Minnesota Governor and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz is constantly freaking out that he is going to let Vice President Kamala Harris down and screw up in his debate against Ohio Senator JD Vance this week, according to a dozen campaign staffers who spoke to CNN.
The network reported that Walz—a longtime politician with twelve years spent in the U.S. House of Representatives and five years in the governor’s office—warned his running mate that he is a “bad debater” last month.
“He’s a strong person,” Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who’s known Walz for 18 years, told CNN. “He’s just not a lawyer-debater type. It’s not like he was dreaming of debates when he was in first grade.”
When he takes part in the vice presidential debate on CBS Tuesday, he’ll square off against Vance, a skilled debater who, like his running mate Donald Trump, hasn’t shied away from bending the truth—such as his false assertions about migrants in Ohio eating people’s pets—or launching aggressive broadsides at political foes.
Vance has, far and away, been the most open and accessible of the four candidates on the two major party tickets to the media, regularly jousting with journalists as one of Trump’s most aggressive surrogates.
CNN reported that Walz has “genuine contempt” for Vance, who he thinks abandoned their common working class roots with his high-rolling adventures working for billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
But sources who know the Minnesota governor told the outlet that Walz’s frequent digs to his opposite on the Republican ticket for going to Yale are also partly because of his “anxiety that his opponent learned to be a sharp debater there.”
Walz, who won a House seat with little major media by hustling on the ground and has been a strong conduit for Harris to the House, doesn’t share Vance’s sharp-elbowed oratory and has instead been cast as a lovable everyman on the campaign trail.
CNN reported that it was apparently Harris herself who floated the idea of calling the former high school football coach “Coach Walz.”
“The guy is reclaiming old White dude masculinity away from toxicity,” one source told CNN.
To get Walz ready for Vance, aides have had him enduring mock debates with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, seen as one of the Democratic Party’s most formidable surrogates. One tactic they’ve been prepping him with, CNN said, is to ignore Vance and attack Trump, hoping to goad the temperamental GOP nominee into lashing out online or in the days following the debate.
The hope is that is enough to avoid Vance potentially dismantling Walz’s aw-shucks persona with a tenacious and effective performance.
“People assume that he is a walking permission structure for rural, exurban, White male hunters,” one Democratic campaign aide told CNN. “Yes, for the 1 or 2 points of those we want to move. But it’s much deeper than that: He’s a walking permission structure for people to feel joyful and hopeful themselves.”
