Kamala Harris’ VP pick may signal a shift away from pivoting to the center | Moira Donegan

“Historically, the vice-president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact,” Donald Trump told the National Association of Black Journalists last week. “I mean, virtually no impact … virtually never has it mattered.” The former US president may have been engaged in a bit of wishful thinking. If the last few weeks have shown us anything, it’s that vice-presidential running mates do, in fact, matter. His, the Ohio senator JD Vance , has quickly become a centerpiece of the race, which has shifted to become in part a referendum on Vance’s regressive and hateful views of women.

The VP choice is not a superficial one, not merely an ornament to the presidential nominee or a bit of tactical cosmetic maneuvering to balance his or her weaknesses. A decision that is ultimately left entirely in the hands of the presidential nominee, it is a signal of that person’s perspectives and priorities, and one of the most influential choices he or she can make to shape the future of their party.

Related: Who is Tim Walz? The progressive governor with a history of winning over Republicans

What sort of future for the Democratic party does Kamala Harris see in her choice of the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz ? The move may reflect a shift away from the strategy of pivoting to the center that the Democrats have been pursuing for decades and towards a new policy and messaging strategy that seeks to attack the sadism and bigotry of Republicans and make an affirmative case for progressive values. Because frankly, if they were doing things the old way, they would have picked Josh Shapiro.

Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania, was the early favorite for the VP slot. There are few paths to victory for the Harris campaign that do not require her to win Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, and Shapiro was thought to be the safest bet to secure them. But Shapiro is a relatively untested politician. He only ascended to national notice in 2022, when he ran for governor against an election-denying quack who barely mounted a campaign. In the quick but comparatively much more thorough vetting process of Harris’s vice-presidential search, an array of liabilities emerged. Shapiro, who volunteered with the Israeli army as a young man, wrote a piece when he was in college that suggested that Palestinians were racially incapable of peace. More recently, he has spoken with uncommon contempt about anti-genocide protestors on college campuses. His appointment would have reinvigorated divisions within the Democratic base over Israel’s war on Palestinians just as college semesters are set to begin.

Walz’s non-threatening masculinity allows him to posit his own progressive values as normative American values

Shapiro, too, seems to have some problems with gender issues, a unique liability in a campaign that is set to be defined by them: he is alleged to have tolerated and helped cover up harassment and sexual harassment of women by one of his closest aides, has antagonized the woman-dominated teachers’ union with his support of private school vouchers , and came under scrutiny while attorney general for his office’s classification of a woman’s death – in which she was stabbed multiple times, including in the head, neck and chest – as a suicide .

Shapiro is what other versions of the Democratic party would have been considered the safe choice: a moderate, seen as antagonizing the party’s left, who could appeal to white male conservative voters in a swing state. That’s what Hillary Clinton chose when she selected Tim Kaine as her running mate in 2016; that was the political theory of change that had been advocated by Bill Clinton and his Democratic party successors in every election since 1992. But cumulatively, Shapiro’s liabilities threatened to divide the base, alienate the left and weaken the Democratic party’s claim to be advocates of gender equality. Placed against Vance, his contrast would have been minimal: the VP contenders would have been two elite lawyers from fancy schools, slick and ambitious and weird about women. The Democratic party has changed. What might have seemed safe in 2016 ultimately appeared too risky in 2024.

Walz, by contrast, offers a long record of policy accomplishments, experience both in Congress and as an executive, an amazing absence of scandal, and an almost relentless midwestern cheerfulness. A former history teacher and champion high school football coach, Walz volunteered to serve as the first faculty advisor to his public school’s gay-straight alliance – back in the 90s, when gay acceptance was still years away and Minnesota still had criminal bans on gay sex on the books.

He later served 12 years in the House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019, representing Minnesota’s first district – a vast rural expanse, spanning the whole southern width of the state along the Iowa border – becoming the first Democrat elected to that seat in years. A veteran, Walz was the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer to ever serve in Congress; in a body made up overwhelmingly of the rich, where other veterans often entered the military as officers from elite service academies, Walz was a public college graduate who had joined the Minnesota national guard as an enlisted soldier.

While in Congress, Walz was a consistent advocate for labor unions and abortion rights, while still earning a reputation for bipartisanship. But it is in his role as Minnesota’s governor, an office he was first elected to in 2018, that Walz has distinguished himself. His administration has racked up multiple wins for progressive policy priorities in the state, even as Democrats have held only an extremely slim majority in the state house. As governor, he has signed laws providing free school lunches for all children, decriminalizing marijuana, assuring paid family and medical leave for workers, advancing common-sense gun control like universal background checks and red flag protections, codifying abortion rights in the Minnesota state constitution and protecting those who travel to the state for reproductive or gender-affirming care, and advancing labor and union protections.

These progressive policy wins have been coupled in Walz’s persona, a cheerful, folksy wholesomeness that contrasts nicely with Harris’s public posture of competent self-assurance. Walz is aggressively normal ; his public persona is the human embodiment of a dad joke. This non-threatening masculinity allows him to posit his own progressive values as normative American values – and to contrast the Republicans’ maximalist social conservative agenda as a creepy intrusion on the American way of life. It was Walz, in a television appearance he made while auditioning for the VP job, who famously first described the Trump-Vance ticket as “ weird ”, a playful pejorative that the Harris campaign quickly seized on.

For decades, Democrats have feared seeming “weird”, feared that too robust a commitment to their policy positions would alienate an America that they imagined as fundamentally conservative. But times have changed. It is the Democrats, now under the banner of Harris and Walz, who can argue that their progressive vision represents the American mainstream.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist