The Democratic Party candidate for president, who will receive the official investiture at her party's convention on August 19 in Chicago, chose Tim Walz as his vice presidential candidate, rather unknown to the international public. Tim Walz is the governor of Minnesota, in office since 2019 and re-elected in 2022. A former teacher and National Guard sergeant, he represented Minnesota's First Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019. As governor, Walz faced challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic and social tensions after the death of George Floyd. He has promoted policies that balance public health and the economy, as well as reforms for social justice. His priorities include education, healthcare and climate change. He can be placed within the moderate left of the Democratic Party.
We asked the professor Stefano Luconi, professor of History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences of the University of Padua, to comment on this designation also in light of the role that the figure of the vice president plays within the political and institutional framework of the United States.
Tim Walz, the most recent of useless profits?
Conceived by the drafters of the Federal Constitution as a reserve president, the vice president has almost always been a marginal figure in the history of the United States, except for Dick Cheney in George W. Bush's administration and, at least in part, for Joe Biden in Barack Obama's.
It is no coincidence that Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's deputy from 1913 to 1921, joked about the irrelevance of his role with a joke: “Once upon a time there were two brothers; one left for sea, the other became vice-president, and nothing more was heard of both.
In addition to the moment of his eventual entry into the White House to replace the president (a circumstance which has occurred only nine times since 1789), the only other occasion in which interest in the vice president generally arouses is the nomination of the candidates for this function during election campaigns.
So it was for the nomination of JD Vance in the Republican field last month and, more recently, for the indication of Tim Walz, awaiting formal ratification at the Democratic convention which will open on August 19th, by Kamala Harris.
A century and a half of candidates for vice president produced by party leaders
The candidacy for the vice presidency has been foreseen only since the 1804 elections. Previously the position was assigned to the first of those not elected to the presidency. Thus in 1797 the federalist John Adams found himself as deputy to the republican-democrat Thomas Jefferson who, for the entire duration of his mandate, did nothing but prepare to take revenge in 1800.
Between 1804 and 1832, in a period in which national conventions for the nomination of candidates did not yet exist, it was the party leaders who decided who should run not only for the presidency but also for the vice presidency. The outcome of this procedure was sometimes equally contradictory. The Democrat Andrew Jackson, defender of customs protectionism, had John C. Calhoun as his deputy between 1829 and 1832, who instead opposed him to the point of urging his home state, South Carolina, not to apply the established duties by Congress.
The establishment of national conventions did not remove the nomination of vice-presidential candidates from party leaders. The criterion they mainly used, however, was political loyalty, rather than governance qualities or the ability to gather votes.
On the basis of this evaluation, for example, in 1880 the Republicans proposed to the voters as vice president Chester A. Arthur, the head of the party organization in the State of New York, a character unknown to most who had not held any positions of authority until then. government because his principal public job had been that of customs collector in the port of New York City.
The number 2 function of the federal administration it was considered so useless who, until the resignation of Spiro Agnew in 1973, when previous deputies had left office to succeed a deceased president or had died themselves, were not replaced. Consequently, after John Tyler took over from the late William Harrison in 1841, who died within 30 days of entering the White House, the U.S. they remained without vice president for 3 years and 11 months without anyone worrying about this void. Senator Marcus Hanna, leader of the conservative faction of the Republicans, believed that the vice president was so insignificant that in 1900 he had the reformist Theodore Roosevelt run for office in an attempt, which later proved to be in vain, to get rid of him politically.
Abraham Lincoln's parenthesis
The only exception, dictated by the war contingency, occurred in 1860. While the civil war was coming to an end, the republican Abraham Lincoln he wanted as his running mate Andrew Johnson, a former Democratic senator from a southern state, Tennessee, and a former slave owner. It was the signal of a desire for national reconciliation to hasten the surrender of the secessionist South.
The lesson of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Lincoln's anticipation aside, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt to inaugurate the system, still in force today, of the presidential candidate's designation of his own deputy. In 1940, Roosevelt forced the Democratic convention to nominate the progressive Henry A. Wallace to replace the incumbent vice president, the conservative John N. Garner, threatening that otherwise he would not accept the nomination for a new term in the White House.
However, this method struggled to establish itself at first. In 1944, Democratic leaders forced Roosevelt to accept Harry S. Truman's nomination for vice president. Aware that Roosevelt was seriously ill, they knew that his deputy would take over before the natural end of his administration and they demanded that his successor be not an alleged radical like Wallace but an obscure moderate like Truman, who they deluded themselves into thinking they could maneuver at will.
Subsequently, the winner of the Democratic nomination for the White House in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson, in order not to give the impression of overriding the national convention, in compliance with the will expressed by the voters in the party primaries let them be once again delegates to determine who would run as his deputy.
