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The Harris-Walz campaign has noticed that VP candidate Tim Walz offers some demographic opportunities to be exploited. And so, that is what the Minnesota Governor will be doing on the campaign trail for the next week... or more.
To start, the U.S. political parties are undergoing a process of realignment, with white working-class voters moving to the Republicans and college-educated voters becoming Democrats. It is to the Democrats' advantage to speed up the movement of college-educated voters to their team (and slow down movement the other way, if they can). Usually when people talk about "college-educated voters" they implicitly mean people who went to Ivy League schools, or other top schools like MIT, Stanford, Duke, Vanderbilt, or flagship state universities like Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Michigan, UNC, etc.
But the vast majority of college graduates did not go to those elite colleges. They went to regional colleges and universities that are not as famous, but are much more numerous. Walz seems to understand that people who went to regional schools are a large untapped audience for the Democrats. At his acceptance speech at the DNC, Walz said: "Now, I grew up in Butte, Nebraska, a town of 400 people. I had 24 kids in my high school class, and none of them went to Yale" (a dig at J.D. Vance).
When Walz was in Erie, PA, he said: "You go off to Yale, you get a philosophy major, write a best-selling book, trash the very people you grew up with, just don't come back to Erie and tell us how to run our lives." What he is trying to do is attract voters who have a bachelors degree, but from a far-from-famous university. They haven't all switched to the Democrats yet, but Walz thinks they could.
The demographic he is aiming at might be called "the state college voter." These are people who went to a school with "State" in the name, like "Cal State Fullerton" or "North Carolina State." The students who go there often stay in their communities after graduating and find decent jobs there, rather than going off to a faraway coastal city and trying to make it big time, never to return. These people form a much larger fraction of the electorate than Ivy Leaguers and have generally flown under the radar. They are college graduates, but not at all elite and people ignore them. Walz is trying to change that and he has the perfect foil in a guy from humble beginnings who went to Yale Law School, which catapulted him into Silicon Valley. That is not the experience of most people who overcame humble roots to get their diploma.
The numbers could work for Walz. About 45% of four-year degree holders attended a regional public university. Very few of these schools are well known outside their state. They admit most applicants with a high school diploma. These are the colleges that students applying to all eight Ivies might have as their safety school, just in case they are rejected everywhere and need to kill a year before reapplying. Despite the vast majority of college graduates coming from regional public universities, the ones in the news all the time are the elite ones—because that is where many politicians, journalists, CEOs, and nonprofit leaders went. You see this bias in lists. In the U.S. News & World Report list of the top 100 national universities, only three are regional public universities.
The Democrats tend to focus on the elite universities and what their students and graduates want. This is often very different from what is going on at the regional universities, where there were almost no encampments about Gaza, high-pitched battles over bathrooms, or fights about affirmative action in admissions. This is because the elite schools lean much further left than the regional schools. Democrats tend to forget this (if they ever knew). Walz, who went to Chadron State College in Nebraska and then Minnesota State University at Mankato, wants to remind them. He also will remind voters that it is the Republicans who have an all-Ivy-League ticket this year, as Trump has a degree from Penn, while Vance earned a degree from Yale. Neither Walz nor Kamala Harris went to an Ivy League school.
And the college graduates are not all that Walz will be focusing upon. While the two members of the Democratic ticket may have "non-Ivy Leaguer" in common, it is also the case that Walz has at least one thing that Harris does not. So, he's going to go on a major media blitz targeted at male voters. First it will be a chat about football with (former football player) Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. Then it will be local hits in swing states, for discussions of high school football and, perhaps, pheasant hunting (note that we initially typed that as "peasant hunting," which is probably more of a Trump family sport). Walz also has appearances lined up with a long list of social media influencers, covering topics from veterans to rodeo riding.
In short, if Walz gets to be VP starting on January 21, 2025, he will definitely have earned it (even if he doesn't manage to shoot a single peasant). (V)