Winning a House seat representing Delaware, 34-year-old McBride became the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, just four years after the Democrat was elected as the nation’s first transgender state senator. Groundbreaking in any year and especially one in which conservatives regularly attacked the transgender community, McBride’s victory also marked a major win for a multimillion-dollar campaign — launched by school shooting survivor David Hogg — to elect young lawmakers to state and national office. 

“From the youngest-ever Senator to the first Trans member of Congress, Delaware knows what young leaders can accomplish when given a chance, just look at Joe Biden,” Hogg posted on X, commenting on how the 81-year-old president was first in 1972 just days before his 30th birthday. 

After Hogg survived the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 of his classmates and educators, he became a formidable up-and-comer in Democratic politics, turning his attention to helping elect Gen Z and millennial Democrats. His latest effort is , a political action committee formed in 2023 that raised nearly $8.5 million as of September to elevate the campaigns of McBride and a dozen other young candidates. 

“Leaders We Deserve is proud to say that Sarah will be our first endorsee elected to Congress,” Hogg wrote. 

Beyond McBride’s high-profile win, candidates endorsed by Hogg’s PAC saw mixed results — with more defeats than victories. Of a dozen candidates offered campaign cash and boots-on-the-ground voter outreach by Leaders We Deserve, five won their races and seven lost.

They include the successful campaign of a seventh-grade math teacher in Atlanta, the defeat of a former Miss Texas who campaigned for a state House seat on a gun control platform, and the setback encountered by a 28-year-old mother who launched her Tennessee House of Representatives campaign after the state denied her access to an abortion. 

Leaders We Deserve has pumped millions of dollars — and resources from Democratic power players — into the campaigns of young candidates who support progressive causes like gun control, reproductive rights and protecting public school funding. The PAC didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Other Leaders We Deserve-endorsed candidates who beat their GOP opponents include Dante Pittman, to the North Carolina General Assembly helped Democrats break a Republican supermajority. In Hogg’s home state of Florida, U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost — who at 27 became the first member of Gen Z to serve in Congress — bid with nearly of the vote.

In Georgia, middle school math teacher Bryce Berry who switched from Democrat to Republican last year after breaking from party ranks to support private school vouchers. In Ohio, Democrat Christine Cockley easily Republican rival Hussein Jabiri. 

The seven candidates who did not prevail include Kristian Carranza, whose campaign for in the Texas House of Representatives in Leaders We Deserve support before losing in a tight race to Republican rival and incumbent state Rep. John Lujan. In another competitive race in Texas, Republican Rep. Angie Chen Button won her to the Texas Legislature, defeating Democrat Averie Bishop. 

In Pennsylvania, former teacher and longtime Republican state Rep. Joe Emrick , defeating Leaders We Deserve-endorsed Democrat Anna Thomas, whose campaign centered on bolstering school funding. Republican Mike Sparks, who has served in the Tennessee House of Representatives since 2010, Democrat Luis Mata.

In another Tennessee House race, Republican Jeff Burkhart in a closely watched contest against Democrat Allie Phillips, who said she was forced to go out of state to terminate a nonviable pregnancy because of Tennessee’s strict abortion laws. After defeating the Leaders We Deserve-endorsed Phillips, Burkhart said his campaign was about “fighting California, New York and everyone else.” 

Nate Douglas, a 23-year-old University of Florida graduate, failed in his bid to oust Republican Florida Rep. Susan Plasencia. The Douglas campaign on get-out-the-vote efforts among college students. 

In Georgia, Republican state Sen. Shawn Still was , defeating Democrat Ashwin Ramaswami by 7 percentage points. Ramaswami, 25, was still in law school when he decided to campaign against Still, who in 2023 who were indicted alongside President-elect Donald Trump on allegations of conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential election defeat in the state. 

After Trump regained control of the White House and Republicans swept into elected office in races across the country, Hogg turned to X to reiterate his argument that new, young voices are more critical than ever. 

“Time for some big changes to the Democratic Party,” he wrote.

It’s once again a harrowing week in America, as the nation grapples with yet another mass school shooting — the campus gunfire incident this year, according to a tally by the folks at the K-12 School Shooting Database. 

Two students and two teachers were killed in Wednesday’s attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, the latest victims in a campus firearm death toll that’s surged in the last few years. 