John F. Kennedy and the consolidation of Roosevelt's method
Only in 1960, with another Democrat, John F Kennedy, the model that Franklin D. Roosevelt had started twenty years earlier took root definitively. Kennedy's choice fell on Lyndon B. Johnson.
The designation was determined by four of the major criteria that have marked the selection of vice presidential candidates ever since: a geographical balancing of the ticket and the ability to bring one's own State as a gift (Kennedy was the expression of a Northern State, Massachusetts; Johnson of a Southern one, Protestant and segregationist Texas, which distrusted Kennedy because of his Catholic confession and his hypothetical commitment in defense of the rights of African Americans); a rebalancing of public perception of the candidates (Kennedy was considered a progressive; Johnson was considered a moderate); the reabsorption of the internal divisions within the party during the primaries (Johnson had been Kennedy's main antagonist in obtaining the nomination for the White House); legislative experience and good relations with Congress with a view to quickly implementing the presidential program (Johnson had entered the House in 1937 and the Senate in 1949, and from 1955 he was the majority leader in this second branch).
A fifth parameter was then configured inability to raise funds. Kennedy did not take it into consideration in betting on Johnson. However, the Republican Richard M. Nixon exploited it in 1968, when he preferred Spiro Agnew to the governor of Massachusetts John Volpe due to the substantial funding that the latter managed to obtain in the Greek-American community to which he belonged.
In 1960 the operation worked great. Kennedy became president by a narrow margin thanks to conquest of Texas and its 24 electors, made possible by Johnson's popularity which ensured him 50,5% of the votes in his state. Moreover, Johnson, who was also a candidate for a new term in the Senate at the same time, was re-elected to Congress with 58% of the votes, demonstrating the favor he enjoyed in Texas.
Take This Waltz
Based on the principles of electoral strategy defined since 1960, Walz doesn't seem like the wisest choice to partner Harris regarding the possible candidacy of Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. Walz, as president of the Democratic Governors Association, has outpaced his predecessors in raising campaign finance.
But Harris, who received 81 million dollars in the first 24 hours after Biden's resignation, certainly doesn't need a fund raiser. It is estimated that the vice candidate increases the vote for the presidential ticket in their state by an average of 2,67%. However, the one led by Walz, Minnesota is not considered a swing state and, in any case, it can bring Harris just 10 electors, just over half of the 19 available in Pennsylvania, whose conquest is instead considered essential to become president.
Furthermore, after having been a member of the House from 2007 to 2019, without distinguishing himself for his legislative activity, Walz rarefied his relations with Congress five years ago when he took office as governor.
Finally, he lends himself to being accused of extremism like Harris because he can be accused of excessive condescension towards the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd - which occurred in Minnesota - in 2020, the application of incisive lockdowns during the covid-19 pandemic, the restoration of the right to vote to convicted felons, the granting of driving licenses to irregular immigrants, the passing of laws to protect LGBTQ+ people and above all the promulgation of the ban on psychological, hormonal and medical treatments to hinder gender fluidity.
In addition to being a representative of the white and rural American province that Harris - an expression of urban and multiracial California - must compete with Trump, Walz's most significant asset appears to have distanced himself from Israel in the ongoing conflict in Gaza, respecting the pro-Palestinian demands of the radical wing of the Democratic Party.
In this way, Walz could reconcile with the presidential ticket those numerous Democrats who accused the White House of having complied with Benjamin Netanyahu's policies, to the point that last March, in Minnesota itself, 19% of voters in the primaries chose to sending delegates to the Chicago convention who had not pledged to support then-candidate Biden.
Last Thursday, Harris was challenged during a rally in Michigan, a key state for winning the White House with a vote sizeable Muslim electorate, due toBiden administration's support for Israel. However, it is questionable how much Walz's position could be electorally useful to Harris.
It is no coincidence that last Tuesday one of the most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause in the House, Cori Bush, lost the Democratic nomination to Wesley Bell in the first district of Missouri, incurring the same fate as Jamal Bowman, another inveterate critic of Israeli policy in Gaza, defeated in July by George Latimer in the New York district of the Bronx.
Both Bush and Bowman were undermined by the opposition of the most influential Jewish lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, already annoyed by the fact that Shapiro, a Jew and pro-Israeli, was supplanted by Walz for the Democratic nomination for vice president.
Who is it
Stefano Luconi teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include The “indispensable nation”. History of the United States from its origins to Trump (2020), US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022) and The dark soul of the United States. African Americans and the Difficult Path to Equality, 1619–2023 (2023).
Books:
Stefano Luconi, The race for the 2024 White House. The election of the president of the United States from the primaries to beyond the vote on November 5th, goWare, 2023, pp. 162, €14,25 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition
Stefano Luconi, US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022, goWare, 2022, pp. 182, €12,35 paper edition, €6,99 Kindle edition.
