Kamala Harris introduced her running mate, Tim Walz, as “the kind of vice-president America deserves” at a raucous rally in Philadelphia that showcased Democratic unity and enthusiasm for the party’s presidential ticket ahead of the November election.
Casting their campaign as a “fight for the future”, Harris and Walz were repeatedly interrupted by applause and cheering as they addressed thousands of battleground-state voters wearing bracelets that twinkled red, white and blue at Temple University’s Liacouras Center – a crowd Harris’s team said was its largest to date.
“Thank you for bringing back the joy,” a beaming Walz told Harris after she debuted the little-known Minnesota governor as a former social studies teacher, high school football coach and a national guard veteran.
“We’ve got 91 days,” he declared. “My God, that’s easy. We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”
Harris, who has served as vice-president to Joe Biden for three and a half years, said Walz would be “ready on day one”. She called the race between them and the Republican presidential ticket of Donald Trump and JD Vance to a “matchup between the varsity team and the JV squad”.
Harris announced the 60-year-old governor as her running mate on Tuesday morning, hours after she formally secured the Democratic nomination, becoming the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket. With the governor’s selection, Democrats capped one of the wildest periods in American political life that led Biden to abandon his re-election bid and endorse his vice-president last month.
Arriving on stage to Beyoncé’s Freedom, the newly minted Democratic ticket rode a weeks-long wave of momentum from an unusually exuberant party happy to be looking forward.
“He’s the kind of person who makes people feel like they belong and then inspires them to dream big,” Harris said. “That’s the kind of vice-president he will be. And that’s the kind of president America deserves.”
Walz shared more of his biography, casting himself as a politician who learned to “compromise without compromising my values” and a midwesterner who lives by the “golden rule” when it comes to personal choice: “Mind your own damn business.” Drawing a personal connection to one of the most searing issues of the election cycle, Walz said he and his wife had two children through in vitro fertilization (IVF) after years of struggling with infertility. “When we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope,” he said.
Then he turned to his Republican opponents, who he has branded “weird” in a line of attack that has resonated widely, especially among Democrats. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell,” he said, setting off a new round of whoops and cheers.
“I gotta tell you, I can’t wait to debate the guy,” he said of Vance, adding a joke about an unfortunate meme. “That is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.” It is now unclear if a vice-presidential debate will happen.
The positive reception for Walz built throughout the day as he earned warm endorsements that spanned the wide ideological expanse of the Democratic coalition, leading the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to quip that the notoriously factious party was exhibiting “disconcerting levels of array”.
The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who served with Walz during his six terms in the House, praised him as a “heartland of America Democrat” while Joe Manchin, the Democrat turned independent senator from West Virginia, expressed confidence that Walz could “bring normality back to the most chaotic political environment that most of us have ever seen”.
As Walz spoke on Tuesday, the Democratic campaign said it had raised more than $20m from grassroots donations, another colossal sum since Harris’s ascent.
Diane Harris, 59, of Philadelphia, said at the rally she was among those small-dollar donors who had given to the campaign in recent days.
“It’s hope and change and newness,” she said, dancing with glee at the prospect of electing the first Black and south Asian woman president.
While Harris and Walz rallied supporters in Philadelphia, the new Democratic ticket was also beating back attacks from the right against the governor’s track record of supporting liberal economic policies. The Trump campaign immediately attacked Harris’s running mate as a “dangerously liberal extremist” who sought to remake Minnesota in California’s progressive image, pointing to his support for policies that would lower carbon emissions and expand voting rights for convicted felons.
“Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide,” said the Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “If Walz won’t tell voters the truth, we will: just like Kamala Harris, Tim Walz is a dangerously liberal extremist, and the Harris-Walz California dream is every American’s nightmare.”
The selection of Walz concluded a lightning-fast vetting process that initially included nearly a dozen Democrats but narrowed in the final days to just three, among them the Arizona senator Mark Kelly and Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of Pennsylvania seen as the most likely choice given the state’s importance.
Shapiro was greeted by thunderous applause from his constituents, several of whom said they would have loved to see him become the vice-president but were also happy to have him in the governor’s mansion. “I love you Philly!” he said, hand over his heart. “And you know what else I love? I love being your governor.”
His speech was a fiery denunciation of the Republican ticket, warning that the supreme court’s decision granting presidents broad immunity from prosecution would only embolden Trump further in a second term. Invoking Philadelphia’s legacy as the birthplace of American democracy, where the Continental Congress met to declare independence from the British crown, Shapiro thundered: “We’re not going back to a king.”
Cherelle Parker, the Philadelphia mayor who publicly advocated for Shapiro’s elevation to the Democratic ticket, had a stern message on Tuesday for any wistful Democrats who wanted to see Harris elevate the Pennsylvania governor instead of Walz.
“Our Democratic nominee has spoken,” she said at the rally. “That’s it. Period. End of story.”
In the eyes of Joseph Alston, a 69-year-old Democratic committee member in the town of King of Prussia who attended the rally, Walz was an excellent choice. Although he was previously unfamiliar with the Minnesota governor, Alston believe Harris was wise to choose a running mate from a midwestern state.
“I originally wanted Josh Shapiro, but it’s better for her to go outside of Pennsylvania because we got Pennsylvania on lock,” he said, expressing confidence the critical battleground that swung for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 would deliver again for Democrats in 2024.
Several speakers reprised the “weird” line popularized by Walz. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said he worked with Vance in the Senate, and was “here to confirm he’s a seriously weird dude”. At one point during Shapiro’s speech, the crowd broke into a chant: “He’s a weirdo.”
Shapiro laughed and agreed: “Tim Walz, in his beautiful midwestern plainspoken way, he summed up JD Vance the best. He’s a weirdo.”
Appearing in Philadelphia earlier on Tuesday, Vance had assailed the administration’s handling of the US-Mexico border, attempting to put the blame on Harris. He also suggested Harris might replace Walz as her running mate since the party had already shown a “willingness to pull a little switcheroo on us” – referring to Biden’s decision to end his re-election bid.
Asked if he had any common ground with the Democratic governor, Vance named one: “We’re white guys from the midwest.”
The Republican vice-presidential nominee will follow Harris and Walz across the country, staging dueling events at several stops along their multi-day battleground state tour.
At the rally, Kathleen Little, a 77-year-old retired director of a housing organization, said that she was excited by Harris’s choice of Walz.
“I am so impressed, and he was the one I was hoping for,” said Little, who is based outside Scranton. “When I saw what he had accomplished in Minnesota, in the middle of the United States, with all of the things that our nation hopes to accomplish … he was right spot on for me.”
She lauded his investment in Head Start, and his passage of gun safety measures, including universal background checks, citing them as part of the ambitious agenda Harris might pursue as president: “Those kinds of things that are exactly what Kamala has been striving for.”
Melissa Hellmann contributed reporting