During a campaign stop hours after the attack, Vice President Kamala Harris called the incident “a senseless tragedy, on top of so many senseless tragedies.” 

“We’ve got to stop it.” 

‘Building leaders for 2050’

Six and a half years after David Hogg survived one the nation’s deadliest campus shootings at his Parkland, Florida, high school, his latest campaign to bolster the country’s gun laws has drawn major support from deep-pocketed donors and Democratic Party bigwigs. 

Hogg co-founded Leaders We Deserve, a political action committee that’s raised more than $8 million in the past year to help elect young Democrats who support gun control, abortion and other progressive causes. 

My analysis of Federal Election Commission filings and the PAC’s digital ads offers insight into how Hogg has leveraged the trauma and lessons of surviving Parkland to create a well-connected operation to influence state and national elections across the country in November. Leaders We Deserve has already claimed some electoral wins for candidates in Virginia and deep-red Texas.

But the effort, former education secretary and PAC adviser Arne Duncan told me, is much bigger than the upcoming high-stakes presidential election. It’s about building the next generation of Democratic lawmakers. 

“That’s what David’s play is about,” Duncan said. “It’s not about, ‘We’re going to change the entire world tomorrow,’ but it’s, ‘Can we plant a whole bunch of amazing seeds, nurture them, develop them, support them and see what happens.’” 

Read the full analysis here

More on the Georgia shooting

They lost their lives: The victims are two 14-year-old students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and math teachers Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall. |

The perp: A 14-year-old student accused of carrying out the attack was taken into custody and will be charged with murder as an adult. | 

The police response: Minutes after the shooting was reported, two school resource officers and other law enforcement arrived on scene. One of the school-based cops confronted the shooter, who was armed with an AR 15-style rifle, and forced his surrender. | 

An emergency alert system created by the security vendor Centegix was credited with alerting first responders to the shooting. The system includes a lanyard with a button that teachers can push to report danger. | 

Police interviewed the alleged gunman and his father more than a year ago, after the FBI received several tips about someone threatening to “shoot up a school” on the social media platform Discord. “The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them,” according to the federal agency. “The subject denied making the threats online.” |/

Just months after an unprecedented parental conviction in Michigan, Georgia prosecutors allege the father’s actions led to the mass school shooting | The 74

The shooter purportedly had a keen interest in past school shootings, most notably the 2018 attack in Parkland. | 

The big picture: This Georgia school shooting was, in many ways, a repeat of past tragedies. The most common scenario is “a surprise attack during morning classes committed by a current student who is allowed to be inside the school.” | 

In other news

California lawmakers passed a first-in-the-nation bill that would prohibit schools from serving food with artificial color additives that officials have linked to hyperactivity and other behavioral effects in children. |

A 33-year-old Latvian hacker has been extradited to the U.S. on charges of being a key player in the cybercrime group Karakurt, which has launched wide-scale ransomware attacks on K-12 schools. |

Four states suing the Education Department over new rules to protect LGBTQ+ kids from discrimination have “a substantial likelihood that they will prevail on the merits,” according to a federal appeals court. |

Meanwhile, the Justice Department and 16 states have weighed in on a lawsuit that charges a Georgia book ban targeting LGBTQ+ literature is unconstitutional. |

Nearly 4,000 “dangerous instruments” — including almost 300 weapons — were seized at New York City’s public schools last year. “Dangerous instruments” is a weird way to say stuff like box cutters and pepper spray. |

Despite school discipline reform efforts, racial disparities in student suspensions persist. |

After six people were killed in a Nashville school shooting last year, Tennessee lawmakers passed zero-tolerance rules mandating a one-year expulsion for students who threaten mass violence at school. As a result, students are being expelled “for mildly disruptive behavior,” ProPublica reported, even when officials found “the threat was not credible.” |

ICYMI @The74

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Emotional Support

Mika, The 74 editor Nicole Ridgway’s pup companion, found a comfy spot on the beach to soak in some of summer’s final rays. 

In a video posted to YouTube, 24-year-old school shooting survivor David Hogg points to a whiteboard and outlines a five-step plan to reshape America. 

Ever since Hogg survived the 2018 Valentine’s Day shooting at his Parkland, Florida, high school, which killed 17 of his classmates and educators, he’s become a national leader in the push for gun control and a formidable up-and-comer in Democratic politics. His latest effort is , a political action committee formed in 2023 that has raised nearly $8.5 million in the past year to elect Gen Z and millennial progressives to state and national office. 

