Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have their fair share of disagreements about policy and politics.
But they both agree that Tim Walz is an excellent vice presidential nominee.
“Gov. Walz is the real deal,” Manchin gushed, saying he’d “bring balance back to the Democratic Party.”
Walz is “a uniter for not just the Democratic Party but for the entire United States,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed.
The fact that Walz appeals to two of the most ideologically disparate Democrats (or former Democrat, in Manchin’s case) is encouraging to the party. But it also suggests the possibility that everyone is projecting their own agendas and expectations onto Walz — and that some people are going to be wrong.
And yet it also may raise questions about where he truly is, ideologically.
Is he a true-believing progressive with an everyman-coding personal style? Or is he a pragmatic politician willing to rein in the excesses of the left?
The answer is that, at different times and on different issues, he’s been both of those things — but always with an affable smile.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz enacted a sweeping progressive agenda geared toward helping the disadvantaged and marginalized. But he’s also been willing to accommodate business’s concerns and explore pro-market reforms.
Back when he was in Congress, Walz backed President Barack Obama’s biggest priorities. But he also questioned the economic and foreign policy establishments in ways that have aged well politically — without ever really becoming a controversial ideological firebrand or totally breaking from the mainstream.
Indeed, in some ways, Walz reminds me of Joe Biden, who himself had an anti-elite streak, attempted to keep his coalition happy, questioned the foreign policy establishment’s wisdom, and tried to go big with a sweeping progressive agenda in office, while also at times making concessions to politics.
Walz signed a sweeping progressive agenda into law in Minnesota last year
The case for Walz as an unusually bold progressive basically comes down to the Minnesota bills he signed into law in 2023.
Walz’s first term as governor was legislatively uneventful because Republicans held the state Senate, but Democrats took over control of that chamber by a single seat in the 2022 midterms and held the state House as well.
Suddenly, Democrats had the power to pass their priorities into law, and oh, did they ever. The Minnesota Reformer has an excellent detailed rundown of Walz’s new laws, but in brief:
State Democrats passed a child tax credit, tuition aid, free school breakfast and lunch for all students, worker protections, and paid family and medical leave. They passed criminal justice reform, abortion rights protections, gender-affirming care protections, and universal background checks for gun purchases.
They legalized recreational marijuana, restored voting rights to felons who had completed their terms of incarceration, let unauthorized immigrants get driver’s licenses and tuition aid, and reformed permitting so the state could transition to clean energy more quickly. They greatly increased spending on infrastructure, schools, affordable housing, and public safety. They raised taxes on the wealthy and corporations, as well as the sales tax.
How did all this happen? In part, Walz was fortunate that the state had a massive budget surplus (due to broad macroeconomic trends plus a decade of divided government), which meant that more painful tax increases weren’t necessary to pay for all this new spending. But both he and Democrats in the legislature turned out to be like-minded in their desire to go big.
“You don’t win elections to bank political capital — you win elections to burn political capital and improve lives,” Walz said at the time. This, of course, is exactly what progressives love to hear.
Read the full story on Vox.com.
