Tim Walz is a dad. He’s a husband. A Midwesterner who likes to hunt. And a governor. He also happens to be a former high school football coach—and the Harris-Walz campaign is here to remind you of that.
Instead of playing up Walz’s five years of experience as Minnesota’s governor, or his 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is choosing to highlight Walz experience as a high school coach. Walz was a football and basketball coach for much of the 1990s, starting in Nebraska. When he and his family moved to Minnesota in 1996, the future VP pick joined Mankato West High School’s coaching staff and in 1999, helped lead the football team to the 4A state championship.
“I like to call him Coach Walz,” Harris said of her running mate at a recent rally in Pennsylvania. “It’s certainly less formal than ‘governor.’”
Signs handed out to attendees at campaign rallies with Walz in attendance have “Coach!” written in red and blue, and the campaign’s Coach’s Collection is football-themed, with items like a $25 striped crew socks, a $10 lanyard, and a $20 four-pack of patches that includes a varsity jacket-style letter H that says “Team Harris Walz, Est. 2024.”
The campaign’s embrace of “coachcore” is perhaps an unsurprising development considering the positive association in the U.S. between football coaches and the concepts of leadership, determination, and community. Take, for example, the story of Walz coaching a team that turned around an early string of losses to win eight straight and the state championship. This narrative reinforces the Harris campaign’s earliest slogan, “Let’s win this,” and matches the story Democrats hope they’ll be able tell about the 2024 campaign: that they went from down in the polls to winning the White House.
The Harris-Walz dichotomy
The campaign’s introductory video about Walz spends more time exploring his role as a social studies teacher and coach than his time in public office. It’s a direct contrast to how the campaign is marketing Harris, which has focused on her professional biography and accomplishments. As a prosecutor, Harris put criminals behind bars, the narrator says in Harris’s first campaign ad, “Fearless.” As California’s attorney general, she went after big banks, and as vice president she took on Big Pharma. The super PAC Future Forward USA Action is doing something similar with its résumé-style ad, “Kamala is Ready.”
We’ll never know if “Coach Harris” would be a similarly engaging meme had Harris coached, say, a softball or basketball team. Regardless, female candidates have to show voters specific credentials, whereas male candidates are assumed to be qualified if they have leadership and service experience, according to Keys to Elected Office: The Essential Guide for Women, a guide to running for office as a woman produced by the nonpartisan Barbara Lee Family Foundation. “Women must show, where men can tell,” the report says. Harris also has a brighter spotlight on her record at the top of the ticket, so as she campaigns to convince voters she’s prepared for the job, Walz is free to spend more time on extracurricular activities.