The PAC aims to find young Democrats running for office, flood their campaigns with cash, offer strategic advice, provide a team of volunteers and work with the candidates to build a winning platform.

The strategy, Hogg explains in the YouTube advertisement designed to attract donors, has already met with success in Texas: “We just did this, electing the youngest person to the Texas state Senate, Molly Cook,” the state’s first openly LGBTQ+ senator. Leading up to the May election, Hogg’s PAC bolstered Cook’s campaign with $300,000 in financial backing, money used to blanket her district with mailings and digital ads.  

“With Molly, we found in our poll that she was behind by 2%, so we came in and we found that she was ahead by 5 after we informed voters about her background,” Hogg says, adding that his team knocked on the doors of more than 1,000 potential voters. “We got her on MSNBC as well and worked with her on her messaging and the result is that she ended up winning by 62 votes.” 

As Hogg works to “elect a ton more Mollys around the country,” an analysis by The 74 of Federal Election Commission filings and the PAC’s digital ads offers insight into how he has leveraged the trauma and lessons learned from surviving one of America’s deadliest school shootings to build out a well-connected, generously funded operation to influence elections. 

The urgency of his key issue remains unabated: were killed and at least nine others injured Wednesday in a shooting at a Georgia high school. During a presidential campaign stop Wednesday afternoon in New Hampshire, Vice President Kamala Harris called the shooting outside Atlanta “a senseless tragedy, on top of so many senseless tragedies.”

“It’s just outrageous that everyday in our country — in the United States of America — that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive. It’s senseless,” Harris said. “We’ve got to stop it.”

Leaders We Deserve has pumped millions of dollars — and resources from Democratic power players — into the campaigns of young candidates who support progressive causes like gun control, reproductive rights and protecting public school funding. Its efforts going into November will almost certainly be strengthened by Harris’s presence atop the ticket, an event that has .

Joining forces with Hogg, a recent Harvard graduate, is Kevin Lata, the former campaign manager of U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida who, at 27, is the first member of Gen Z to serve in Congress. Hogg and Lata didn’t respond to interview requests.

“As a generation, we’ve collectively been told to run, hide and fight over and over during active shooting drills, and our generation has learned that along with our ABCs,” Hogg says in one ad. “I think it’s time that we repurpose the meaning of that. We need to start running for office. We need to stop hiding from the responsibility that we have to protect future generations.”

Cook has received the largest share of direct campaign cash from Leaders We Deserve, according to the PAC’s most recent federal financial disclosures, which cover the period from June 2023 to the end of July 2024. In that time, the group has helped finance the campaigns of 16 candidates, primarily at the state level, including in Pennsylvania, Alabama, Florida and Ohio. 

Funding has gone to the Georgia House race of a seventh-grade math teacher in Atlanta, a former Miss Texas vying for a state House seat on a gun control platform, a 28-year-old in Pennsylvania whose run for the state House is centered on , and a 28-year-old mother running for a House seat in Tennessee after the state .

‘Pain into purpose’

Though young candidates are underrepresented in public office across the country, and they tend to face steeper financial barriers than those from older generations, FEC data — and Hogg’s five-step plan — show the PAC offers more than money to its endorsed candidates. It has ties to some of the major players in Democratic campaign operations. 

Its 59-person advisory board encompasses education leaders, gun control proponents, youth activists and two former law enforcement officers — — who defended the U.S. Capitol during the January 6, 2021, attack by a mob of Donald Trump supporters. Democratic politicians, half of them 35 or younger, make up the largest share of advisors. 

Among the more seasoned advisors is Arne Duncan, the former education secretary for President Barack Obama. Duncan now has his own group — Chicago CRED — which provides job training and other resources in a bid to stem gun violence in his hometown. 

Duncan told The 74 that he and Hogg communicate regularly to discuss their shared goal of thwarting gun violence. Duncan said that his “generation has failed” to confront the issue in a meaningful way, leaving young people — including the ones Hogg is working to elect — to devise solutions. 

“I hate the leadership that David has had to provide on this issue. I hate the trauma that he and his classmates and his school and his community have been through,” Duncan said. “But I so appreciate him turning that pain into purpose and really fighting to change things.” 

