Mark Linker
Opinion Editor
PHOTO COURTESY OF FREERANGE STOCK
With the addition of Tim Walz to the Harris presidential campaign, the Democrats are making a statement. The statement being made in some ways is an admission of defeat and mistake on the part of the party for much of the past decade.
Since the 1960s, the Democratic party has claimed to represent a vast swath of the population but staked its case and laid the foundation to become the party of minorities in the country. The party has been at the forefront of civil rights issues for the past 60 years and in the 1990s the party started catering to the business class.
However, with both the Republican and democratic parties focusing on its technocratic wing throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s, there was a huge margin that neither party was speaking to: the white working class demographic that had been steadily losing jobs and opportunities since the turn of the digital age and the decline of factory work. Rural areas of the country that used to be staples of the American economy no longer functioned. Therefore the thousands of working class families from these small towns were left behind by the American economy and government.
This market was filled, intentionally or not, by Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign run where he was able to pick up thousands of votes from those forgotten American towns. Hillary Clinton made the mistake during her run of often deeming people from these areas purposely painting herself as a “coastal elite.”
Trump was then just divisive enough to lose by a close margin in 2020 to Joe Biden, where it seemed as though the average American was longing for a return to normality. Still, the problem stood that the Democrats had lost an entire section of working-class Americans to the Republicans. The party that once stood for the common American was still the party of coastal elites.
However, the addition of Walz is, at least, optically making it seem as though Democrats are on the side of the working class. If the rest of America feels this way then the Republicans will be in the position to lose most presidential races for the foreseeable future. Although a lot of what makes a good politician is purely optical as opposed to the policy being at the forefront,
Walz is just that, a politician who represents the optics of Middle America straight to the core. Only time will tell if Walz’s pull on the heartstrings of this demographic will be enough to possibly get some return from lost Trump supporters, but it’s clear that the future of the Democratic party no longer plans to leave out the vote of the white working class. Tim Walz is the political embodiment of such an idea.