The Gettysburg address was an exceptionally brief 272 words. Walz’s nomination acceptance was about 1,720 words, lasting 15 minutes. That’s much longer than Lincoln, but it’s the shortest vice-presidential nomination acceptance speech since at least 1984.
In that short time, Walz put on a rhetorical clinic.
He may not soar like an Obama—few can. But there is a lot one can learn about messaging from this speech.
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.
Walz, in arguably crude fashion, is trying to tar the Trump-Vance ticket as elitist by taking advantage of a unique contrast between the two campaigns.
This presidential election features the first Republican Party ticket in history with two Ivy League graduates. Donald Trump graduated from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and J.D. Vance got his law degree from Yale.
And this is only the fourth Democratic ticket over the last 50 years with no Ivy League members. The other three were Jimmy Carter-Walter Mondale, Walter Mondale-Geraldine Ferraro, and Joe Biden-Kamala Harris. Every Democratic ticket between 1988 and 2016 had at least one Ivy Leaguer.
For years, Republicans, regardless of how selective their own education was, have gleefully tagged Democrats as egghead elitists and not real Americans. Now Walz is trying to turn the tables.
Usually when Walz brings up Vance’s Ivy pedigree, directly or indirectly, he doesn’t suggest the mere act of attending Yale makes one a bad person. He ties it into a larger narrative about Vance’s attitude towards the Ohioans and Kentuckians from his childhood.
For example, at the first rally after his selection, Walz said, “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, J.D. studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community.” The Yale part is a chapter, according to Walz’s narrative, in Vance’s journey away from hardscrabble Appalachia, to a life among the upper crust, where he wrote a book placing much of the blame for Appalachian poverty on those who refuse to leave Appalachia.
Walz didn’t give any such context last night, making it more of a cheap shot. But in politics, cheap shots often hit the target.
(This is one indication from last night that, like the football coach Walz once was, he is laser-focused on winning, whatever it takes.)
Growing up in a small town like that, you learn how to take care of each other. That family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do. They may not love like you do. But they’re your neighbors. And you look out for them. And they look out for you. Everybody belongs. And everybody has a responsibility to contribute.
This struck me as a deliberate reference to the controversial song Try That in a Small Town, in which Jason Aldean sings, “Cuss out a cop / Spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, ya think you’re tough / Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own.”
The music video includes news footage of protesters clashing with police (an earlier version of the video used footage from 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.)
Walz, however, skipped over any allusion to protests or vigilante responses to outsiders. Instead, he focused on the “take care of our own” part, depicting small town America as community-oriented and open-minded.
In doing so, Walz firmly identified himself with small-town America and signaled to small-town America he’s interested in giving them a reputation for compassion, not one of hateful insularity.
And everybody has a responsibility to contribute. For me, it was serving in the Army National Guard. I joined up two days after my 17th birthday, and I proudly wore our nation’s uniform for 24 years. My dad, a Korean War-era Army veteran, died of lung cancer a couple of years later. He left behind a mountain of medical debt. Thank God for Social Security survivor benefits. And thank God for the G.I. Bill that allowed my dad and me to go to college. And millions of other Americans.
First, Walz tells a short story of his father’s passing which ends with gratitude for government programs. Except, he doesn’t make a heavy-handed point about the value of government programs. He just lets the audience connect those dots.
Then, Walz celebrates how he and his dad went to college with government help. So even though he wants to tweak Vance about his Yale degree, Walz does not go so far that he wrongly disparages a college education as a waste of money that amounts to an abandonment of one’s hometown and switching of sides in any culture war.
I represented my neighbors in Congress for 12 years. And I learned an awful lot. I learned how to work across the aisle on issues like growing the rural economies and taking care of veterans. And I learned how to compromise without compromising my values.
While Walz took several shots at Republicans in his brief speech, he made sure to leaven them with a reference to his bipartisan track record in Congress, which he knows carries weight with swing voters.
Then I came back to serve as governor, and we got right to work making a difference in our neighbors’ lives. We cut taxes for the middle class. We passed paid family and medical leave. We invested in fighting crime and affordable housing. We cut the cost of prescription drugs and helped people escape the kind of medical debt that nearly sank my family. And we made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day. So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.
