On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris—the Democratic nominee for president—announced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, and the memes are already flooding throughout social media. In that brief time, the web has anointed Walz a “Midwest princess.”
At face worth, the moniker is a nod to Gen Z pop star Chappell Roan’s 2023 album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which refers to her upbringing in rural Missouri. However on this context, it’s additionally a reference to the well mannered and down-to-earth, quintessentially Midwestern virtues attributed to Walz. It frames him as each a Gen Z hero and an endearing, approachable (even perhaps cute) consultant of America’s heartland. It additionally positions Walz as a really perfect foil to Republican VP candidate JD Vance of Ohio, whom Democrats have characterized as out of touch and “weird.”
Walz has a background that many residents of the so-called Blue Wall—Democratic-leaning states Harris needs to seize within the November election—can determine with. He was born and raised in Valentine, Nebraska, a small city that he told MSNBC had a complete inhabitants of 400. After highschool, Walz enlisted within the Military Nationwide Guard, the place he served for twenty-four years. Throughout that point, he moved to Minnesota, earned his undergraduate diploma from Chadron State School in Nebraska, and, later, his masters in schooling from Minnesota State College. He labored as a geography trainer and soccer coach at a public highschool earlier than transitioning to politics.
The meme-ification of Midwest values
Up to now, the meme-ification of Walz’s persona has centered on a Gen Z interpretation of his Midwestern roots. “BIG yr for midwest princesses,” one X (formerly Twitter) user captioned a side-by-side of Walz and Roan, which has garnered 98,000 likes as of this writing. “Kamala is brat and Walz is a Midwest Princess,” another user posted, echoed by a tweet lamenting, “Can’t consider the 2024 Dem ticket is Brat/Midwest Princess.” There have additionally been a number of iterations of Walz’s face photoshopped over Roan’s album cover—some more unsettling than others.
“As a child raised on mr rogers, who benefited from some wonderful lecturers in smalltown rural america, walz epitomizes what the midwest is all about,” Carnegie Mellon College professor Jeffrey Bigham wrote on X. Media strategist Michael Del Moro posted, “Walz was a soccer coach, but additionally the school advisor for a gay-straight alliance in **rural Minnesota within the Nineteen Nineties**.”
A VP decide with small-town roots who seeks to attract massive contrasts
In interviews, Walz has emphasised his private connections to small-town America and its values, particularly in distinction to Vance. Whereas discussing his dedication to public schooling with MSNBC, Walz made a jab at the truth that whereas Vance grew up in a small city, he finally attended Yale Regulation Faculty: “That angst that JD Vance talks about in Hillbilly Elegy? None of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale!”
In that very same dialog, Walz famous Vance’s time as a enterprise capitalist, arguing that he “is aware of nothing about small-town America,” and calling MAGA fans “bizarre.” The Harris marketing campaign has run with the word weird to characterize the Trump-Vance ticket, making a play for larger relatability with voters. And given his background, Walz is completely primed to attract a distinction between his personal reference to small-town America and Vance’s coastal elite connections, a juxtaposition that helps make Vance appear phony.
Midwest good for “good luck, babe”
Kamala HQ, Harris’s official marketing campaign account on TikTok and X, seems to agree. The primary video posted after the official announcement this morning options clips from that very same MSNBC interview about small cities, edited to a trippy background beat and spliced with photos of Walz strolling by way of a discipline and feeding livestock.
Now plainly the web is leaping on Walz’s obvious Midwest cuteness as the final word instance of normalcy in distinction to Vance’s distant weirdness. There’s been praise of Walz’s wholesome trip to the Minnesota State Fair together with his daughter, references to his ice fishing and hunting hobbies, and loads of tweets declaring that “VP stands for ‘very precious.’” It’s a singular type of hype that nearly borders on infantilization, focusing extra on his folks expertise than on his political prowess.
The web’s lightning-speed response to Walz becoming a member of the ticket is additional proof that meme tradition, pushed by Gen Z, has become part and parcel of Harris’s campaign. The query now’s how lengthy the ticket can journey this wave earlier than probably descending into cringe-worthy territory.
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