Welcome to Thunderdome. Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim “MSNBC Dad” Walz as her running mate came as a surprise to many in the Acela-corridor set who had expected her to pick the rising talent, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a far more centrist choice in a critical swing state viewed by many members of the Democratic elite as the future of the party. But as it turns out, Harris had concerns — according to the Wall Street Journal, that included Shapiro’s contentious relationship with teachers’ unions, his criticism of antisemitic campus protesters and concerns he wouldn’t fit a “supporting role” on the campaign, The choice of Walz came down to a belief that his leftist views won’t matter because the vice president was already going to be labeled as far-left, and what one campaign source called a “gut feeling.”

Perhaps the Harris campaign should have remembered that guts make terrible brains. The choice of Walz may well be looked back on as a huge unforced error, handing the uneven Trump-Vance campaign an obvious line of attack at just the moment they needed it. It’s not just Walz’s far-left views; it’s that he presided over one of the worst events of the past decade in the post-George Floyd riots that still burn so bright in the minds of Americans. The media can spin opposition to Walz as being about free school lunches as much as they want, once again fulfilling Kamala’s role as Selina Meyers trying to turn J.D. Vance into Jonah Ryan, but that’s not what people are going to be talking about. They’re going to be talking about the economy, immigration and security — three issues where Walz’s record presents a major liability.

Of course, Walz has experienced the kind of hero’s welcome from the same media luminaries that spent the last several weeks beating J.D. Vance into a pulp as a weird extremist. We’ll see how long they can sustain that (answer: indefinitely — and despite all competing facts). But now that we have both choices made, we should step back and evaluate the likelihood that either one is viewed with regret after the 2024 election.

We’re told vice-presidential selections don’t matter except as negatives — and typically they don’t. Walz was chosen because he would cement Harris’s support among the activist left and wouldn’t be an uppity you-know-what, while Vance was chosen to run against Scranton Joe, as a loyal foot soldier for Trump with a compelling life story who cemented the pro-worker cultural populism of this Republican Party. If this was going to be a race between Trump and Biden, naming a nerdy loyalist who pleased nationalist conservatives was a fine move to make — especially because Trump was already winning. 

That’s why at this juncture, it seems a lot more likely that Trump will come to regret his choice than Harris.

To say Vance’s performance since he was selected has been a disappointment is putting it mildly. His convention speech was boring, he’s been on gaffe clean-up ever since and his polling boost post-selection was non-existent. What’s more, his particular brand of conservatism is exactly what Harris-Walz want to run against, not the Trump record on economy, the border and security. Vance gave Democrats and their media cheerleaders an opportunity to change the subject, providing a perfect narrative fit for the new Democratic campaign message. They seized it with the eagerness of Augustus Gloop housing a chocolate bar.

The world where Vance made sense as a choice disappeared the minute Joe Biden was knifed by his fellow Democrats in favor of Harris. The media manufactured version of her — innocent of anything bad under Joe Biden, a key participant in every success — is rolling at full steam. Her appeal to union voters is more to the masked teacher than the Rust Belt union hall worker, but the media loves that. Hard hat workers are meant to be seen, not heard.

Trump is more attuned to media storylines and to how his personnel selections are received by his crowds and voters than any other politician. Vance has been getting beat up without showing a strong capability to fight back — and while Trump’s supporters don’t hate Vance, they increasingly view him as a drag on the ticket, not an asset. The next few weeks will show if he can get any better at fighting for the ticket, else Vance finds himself sitting across from Trump at the boardroom table as he asks his new Apprentice winner why he’s bungling his big opportunity. Everyone told me you’re a smart guy, so why aren’t you better at this?

That’s why there is a non-zero possibility that Donald Trump could decide to move on from J.D. Vance in the aftermath of the upcoming Democratic National Convention. 

As of this morning, Trump is losing this race — and he knows it. He’s losing it narrowly, but he’s still losing. The idea may seem far-fetched, but in a cycle as crazy as 2024, another twist can’t be ruled out before November. And Trump may be the only candidate in modern history who would make such a surprising move, intent on resetting the storyline of the cycle once again.

