BREAKING (*updated): Harris Selects Moderately Progressive Military Veteran, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, as VP Candidate

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

Shortly after officially clinching the Democratic nomination for president in spite of failing to run during any state primaries, Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential candidate. 

Walz was among three contenders who had been widely speculated as a potential pick for Harris. Between Walz, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Walz was seen as the most progressive option. 

The Minnesota governor, a military veteran, served as a member of the House of Representatives between 2007 and 2019. In this capacity, he was the Ranking Member of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee during his final three years in Washington. He ran for governor in 2018.

In selecting Walz, Harris appears to be trying to shore up her ‘left’ flank: As Minnesota governor, Walz was seen as a moderately progressive force following George Floyd's murder and showed a degree of sympathy toward campus protesters who supported the Palestinian people. Walz has also been a long-time champion of drug law reform and legal cannabis, and defended “defender affirming care” for young people. 

Harris’ selection of a sitting governor as her running mate, coupled with former president Trump’s selection of a sitting senator, makes independent running mates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan the only candidates who are political outsiders. Kennedy and Shanahan draw from their experience in both the private and charitable sectors. They are determined to take on corrupt Washington interests. The Harris and Trump choices – in both cases, political insiders – don’t appear destined to bring Americans anything radically new.

Upon learning of Harris’ decision, Kennedy took to X, writing:

America’s political divide sharpens with the pick of Tim Walz for Dem VP. He called Trump supporters “fascist” and “weird,” and they in turn are calling him worse than that. The need for an independent President who stands outside the divide and can unify the country is more compelling than ever. 

A few hours earlier, Kennedy addressed the media’s open hostility toward him, and the failed, shallow policies of his political opponents. He expressed this in a post on X:

 “Every time you write ‘roadkill,’ I will mention dirty C.I.A. regime-change wars and our $35 trillion debt,” he wrote. “Every time you write ‘barbecued goat,’ I will invoke normalized government censorship, vanishing topsoil, threatened wilderness, the epidemics of addiction and loneliness, the deaths of despair, and the world’s largest chronic disease burden. Every time you write ‘vaccine crank,’ I will remind you of an industry with a well-documented track record of putting profits before people, an industry with unreliable regulatory oversight, an industry which is one of the most powerful entities in the world.”

Kennedy continued, “Every time you write ‘fringe,’ I will remind you of my pledge to heal the divide and center us in our shared humanity. Every time you write ‘brain worm,’ I will mention our blundering foreign policy, which has helped bring our precious earth to the brink of World War III. Your opportunistic fidelity to a monstrous status quo has turned you into the Red Herring Machine. The Defamation Industrial Complex. The Abettor of the Social Lie. We are a beautiful but polarized and ailing nation. The more you smear me, the more I'll keep speaking.”