Then Walz touts his gubernatorial win list, which is far more progressive than his House win list. But he subtly connected it to his community-minded small-town roots—he was just “making a difference in our neighbors’ lives.” He slipped in items not always embraced by progressives such as cutting middle-class taxes and fighting crime. And he didn’t get bogged down with bureaucratic jargon and numerical data, which can cause average voters to tune out.
We also protected reproductive freedom, because in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make. And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.
A regular applause line for Walz, making an explicitly libertarian case for abortion rights.
And that includes I.V.F. and fertility treatments. And this is personal for Gwen and I. If you’ve never experienced the hell that is infertility, I guarantee you, you know somebody who has. I can remember praying each night for a phone call. The pit in your stomach when the phone would ring, and the absolute agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked. It took Gwen and I years, but we had access to fertility treatments. And when our daughter was born, we named her Hope. Hope, Gus and Gwen, you are my entire world, and I love you. I’m letting you in on how we started a family because this is a big part about what this election is about. Freedom.
This speech was delivered one day after a mini-controversy broke out when Gwen Walz told Glamour they used intrauterine insemination (IUI) to facilitate her pregnancy, and not in vitro fertilization (IVF). Anti-abortion absolutists haven’t attacked IUI procedures, as they do with IVF, because they do not involve any destruction of embryos. Yet Gov. Walz sometimes suggested they used IVF, forging common cause with many other families. Republicans have been hammering Walz for embellishments.
While Walz was careful last night not to say they used IVF, he didn’t go out of his away to satisfy Republican critics and persnickety mainstream fact checkers by vocally retracting past statements and emphasizing his family’s use of IUI. He largely kept to his past framing—“this is personal for Gwen and I”—to assert common cause with families that used any type of fertility treatments and who feel threatened ever since Alabama Republicans recently tried to legally ban IVF.
Similarly, when he mentioned his service in the National Guard, he didn’t say anything inaccurate, but neither did he complicate his preferred narrative by acknowledging any of the Republican criticisms about how he has characterized his service, or failed to correct mischaracterizations, in the past.
You may rather see Walz go the extra mile to stay on the right side of the fact checkers. But here we see again that the coach is singularly focused on winning. He is not especially interested in letting Republican attacks knock him off his game plan.
When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations—free to pollute your air and water. And banks—free to take advantage of customers.
But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.
Walz is not freelancing here. “Freedom” has become the anchor of the entire Harris campaign message architecture. And it appears to be effectively broadening the appeal of the Democratic agenda by giving it a libertarian sheen.
Look, I know guns. I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter. And I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress, and I’ve got the trophies to prove it. But I’m also a dad. I believe in the Second Amendment, but I also believe our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe.
No mention of specific gun control proposals here. Walz is wisely avoiding predictable language that would prompt the usual polarization. He is flatly supporting the right to bear arms, while suggesting that right is not in conflict with another goal nearly everyone shares: keeping our kids safe.
Theoretically, once there is clear acceptance from voters with those two principles, pursuing legislation in line with those principles will become easier. (Optimism for any gun reform legislation may seem naive, but don’t forget, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act made it to Biden’s desk two years ago.)
Some folks just don’t understand what it takes to be a good neighbor. Take Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.
Their Project 2025 will make things much, much harder for people who are just trying to live their lives. They spend a lot of time pretending they know nothing about this. But look, I coached high school football long enough to know, and trust me on this: When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.
Again, Walz is reinforcing the “good neighbor” framing with which he began the speech. And he is unafraid to deploy sports metaphors, further burnishing his regular guy persona.
This dispatch is now running about as many words as Walz’s entire 1720-word, 15 minute speech—which is another way Walz comes off like a regular guy. Normal people want short speeches that make points succinctly and don’t run past midnight, not 90-minute self-indulgent ramblings.
In other words, the graduate of Nebraska’s Chadron State College could teach the Ivy Leaguers a thing or two about how to deliver a speech.