You can argue this is unfair, but so is not taking any questions or doing any interviews and all the other things the Harris campaign can expect to do in their sprint run to the November finish. The media only need to sustain this false version of Kamala for about another ninety days — and they absolutely can, even faced with the possibility of an economic recession and a potential war in the Middle East. They’re that shameless. 

Trump knows this — and it’s why the flailing of the past week seems to be such a break with the discipline he showed as Joe Biden fell apart. Trump approaches politics much the same way as the old coaches he admires the most. He doesn’t like massive changes in the rules or the field of play, because he knew how to win under the old rules of the game. Major changes can be exploited by your opponents and undermine your plan of attack. We saw this with the Covid election changes and his reaction to the Dobbs ruling; now we’re seeing it on stage with inability to figure out how to attack Harris — falling instead back on old gripes against Brian Kemp, as if that moves the needle. 

When old coaches are nearing the end of their run, they can give up, get desperate or try one more move to win before they step away. This is Trump’s last campaign, and it is now a desperate attempt not just to win but to stave off a life of endless lawfare and potential ruin. He can’t risk losing it all while he waits around for J.D. Vance to figure out the playbook. He need only look to his old pal Bill Belichick’s final tour in New England to see the danger of sticking with the political equivalent of Mac Jones. If a highly touted choice turns out to be an immobile statue in the pocket, throwing pick after pick, a head coach has to make a change — writing off this season is something Trump can’t afford to do. 

The political world changed the day Joe Biden stepped aside. Trump may need to change it again to get his momentum back. Republican voters won’t be mad about it, understanding that he needs to do whatever he has to do. Their mantra in 2024 is the same as his: just win, baby.

Walz won’t fool rural America

Jenna Stocker of Minnesota writes on why Walz’s appeal isn’t what the media claims:

Walz sells himself as the “aw, shucks” guy. He has the look and feel of an average Minnesotan, outfitted in a plaid flannel shirt and a wide smile. Heck, if he claimed to be the human cousin of Paul Bunyan, we might believe him. Walz also seems to do the work bridging the gap between the working class and rural greater Minnesota with his demeanor and background — and the elitist urban core Twin Cities with his policies and progressive politics.

He’s a long-time union guy, not just because of his teaching background. Like the late Senator Paul Wellstone, he has working-class white guy vibes, which appeals to trade union members who might be apprehensive about voting for a woman who looks goofy in a hard hat. He sent out relief checks to essential workers like nurses and grocery clerks who kept the state (sort of) running during the Covid-19 pandemic. He served in both the Nebraska and Minnesota National Guard. He was a high-school football coach. He’s often seen motoring around in his vintage 1979 International Harvester Scout II, the kind of personal tidbits that endear him to an average Minnesotan. He seems to be one of them — just don’t think about it too hard.

And maybe that’s what the Harris campaign saw in Walz — if they didn’t think about it too hard. But part of being “Minnesota Nice” — besides forging it through the aforementioned suffering — is having a healthy dose of standoffishness and hardheadedness. That’s the Minnesota variety of folksiness that makes us good neighbors. So, even though Walz looks the part of an average deer hunter who never misses an official fishing opener (spoiler alert: he does), he doesn’t fool the real farmers and residents outside the urban core.

Back in 2017, Walz made an appeal to the pretentious city-dwellers who perpetually look down on the country bumpkins whose relatives likely settled here in the nineteenth century and have since been sacrificed by Walz and his colleagues in the state legislature in the name of racial reckoning that started with the death of George Floyd in 2020 and continues with the recent redesign of the Minnesota state flag.

