When Kamala Harris chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the radicals within the Democratic Party cheered. An Instagram account run by staffers for Rep. Summer Lee, known as “dear_white_staffers,” posted in all-caps, “WE FUCKING DID IT WE FUCKING WON LETS GO LETS GO LETS GO!!!!!”
It wasn’t a one-off. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, the Squad legislator who lost his primary in June to a more centrist candidate, posted a video of himself on X after the veep announcement, exclaiming: “It’s Walz, baby. Let’s go.” Trita Parsi, the vice president of the pro-Iran Quincy Institute, posted on X that Harris’s running mate signaled “a huge change in the political landscape of the Democratic Party.”
On Facebook, original squad member Rep. Ilhan Omar posted congratulations to Walz, “our next Vice President.” Former Ohio state senator and Bernie Sanders surrogate Nina Turner was overjoyed at the Walz pick. She posted on X, “The Harris-Walz campaign has an enormous opportunity to keep this energy and momentum going with a policy platform that centers the working class, a Black agenda, and moving to a humanitarian position on Gaza.”
On the surface, the snubbing of Shapiro, who looked like a lock for the vice president slot going into the weekend, is about Israel. A noisy fringe of the Democratic Party threatened to stay home altogether to protest President Biden’s policy on aiding Israel after it was attacked by Hamas on October 7. Last month, this same crowd mobilized to tar Shapiro as “genocide Josh,” creating a website and flooding social media with attacks on his record, which went as far back as a pro-Israel column he wrote for his college newspaper when he was 20 years old. (An op-ed that he sorta kinda apologized for when he said his views had evolved from his college days.)
But the fight over America’s support for Israel is a proxy for a deeper problem inside the Democratic Party: radicalism. Recently, the radicals have taken up issues like the Gaza war and police abolition. But in 1968, it was the Vietnam War, as anti-American extremists like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin sought to make Democratic nominees unelectable by disrupting the convention that year. And while that war was deeply unpopular at the time with all Americans, the radicals went even further, taking the side of the enemy that the U.S. military was fighting.
One might think this would be a cautionary tale. Republican Richard Nixon went on to win handily that year. And in 1972, after Democrats nominated George McGovern, a candidate even further left to their 1968 nominee, Nixon won again, in a landslide.
That’s certainly how some in Trump’s orbit see it. In Shapiro they see a guy who could prove the Democrats were breaking from the radicalism of 2020. In Walz, they see a hard-left progressive who is on the fringe when it comes to gender, taxes, and public order. As Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway tweeted upon hearing the news, “Tim Walz? What a relief.”
In other words, it’s not just the radical Democrats who are celebrating. So is Team Trump.
Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @EliLake, and read his piece, “Could Josh Shapiro Help—or Hurt—Kamala Harris?”
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