Hogg— who co-founded the gun control group in the Parkland shooting’s immediate aftermath and has campaigned in previous elections for candidates who support new gun laws— has garnered financial support for his political committee from marquee donors. The bulk of donations — more than $4.3 million — come from undisclosed individuals contributing less than $200, but the largest single contribution of $300,000 is from Ron Conway. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist and gun control proponent served on the advisory board of , which has sought to reduce campus gun violence in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting at the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school. 

Other prominent donors include reproductive rights activist Phoebe Gates, the daughter of Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, who gave $75,000, and actress Kate Capshaw and her husband, the director Steven Spielberg, who donated a combined $25,000. 

That support, federal election data shows, has translated into significant spending, with nearly $3 million going to advertising via text messaging, digital ads and campaign mailers. Nearly $1 million — the PAC’s second-largest expense — was used to purchase lists with the contact information of potential voters. 

The PAC’s expenditures also reflect the web of influential players working behind the scenes. Leaders We Deserve paid nearly $130,000 in legal fees to the Elias Law Group, the firm of Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, who and is now assisting with the party’s vote recount strategy for November. Other top payments were to prominent political fundraisers and strategists, including The Hooligans Agency, with using Hollywood tactics to make viral political ads.

PACs like Leaders We Deserve have faced criticism for injecting smaller races with big money from interest groups and out-of-state donors. Leaders We Deserve has found its greatest success raising money from donors in California, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York, federal data shows. The group hasn’t contributed to candidates in any of those states. 

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a Leaders We Deserve advisory board member, said the PAC offers Hogg a strategic advantage.

“He did this in a way so that he wasn’t constrained by party,” Weingarten said. “He understands and knits together policy and politics.” 

‘A big barrier’

Even with its list of established connections, Leaders We Deserve faces headwinds in driving change. 

Young people are “vastly underrepresented on the ballot” and run for public office at much lower rates than older adults, according to from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning Engagement, or CIRCLE,  a nonpartisan youth-focused research organization at Tufts University.

As of 2021, millennials — those born between 1981 and 1996 — made up a quarter of the voting population yet  of lawmakers in Congress. Researchers found that financial insecurity and structural inequities — not apathy — were behind the divide. 

While more than 20% of young adults 18 to 25 said they would consider seeking public office — and an increasing number of them have followed through in the past decade — the encouragement they receive varies widely by race and gender. Younger candidates are more diverse than those from older generations, but while Black and Latino youth are more likely than their white counterparts to consider an election bid, they are less likely to actually run. 

The data drives home why groups like Leaders We Deserve are critical to improving civic engagement among young people, said Sara Suzuki, a senior researcher at CIRCLE.

“That gap between interest and actually running can be filled by organizations like Leaders We Deserve and other organizations across the spectrum because financial support is a big barrier,” Suzuki said, adding that the PAC’s explicit encouragement of young candidates could lead more of them to enter politics. 

Getting the necessary votes is another story. Suzuki said it’s plausible that a candidate’s age is one of the factors that young people consider at the ballot box, but that they are primarily driven by specific issues rather than individual candidates or parties. 

“They really vote as a way to make change happen on issues that they care about,” she said, “and those issues tend to be economic issues like cost of living, climate change is a big youth issue, gun violence and abortion.” 

‘Leaders for 2050’

The PAC’s went to the congressional campaign of Sarah McBride, a Democratic state senator in Delaware since 2021 who has been on transgender rights. If elected, the 34-year-old would be the first openly transgender member of Congress. 

“Everyone deserves to feel safe in their community, whether you are walking alone at night or going to school during the day,” McBride notes on her campaign website. “The truth is, when it comes to guns, our country has lost its common sense.” 

The PAC’s  “first elected candidate,” according to Hogg, was Nadarius Clark, the youngest member of the Virginia House of Delegates. Clark got $100,000 in support and beat his Republican opponent by 800 votes in 2023. Leaders We Deserve and the ideologically aligned nonprofit were Clark’s top campaign contributors, show.

The PAC stands to see another victory, where Bryce Berry — the 22-year-old Atlanta middle school math teacher — faces an incumbent from Democrat to Republican last year in order to support private school vouchers. The heavily Democratic district has never elected a Republican to the state House. 