“Red and blue and there’s all that red across there. And Democrats go into depression over it. It’s mostly rocks and cows that are in that red area,” Walz told the Minneapolis audience, referring to the state’s electoral county map. Fast-forward to the race for governor in 2022, and Walz seems vindicated in his remarks, with the disparaged country folk not forgetting his attitude, but neither did the urban elites. Walz was defeated in nearly every county outside the Twin Cities, Duluth and Rochester — the state’s city centers. But very blue, very urban Minneapolis/St. Paul’s core was all that mattered in the election.

So how does Walz push through a progressive agenda and still carry on the facade of “One Minnesota?” He takes advantage of our Minnesota Nice disposition and shames us into compliance: speaking about the state’s racial inequities by appealing to white guilt, how any condition on abortion is a war against women or how opposition to gender-affirming surgery is an attack on kids. Who wants to be seen as a racist, woman-hating kid denier as long as you don’t think about the real consequences too hard? And if there is any state that wants to be seen as the “good little student” to Walz’s blowhard, scolding teacher, it’s Minnesota.

More on the risks associated with the Walz pick here.

The growing partisan divide on families

The WSJ attempts to outline the divide:

Polling shows a sharp partisan divide on attitudes about family. An April survey of 8,709 adults from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 59 percent of Trump’s supporters say society is better off if people give priority to marriage and family, compared with 19 percent of President Biden’s backers. In the April survey, 47 percent of Trump supporters said the country’s falling birthrate is a bad thing, compared with 23 percent of Biden supporters.

Polling also shows a growing split between young men and young women. More than half of the 2,022 young men surveyed last year by Equimundo, which advocates for gender equality, said they deserved to know where their wives or girlfriends were at all times, up from 46 percent in 2017. Respondents were also more likely to say a man should always have the final say about decisions in his relationships or marriage than in 2017, rising from 34 percent to 41 percent.

The Hunter Biden scandal is getting worse

When Joe Biden was finally knifed by his fellow Democrats who had spent the prior months defending him to the hilt, one of the predictions I made was that we’d learn more negative details not just about Joe, but about his son Hunter in the aftermath — there being no more reason to protect the presidential scion from the consequences of his rabidly illegal actions. Well, that’s turned out to be true — not just with new leaks about the response to the White House cocaine incident, which is what I had in mind at the time, but now this:

Prosecutors in special counsel David Weiss’s office are accusing Hunter Biden of accepting payments from a Romanian businessman who was attempting to “influence US government agencies,” while his father Joe Biden was vice president.

If true, the allegation would mark the closest prosecutors have come to tying President Joe Biden to his son’s overseas business endeavors — a matter congressional Republicans have spent years scrutinizing.

The special counsel’s claim, in a court filing Wednesday in the younger Biden’s  federal tax case, stems from Hunter Biden’s work on behalf of Gabriel Popoviciu, a wealthy Romanian who prosecutors say hired the president’s son for legal work in late 2015. Popoviciu was at the time facing corruption charges in his home country.

At Hunter Biden’s upcoming tax trial, “the government will introduce the evidence… that [Hunter Biden] and Business Associate 1 received compensation from a foreign principal who was attempting to influence US policy and public opinion and cause the United States to investigate the Romanian investigation of [Popoviciu] in Romania,” prosecutors wrote in Wednesday’s filing.

According to prosecutors, Hunter Biden and his business associate “were concerned that lobbying work might cause political ramifications for the defendant’s father,” so the deal was structured in a way that “concealed the true nature of the work he was performing.”

Only now can it be told, of course.

One more thing

There’s a silly little item in the Hollywood Reporter (day ends in “Y”) about an effort to politically activate fans of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise on behalf of Kamala Harris, promoting the lazy Instagram with fewer than 10k followers of race-baiting radical leftist organizer, Nelini Stamp. (If you want to know what she’s about, she led efforts to harass Chuck Schumer for being insufficiently anti-Trump.) The great irony of this piece is that it’s no little industry secret that a significant portion of the Real Housewives, who the target audience for this effort obsess about incessantly, are themselves dirty, awful Republicans. Let’s hope it’s not one or more of Stamp’s favorites. Quelle horreur!