Trump’s big new problem is that by attacking Walz, he punches his own voters

Ever since Kamala Harris named Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Donald Trump has been confronted with an unforseen problem.

While the former reality-television star has always favoured making his political attacks deeply personal, if he wants to reclaim the White House, he has to change tack.

The everyday appearance of Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz presents a fresh problem for his Republican rivals. Credit: AP

Where Trump has mocked Harris for her Indian name, the way she laughs, her facial expressions, and her lack of biological children, and his running mate J.D. Vance has labelled her and other female Democrats “crazy cat ladies”, this style of assault doesn’t work when applied to Walz – a 60-year-old former high school teacher and football coach who owns guns, enjoys hunting and ice fishing, grew up in rural Nebraska in a town of roughly 300 people, and has a lower net worth than the national median of others his age.

In every way, Walz is the embodiment of typical middle America. The name Tim is unremarkable. He has two kids and a laugh that is indistinct from any other laugh. He’s married to a high school teacher and is a former national guardsman. He owns no stocks or bonds, and his primary asset is his pension fund. And so to attack him personally is to risk alienating the very people whose votes Trump needs on November 5.

At press conferences, Walz wears the kind of well-worn T-shirts and baseball hats that make it look like he went to the hardware shop for a new garden hose one Saturday morning and picked up a VP nomination on the way home. It’s not impossible to imagine that same man in those same clothes fitting in at a Trump rally.

As Molly Jong-Fast, a US journalist and political commentator noted recently when discussing the upcoming election on the Politics Weekly America podcast, in the key battleground areas that Trump and Vance need to secure a win, “guys like Tim Walz are pretty much what men look like in those states”.

In other words, Walz’s unremarkableness is the very thing that makes him so remarkably threatening.

For Trump, making personal snipes is a compulsion; it’s as if he can’t stop himself from calling people losers or failures. But when the subject of the attacks bears a striking resemblance, both physically and socially, to the voters the Republicans need, Trump risks playing with fire.

According to data from Catalist, voter turnout at the 2020 election was the most ethnically diverse in history. Yet of those who voted for Trump, 85 per cent were white men and women, and 58 per cent were not college-educated. Based on exit polling data compiled by The Washington Post in February, over a third of Trump’s supporters are now aged over 65, and 42 per cent live rurally or in a small city.

In three of the key battleground states of this election – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – more than 75 per cent of the population is white, while the median annual household incomes in 2022 were $US73,170 ($110,278), $US73,330 and $US68,990 respectively. In other words, they are textbook white middle-class regions.

Where Trump was born into wealth and has lived in major cities since he was born, Vance comes from a working-poor background. But Vance’s ascension from hardship via Yale University, a bestselling memoir later adapted to the silver screen, and a successful career in Silicon Valley before entering politics, makes him much more removed from the average American family’s experience.

To call Walz stupid or imply he’s not particularly smart, one of Trump’s go-to snipes, doesn’t work either because this is a man who was entrusted by thousands of parents with the education of their children. To punch at that would be, by extension, to punch at them and their intelligence.

Even on the university front, Walz’s experience is more relatable than Trump and Vance. Walz attended his local state university, which is ranked 393rd in the United States, compared with the Ivy League colleges attended by Trump (Pennsylvania) and Vance.

The only real option for the Republican pair, then, is to attack his track record as Minnesota governor. Here, there is ample fodder to spook conservative voters. Since taking office in 2018, Walz has overseen the legalisation of marijuana, codified abortion rights, ushered in protective laws for trans people, and has been criticised for his handling of the protests and riots that occurred across Minnesota following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

But there are also policies that are harder to weaponise, such as enacting paid family leave for working-class parents and introducing free school meals for public-school children who need them. Though some Republicans fleetingly attempted to paint the latter policy as an act of radical-left socialism, this quickly fell flat because, as Jong-Fast noted when discussing Walz’s track record: “Is feeding hungry children progressive? Jesus did it.”

Given Trump freely mocks people within his own party (remember when he declared the late senator John McCain wasn’t a war hero because he’d been captured during the Vietnam War? Or when he promoted a pejorative term about former Republican governor Chris Christie by urging his supporters not to call him “a fat pig”?) it’s unlikely he’ll be able to resist the urge to personally attack Walz.

Trump has always revelled in aiming his attacks perilously low. Where once it was something he was celebrated for, going after a man who epitomises middle America might be one blow too low, even for him.

Katy Hall is deputy opinion editor.

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