Leaders We Deserve has also been handed defeats, including its failure last fall to help elect a 26-year-old transgender woman to the Alabama House of Representatives. The PAC spent $124,325 on the race, one that Hogg acknowledged would be tough. 

But the group is looking well beyond 2024’s high-stakes election cycle, a strategy that Duncan, the former education secretary, said is critical to the Democratic Party’s future. The state lawmakers elected today, he said, are one step closer to becoming the national leaders of tomorrow. 

“That’s what David’s play is about,” Duncan said. “It’s not about, ‘We’re going to change the entire world tomorrow,’ but it’s, ‘Can we plant a whole bunch of amazing seeds, nurture them, develop them, support them and see what happens.’” 

It’s a political mindset that the group hopes will propel progressive leaders beyond their Republican rivals.

“While MAGA plans for 2025,” one of the PACs ads states in reference to Trump’s ties to the to remake the federal government, “we’re building leaders for 2050.”

Kamala Harris’ new running mate is an unabashedly progressive midwestern governor who appeals to veterans, hunters and football fans. If elected, he’d also be the first K-12 educator since Lyndon Johnson to be vice president, boasting the deepest connection to public schools of any candidate in recent memory.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is a former high school teacher and football coach who enacted a free college tuition program and expanded free school lunch statewide. But Walz, 60, a former congressional lawmaker who is in his second term as governor, may also carry left-of-center baggage that weighs down the ticket in a tight presidential race, observers said.

Walz rose to prominence earlier this year by informally leading Democrats’ turn to calling Republicans “weird,” suggesting in interviews that they’re out of touch and relying on culture-war fodder instead of issues Americans care about. 

Tim Walz first year as a high school football coach and geography teacher

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE)

“Who’s sitting in a bar in Racine, Wisconsin, saying, ‘You know what we really need? We need to ban “Animal Farm.”’ Nobody is!” Walz with MSNBC.

In a introducing himself released by the campaign Tuesday, Walz described the “small-town” values he learned growing up in Nebraska and later tried to instill in his students: “respect, compromise, service to country. And so when I went into government, that’s what I carried with me.”

Harris echoed those themes in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia Tuesday evening, calling him “the kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having and that every kid deserves.”

As governor, Walz put forward an education agenda that unions have cheered, signing a nearly state budget last year that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools. He also signed into law a new $1,750-per-child tax credit that he said will help reduce childhood poverty.

Walz enacted for Minnesota families earning less than $80,000 per year. Analysts predict it’ll cost the state around $117 million in fiscal year 2025 and $49.5 million annually after that.

With a $17.5 billion budget surplus last year, Walz promised “to put it behind our teachers so we can educate our children.”

Despite the “historic” spending, school districts throughout Minnesota last spring were facing massive cuts, the one-two punch of the end of COVID recovery aid and enrollment losses. 

The state’s second-largest district, St. Paul Public Schools, projects a $150 million deficit for the 2024-25 academic year. Minneapolis Public Schools anticipates a $116 million shortfall. And even the most prosperous Twin Cities suburbs must explain the disconnect to families who moved there for their well-funded schools.

Free lunch for all

Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard after high school and attended Chadron State College. He earned a social science degree in 1989, and spent a year in one of the first government-sanctioned groups of American educators to teach in China.

Walz went on to serve full time in the Army National Guard, retiring in 2005 as a command sergeant major. 

He and his wife, Gwen, met while teaching in Nebraska. They worked together at Mankato, Minn., West High School, where he taught social studies and coached football. She taught English and later served as a district administrator. 

Former colleagues said the couple were powerhouse teachers who balanced out each other’s energy-levels. He was animated, they . She was more reserved.

“He came in very outgoing, very gregarious,” former social studies teacher Pat Griffiths told The Post. “If there were 100 people in a room and 99 loved him, he would work on the one who didn’t until they did too.”

Another colleague told of a prank that a group of teachers played on Walz during his first semester there: They printed out a fake gift certificate for a free turkey as a bogus “welcome gift,” to be collected at a local grocery store. 

Walz returned to school with the turkey. 

In 2006, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating a Republican incumbent in Minnesota’s rural First District, which typically leans Republican. He served six terms before being elected governor in 2018.

