I went on the road with Tim Walz as he trialed his new attack lines against Trump

Rain was falling in Asheville, North Carolina. The ground was wet and soft. A crowd of 2,500 cheered as loudly as you’d hear at any of the shows that this live music venue has hosted for acts such as The Beach Boys or Mavis Staples over the years.

But the sodden audience hadn’t come to hear music – they were there for a 60-year-old former teacher who could be vice-president come January.

For his part, Tim Walz appears to be enjoying the ride.

Walz — who served more than two decades in the Army National Guard while teaching before he parlayed a decade-long stint in Congress into the Minnesota governor’s mansion — wasn’t the top choice of most Democratic pundits when Kamala Harris was picking a running mate. Yet, just six weeks after he was catapulted into the national spotlight, he appeared incredibly at ease with himself during a campaign swing through Georgia and North Carolina this week.

Let’s just say he cuts a far different figure on the campaign trail than his Republican counterpart, Ohio senator JD Vance.

Accompanied by his daughter Hope, whom he frequently name-checks in speeches when discussing the fertility struggles he and his wife Gwen have faced, Walz is comfortable in khakis and an open collar. It’s a marked contrast with the more formal affectations of Vance, whose sartorial tendencies are an echo of the boxy suits and overly long ties favored by Donald Trump.

Gray-haired and balding, and looking far older than the 59-year-old Harris — he attributes the difference to his time supervising high-school cafeterias — Walz has been leaning into the traditional attack-dog role of the vice-presidential pick.

As he stood on stage in Asheville, he contrasted the “opportunity economy” he and Harris have been touting on the stump with the vision put forward by their rivals, telling rally-goers it is important that they know where he and Harris come from and what they stand for. Trump and Vance “run on fear,” he said — adding that his time in the aforementioned lunchroom had taught him that fear can be “an incredible short-term motivator” that does little to transform anything in the long run.

“These guys focus on fear, fear of the unknown. Blame the brown man. Blame somebody else. That’s what they do,” he said. “It’s important to know who they are, but what really inspires people is policies and a vision like Kamala Harris is bringing, that’s about the future. It’s about the future. It’s about what we can do together.”

Walz’s Asheville rally on Tuesday evening was meant to celebrate National Voter Registration Day, and to cap what sources called a “youth vote week of action” coordinated between the Harris-Walz campaign and the Democratic National Committee to mobilize young voters across battleground states.

He started his day in Georgia, a state that narrowly delivered its electoral votes to the current president Joe Biden four years ago. Until Biden exited the presidential race in July, it appeared that the state would fall back into the Republican column this November. But that no longer looks so certain. That’s why Walz told volunteers at a campaign office in Macon, Georgia, that the 2024 race is “not going to be won in a Twitter fight.”

“It’s going to be by neighbors calling up neighbors on the phone,” he added.

He had a similar message a few hours later when he stopped by Rocky Mountain Pizza, a popular Georgia Tech student spot. As he entered the stuffy, packed-to-the-rafters restaurant, which is partially outdoors, the cheers for the Minnesota governor were loud enough that they could be heard from the street as the press pack traveling with him rushed from the vans we’d arrived in to the area where he was set to speak.

After a brief introduction from a Georgia Tech student, Walz paced back and forth as he addressed an animated group. Looking every bit the educator he once was, he held the audience in his hand as he told them he feared that they would “become cynical and check out” even though the stakes for this election are, in his telling, higher than ever.

“We’re not just shaping the next election – we’re not even shaping the next four years in America. We’re shaping the next 40 years across the planet. And that’s an incredible responsibility, but it’s also an incredible privilege that you get to be part of,” he said.

A short time later, as he addressed a group of Black students at a cafe near the medical school of Morehouse College — the storied Atlanta men’s HBCU — Walz brought up something his running-mate almost never does: her status as a Black woman.

Harris’s aides say she rarely mentions her racial or ethnic background because it’s blatantly obvious to anyone who looks at her. Another source close to Harris told The Independent that she is aware, based on her observations during the 2016 election cycle, that leaning into her race or gender is more likely to push some voters away than bring any to her corner.

Walz echoed those sentiments by telling the students that Harris “doesn’t talk about the historic nature of her candidacy” because “she just does the work.”

“And she does it better than anybody else,” he added.

