Harris' Gun-Toting Moderate Vet VP Pick

Is Way Left of Seattle's City Council

Walz Is A Mainstream, Moderate Democrat

By now I’m sure you have heard that Vice President Harris picked mainstream Democrat Tim Walz as her running mate. Mr. Walz is the former teacher and football coach and current Governor of modestly-blue Minnesota. 

He won his first congressional seat by flipping and holding a rural red district that was reliably Republican before him and reverted back to Republican right after. 

He has seasoned his career with some seriously centrist, and even aisle-crossing moments– earning an “A” rating from the NRA in his early days in Congress, and praise from then-President Trump for his handling of riots in Minneapolis after George Floyd’s murder. Walz has also peppered in some practical progressive policy along the way–like universal school meals. 

But the vast majority of his positions are garden variety Democratic policies, pulled pretty much straight from the Democratic Party platform.

A lefty, he is not. 

But That Puts Him Way To the Council’s Left

Coach Walz is thus a study in why no serious commentator should call our current city council majority “moderate,” ever again. 

Walz’s (actual moderate) agenda is exactly the kind of stuff that brings howling complaints of “radical leftist activism” from the people on our city council and their corporate backers. After all, he is on the side of unions, transit riders, climate-hawks and education advocates–the same people the corporate oligarchs oppose in Seattle. 

But people who share Walz’s policy vision are the people that the council majority and their corporate backers treat as the enemy. Had Walz run in the most recent city council election, the Chamber of Commerce’s friendly local SuperPAC boss and his big donors would have dropped a million bucks branding Walz as a virtue-signaling leftist who was going to run the businesses out of town. 

Sandeep Kaushik would have gone onto “Seattle Nice” and hyped it all up as “progressive performative bullshit,” and the Seattle Times would have had Alex Fryer–the political communications guy they hired to pretend to be a journalist while writing screeds against progressives–pen a scathing attack on Walz under the cover of an endorsement for his opponent.

More infuriating, mainstream news reporters would have unwittingly fanned the flames of this false naive narrative by repeating the mantra that Walz is a “progressive” and branding his inevitably anti-tax, anti-social-services, anti-union opponent as “moderate.”

What Walz Supports

Let’s look at Walz’s accomplishments in Minnesota. It’s pretty much a straight-up list of the kind of policies that Seattle’s pretend-moderates like to pretend is going to turn our city into some sort of socialist hellscape. 

Walz Shows Up For Workers While Seattle City Council Tries to Cut Minimum Wage

In just a short time, Walz passed paid family medical leave and a bunch of other labor friendly laws that, among other things: eliminated non-competes and non-poaching agreements, required paid sick leave, protected construction workers against wage theft, gave a big raise to rideshare drivers, created a board that sets industry-wide pay and benefits for nursing homes, granted workers the right to refuse to attend anti-union meetings at work, increased workplace safety standards at meatpacking plants and Amazon warehouses, and required Amazon to disclosure performance data to its employees. He also eliminated 4 year degree requirements for most state employees.

Walz has also stood up for consumers, working to prevent hospital monopolies, and signing a law capping insulin prices at $35 per month and is fighting against inflated drug pricing across the board. He passed a tenant’s rights bill and a law that banned junk fees.

These policies faced the same intense industry opposition that The Chamber leads here–where big businesses try to portray basic Democratic party policy as some sort of loony leftist nonsense that will crash the economy. 

I wonder if they also pretended they were good Democrats while doing so. 

Walz-In-My-Backyard, Hop On a Train

Those of us who tend to fixate on housing, or climate, or transit, Walz’s Democratic party credentials also look sterling. He passed permitting reform for clean energy projects, and recently signed a single stair bill–remember I wrote about how awesome single stair buildings are a few months ago? Solid stuff.

According to some hardcore YIMBY’s he’s very much pro-housing, although I don’t yet know enough to have fully assessed the matter. And, similarly, though I haven’t yet had time to dig deeply into the all his history with transportation, he has transit boosters feeling buoyant.

While I don’t know for sure, I would be pretty surprised to find out that he has, say, tried to delete any major stations in major transit projects, or tried moving stations to places that will significantly increase commute times for millions of rides per year, or has rolled out plans that will make housing markedly more expensive—like our city leadership.

Redistribute Like a Democrat

Taxes in Minnesota are higher, 25% higher as a share of their economy than ours. They are also way, way, way more progressive than they are in Washington. 

When people like me propose modest tax increases for the very rich or corporations in Seattle, our pretend moderates and their communications teams at KOMO and on the Seattle Times Editorial board shout things like that government is “bloated” and that jobs will flee and poverty will rise and well meaning but foolish progressives like me will be so sad because all the tax money will be gone too. 

But even though Minnesota faces the headwinds of being a post-industrial, upper- Midwest state, it has consistently lower unemployment and lower poverty than Washington. And in fact, rather than these taxes generating some sort of Ronald-Reagan-dreams-it-up-doom-loop, Minnesota’s more progressive taxes generated one of the most eye-watering budget surpluses in the country last year, over $17 billion.

Say It With Me— “They Are Not Moderates.”

So—given that Walz is a mainstream, centrist Democrat, can we quit calling the people who oppose such policies, from the right– “mainstream,” “moderate” or “centrist?” If they are Democrats, they are serious outliers. They are conservative.