These days, Walz is widely known on the national stage for last year’s Minnesota Free School Meals law, which made school breakfast and lunch free for all students, regardless of income. It made Minnesota the fourth state to do so after California, Colorado and Maine. Currently, offer free meals to all students.

At the time, Walz said the measure “puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up.”

During debate on the bill in March 2023, state Sen. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican, questioned whether food insecurity was even an issue in the state, saying, “I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry. I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don’t have access to enough food to eat.”

A video of his speech went viral, garnering on X and plenty of criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Recent coverage suggests that though the program is popular and the state’s surplus helps keep it afloat, the free-meals program than expected: an extra $81 million over the next two years and $95 million in the two years after that.

Walz has also criticized education savings accounts, saying they don’t help rural areas. Support for these accounts, championed by conservatives, may have hurt Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s prospects to become Harris’ running mate. 

A lifelong hunter, Walz shifted substantially on gun safety, moving from an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association in 2016 to endorsing an assault weapons ban after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. At the time, Walz said his then-17-year-old daughter asked him to do more on gun safety. He donated his NRA contributions to charity.

The move turned his rating to “straight F’s,” . “And I sleep just fine.”

On Tuesday, after word leaked about Harris picking Walz, gun safety activist and Parkland survivor David Hogg on X, “I’m smiling a mile wide right now.” 

Extreme or Norman Rockwell?

Policies like these have earned Walz endorsements on the left — American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Tuesday called him “an unabashed champion for public education, for educators and workers.” 

It also doesn’t hurt that Mary Cathryn Ricker, Walz’s first state education commissioner, was a former AFT vice president. Before that, she led the St. Paul Federation of Teachers.

At Temple University Tuesday evening, Walz spoke of his 20-year career as a teacher and his wife’s 29-year tenure, saying, “Don’t ever underestimate teachers.”

Walz’s career nearly derailed when he was pulled over in a drunk driving incident as a 31-year-old teacher in Nebraska. As the reported, he was stopped for driving 96 mph in a 55-mph zone. He failed a field sobriety test, but later pleaded guilty to reckless driving, a misdemeanor. He left the state in 1996, when he continued teaching and coaching football in Mankato.

Invoking his time as a coach there, Harris said he was a role model — on and off the field. She recounted the story of one of the first openly gay students at Walz’s school, who sought to start a gay-straight alliance “at a time when acceptance was difficult to find.”

Harris said Walz “knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group’s faculty advisor. And as students have said, he made the school a safe place for everybody.”

But in a tight race, Walz’s progressive credentials could spell trouble for Harris, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative .

Hess called the Walz pick “an odd choice” in a race in which Harris already has teachers’ union backing but needs to shore up support among independents and conservatives. He suggested that Shapiro might have been a better match for those constituencies.

“You couldn’t get the NEA and AFT working any harder for Harris than they already are,” he said. “She’s already broken out ‘the full pander’ for them.”

Hess said Harris likely chose Walz as a “vibe pick” who suits midwesterners in style if not substance: “He looks like a big, burly high school football coach, assistant principal, kind of sensible guy from Middle America” who served in the military, “whereas Shapiro looks like an investment banker. Part of the calculation might be that that visual is worth plenty.”

Harris may also be trying to “buy herself a lot more leeway with the left so she can keep tacking back to the middle on issues — and the left will be happy because they feel like Walz is one of them.”

It’s possible centrists or moderates in battleground states will be swayed by Walz, Hess said, but his progressive policy solutions could stop them in their tracks. “The guy’s a high school teacher who has been in the National Guard for 20 years,” he said. “His politics are extreme, but his profile, his biography, is about as Norman Rockwell as you can get.”

That moment when you’re a union president, and find out that a teacher and union member is going to be the next vice-president.

We’re excited for former public school teacher & AFT member to join on the ballot this November!

— AFT (@AFTunion)

But Chris Stewart, CEO of and an education blogger based in Minneapolis, said framing Walz in traditional political terms is misleading. Minnesota may be progressive, but it’s “not wild and crazy. We’re not San Francisco. … I don’t think people know how purple Minnesota can be,” he said of . 

Despite the divide, Stewart said, Walz has succeeded with a “very slim majority” in the state legislature. 

But rather than judging Walz on a “left-right continuum,” he said, we should look at him as “just a better version of a great American Democrat. He is not left or right in the way that we traditionally think about things. He kind of breaks that binary.”