The Trump team was all set for Josh Shapiro.
Former President Donald Trump’s political operation spent much of the past two weeks digging up potential attacks on Shapiro, the popular Pennsylvania governor, whom they saw as nearly certain to be chosen as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, according to two people with direct knowledge of the internal planning.
The logic was hard to dispute. The way the Trump team saw it, Shapiro could have done something running mates almost never do: enhance Harris’ prospects of winning a crucial battleground state, one that Trump’s own super political action committee considers pivotal to blocking Democrats’ path to 270 electoral votes. Shapiro is viewed favorably by 61% of Pennsylvania voters, according to a recent Fox News poll; only a handful of elected officials have achieved comparable numbers in the recent tribal and polarized era of American politics.
Trump’s advisers thought that Shapiro’s image as a centrist could also have helped Harris with independent voters who are wary of her liberal record, offering balance to the new Democratic ticket.
Trump aides had compiled stacks of opposition research on Shapiro. They were ready to highlight his support of Israel — part of a plan to inflame the anti-Israel left and increase the chances of pro-Palestinian protests disrupting the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this month.
But in recent days, that private view began to shift. Public reports indicated that Harris and her advisers were cooling on Shapiro amid a progressive campaign against him and a flurry of negative news stories about his time in office.
The Trump team came to see Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as the safer choice for Harris if she did not want to risk angering the left, something she had avoided in her short-lived presidential campaign in 2019. And as the push against Shapiro gathered momentum — with Sen. John Fetterman, a fellow Democrat, criticizing the governor and others in the party criticizing how Shapiro had handled a sexual harassment allegation against a top aide — Trump’s top advisers zeroed in on Walz and accelerated their research into his background.
Still, the Trump team’s week-ago assumptions remained in evidence Tuesday at an event in Philadelphia held by Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Flyers describing Shapiro as a “fraud” and a “corrupt lying con man” were on hand before an aide hastily gathered them.
One challenge for the Trump team is that Walz’s speaking style; his background as a high school football coach, deer hunter and former National Guard member, and his Midwestern demeanor could appeal to rural voters and make him much harder for Trump to caricature as elitist or out of touch. The Harris campaign plans to highlight all of those aspects of Walz’s background, as well as his experience going to college on the GI Bill and his work on agricultural issues.
“America is desperately in need of someone relatable,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster whose firm has worked with the Biden and Harris campaigns. “And this guy can go into small-town and rural America and speak their language. We have literally never had that. And he is such a good messenger. Never really sounds political or vitriolic. Just sounds reasonable.”
But their plan for Walz is to emphasize his left-wing governing record — which made him a favorite of the Democratic Party’s most progressive members, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — to strengthen their framing of Harris as “dangerously liberal.”
Walz and Minnesota Democrats have used their legislative majorities to pass a long list of progressive policies. He has signed bills for background checks on prospective gun owners, legalized recreational marijuana, expanded free school lunches, enshrined abortion rights in state law, supported transgender medical care for children, approved sweeping climate legislation and made it easier for felons to vote once they leave prison.
The Trump team believes it will benefit from focusing on Walz’s response in 2020 after protests over the killing of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, in his state turned violent, according to two people briefed on the discussions. The governor was criticized as taking too long to send in the National Guard to quell the unrest, which damaged hundreds of businesses.
Such an attack — which Trump allies were already spreading on social media — would fit into the Trump campaign’s effort to take on Harris’ record as a prosecutor in California and portray her as soft on criminals.
After news broke on Tuesday that Harris had chosen Walz, some of Trump’s advisers expressed relief that she had not picked Shapiro. Close allies of Trump saw it as yet another of the fortuitous breaks he has caught throughout his political life.
The Trump campaign immediately sought to frame Walz as a radical, hoping to blunt any presentation as a centrist that the governor might make when he made his debut alongside Harris in Philadelphia late on Tuesday.
“By picking Tim Walz as her running mate, Kamala Harris not only bent the knee to the radical left, she doubled down on her dangerously liberal, weak and failed agenda,” Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign senior adviser, said in a news release.
Trump himself responded with typically overheated rhetoric in a text message and an email fundraising appeal blasted out to his supporters. “Tim Walz,” he warned, “will unleash hell on earth!”
It remains to be seen how many voters outside the Make America Great Again base will be as frightened of Walz as Trump wants them to be.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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