As he swung through the various student-centric events, Walz tested out new attack lines aimed at his opponents. One line he appeared to debut during his talk with the Georgia Tech students illustrated how the Harris-Walz campaign has pivoted from the heavy rhetoric about “threats to democracy” that dominated the discourse when Biden was the candidate.

Walz did bring up the January 6 attack on the Capitol and what had led to it, describing it as Trump having “tried to violently overthrow our election and deny a free and fair election.” He said it’s important to “be very clear about how we talk about that, because he lost the election, and there’s no doubt about that.” But instead of droning on about “democracy” in an abstract way, he drew on his background as a former teacher and football coach.

“You play hard, the other team plays hard, and after the game, if you lose, you’ll walk across and shake hands and congratulate the other team. That’s the way it works in politics — you take it another step forward, you walk across and congratulate the winner, and then you pledge to do all you can to help them succeed, because that’s good for America,” he said.

Turning the subject back to Trump, Walz lightened the mood with a joke. “I think I’m a pretty good teacher, and I would always give my students extra chances to learn — sometimes you don’t learn the lesson the first time,” he added.

Trump, he continued, “did not learn the lesson the first time” of how to concede gracefully after losing — “but the good news is, he’s going to learn the lesson in November!”

The students erupted in cheers.

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But it wasn’t just younger or more diverse voters who clamored to hear Walz this week. In Asheville, rally-goers started gathering hours before Walz was set to take the stage. They stood at the outdoor venue, called the Salvage Station, despite the kind of rain that made it difficult to stay upright on the unpaved ground.

An older white woman, Gwen Mathews, of Fletcher, North Carolina, said she had come to see Walz to show her support for the Democratic ticket in the nominally red state, one that hasn’t voted for a Democrat since Barack Obama carried it in 2008.

“I want Governor Walz and Vice-President Harris to know that we are supporting them, and I felt like this was a good way to do it. And I just believe in the policies that the vice-president is presenting, and I wanted them to know,” she said.

As she spoke to The Independent, a former North Carolina Supreme Court justice, Bob Orr, was on stage. Orr, who stood for election under the Republican banner four times, told the crowd he was speaking “as a proud North Carolinian and a concerned American asking my fellow citizens to support Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz.”

He said the Trump-era Republican Party was not something he recognized any more.

“It is no longer the party of those who care about protecting our freedoms or about lowering costs for working- and middle-class North Carolinians, or about fighting for our democracy — it is the party of Donald Trump, JD Vance and Mark Robinson, and their extreme Project 2025 agenda designed to rip away our fundamental freedoms, strangle our economy, and undermine the very foundations of our democracy,” he said.

He praised Harris and Walz — the latter, like him, an army veteran — for reaching across the aisle in search of GOP support. In doing so, the Harris-Walz campaign has already come away with endorsements from ex-Republican office-holders, such as former vice-president Dick Cheney and his daughter, the former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney.

Mathews, a self-described lifelong Democrat, told The Independent she is glad Harris and Walz are attracting Republicans to their banner.

“I believe that she’s trying to bring the country together, and it seems to be happening,” she said.

Another older white woman who said she intends to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket, Rhonda Schandevel, told The Independent she felt it was important to brave the rain and hear the Minnesota governor speak because she is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who has run for office multiple times and previously served on the school board in nearby Haywood County.

Schandevel also said the combination of Harris atop the ticket and a polarizing Republican gubernatorial nominee — Trump-endorsed Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson — has the potential to flip the state’s electoral votes back to the Democratic ticket. Robinson holds extreme positions on abortion and other reproductive rights that may cost him dearly at the ballot box.

Schandevel also noted the moment during the Democratic National Convention when, during Walz’s speech, his son Gus became emotional, shouting through tears in a moment of pride: “That’s my dad!” Republican commentators savaged the teenager, who has a non-verbal learning disorder as well as ADHD and an anxiety disorder, implying that his emotional reaction implied some deficit in masculinity. But for Schandevel, the young man’s tears, and his father’s subsequent expression of pride, “struck a chord” with her because of her personal experience raising a child with differences of his own.

“I have a severely intellectually disabled son who is 37, who I’ve advocated for his entire life ... and it just makes me feel my passion even more, so I just support this ticket 150 per cent,” she said. “We have to get them in, because Donald Trump, he says we’re ruining the country, but he’s the one who will ruin this country.”