Listen, team, we’ve got a job to do. It’s not going to be subtle. Jimmy Sexton’s clients have been floated for SEC jobs with more stealth. We’re going to stop calling the Democratic nominee for vice president Tim Walz. We’re going to call him Coach Walz. Now, grab a metaphor—about being behind in the fourth quarter, about blocking and tackling—and let’s get out there!
On Wednesday night at the United Center, Democrats began the next phase of an unusual political experiment. The party bound its ticket to football, the sport one apparatchik at the United Center called the “last unimpeachable brand in America.”
As presented by Democrats, the figure of Coach Walz may sound like your average, straight-talking populist. What politician hasn’t been praised for helping Americans get the best out of themselves? But, so far, the Democrats’ football experiment is working. According to one recent poll, Walz—er, Coach Walz—has the best favorable-unfavorable split of any of the four major candidates in the race.
Walz’s political makeover began the moment Kamala Harris picked him as her running mate. At the rally announcing the choice, Harris said, “The nation will know Coach Walz by another name: vice president of the United States.” The campaign handed out signs that said, “COACH!”
In the weeks that followed, Walz’s biography got picked apart by Republicans. Walz had to admit he “misspoke” when he said his stint in the Army National Guard included carrying weapons “in war.” This week, his wife, Gwen, released a statement saying the family hadn’t used IVF, as Walz suggested, to have children. They used another fertility treatment.
Walz’s coaching years have remained impregnable even to GOP swift boats. When he taught social studies at Minnesota’s Mankato West High School, Walz was the football team’s defensive coordinator. As Walz said from the stage on Wednesday, “We ran a 4-4 defense. We played through to the whistle on every single play. And we even won a state championship.”
Standing on the convention floor, Minnesota State Senator Nick Frentz, who represents the Mankato area, told me football gave him his first glimpse of the man who could be America’s next vice president. “In 1999, they were on TV winning the state title,” said Frentz. “I was like, ‘Who’s that guy?’ They’re like, ‘That’s the social studies teacher.’”
Once, the GOP was the party of coaches. In 2016, Donald Trump got endorsed by some of the crustiest men in Indiana. In 1988, Ronald Reagan channeled Knute Rockne, and the biopic Reagan had starred in, when he urged George H.W. Bush to “win one for the Gipper!” Oklahoma’s Bud Wilkinson ran for Senate, with Richard Nixon as a surrogate.
This year, Democrats get to use the same blunt iconography. From my seat in the upper deck at the United Center, I could see the politicians’ speeches scrolling across one of the teleprompters. In two different speeches, the would-be veep was simply called “Coach Walz.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered the line, while Bill Clinton ignored the playbook.
The night ended with Walz accepting the party’s nomination for vice president—and giving the kind of big political speech he wasn’t used to, he said. Before he took the stage, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar saluted Walz’s coaching acumen and then ticked off his talent for deer hunting and fixing cars. Walz’s middle-aged former Mankato players put on their jerseys like Al Bundy and fanned out across the stage.
Walz’s speech—a fast 15-minute affair he compared to a “pep talk”—was delivered like a coach ticking off a bunch of simple points. Don’t overcomplicate things right before game time! Barely remembering to smile, Walz invoked his old job again and again. About Project 2025, the Democrats’ favorite Republican bogeyman: “When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re going to use it.”
If the symbolism wasn’t obvious for TV viewers, ushers gave out red, white, and blue signs that said, “Coach Walz.” Democrats on the floor shouted, “Coach! Coach! Coach!”
The high school football coach has become a semi-mythical figure in American life, one part real, one part Kyle Chandler. In my experience, just about every football coach is halfway nuts. Yet the idea of coaching football is normalcy itself. Walz got a spot on the Democratic ticket by calling Donald Trump and J.D. Vance “weird.”
I asked another Minnesota state senator, Steve Cwodzinski, why Coach Walz was such an appealing figure. “Most coaches, after a long day of doing an incredibly difficult job, don’t go home and go for a run,” he said. “They go out to the practice field or the pool and give another three to four hours of their life to their students.”
Indeed, in Walz’s case, “coach” means “a teacher who’s doing a lot of extra work.” (As Walz himself said, “Never underestimate a public school teacher.”) On Wednesday, Ben Ingram, a former student, said Walz took a third job coaching middle school basketball and track because he wanted to pay another student’s lunch debts.
As Mina Kimes has pointed out, Walz is not Bobby Knight. Just the opposite: He emits an enlightened form of masculinity—the Minnesota analogue to his fellow DNC speaker Steve Kerr. A fundraising email that went out Wednesday reminded readers that Walz’s CV included “helping lead his team to their first state championship and as a faculty adviser to the school’s first Gay-Straight alliance.”
The figure of Coach Walz doesn’t command voters to subscribe to a particular set of values. He tells the government, “Mind your own damn business!”
This week, the Democratic Convention has become a quasi–award show starring Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, and John Legend. Walz brought it back to Mankato West. Though he doesn’t represent a swing state like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Walz, Harris figured, could help Democrats win the Midwest “blue wall.”
Because football is so mixed up in our national monoculture, Walz also gave the party a way to remind voters, as Winfrey said on Wednesday, that “we are Americans.” At Walz’s first rally with Harris, a “U-S-A!” chant broke out. As Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote, “It was the stuff of Republican nightmares.”
Coach Walz can throw out populist red meat that seems a tad unconvincing when it’s peddled by a Midwesterner like, well, Vance. Coach Walz is a straight talker. An insult comic. (“Is it weird?” he said of the Trump-Vance agenda on Wednesday. “Absolutely.”) Coach Walz tweaks Yale, Vance’s alma mater. He slugs Diet Mountain Dew, prying over-caffeinated nightmare fuel from Vance’s hands.
There are a couple of things to take away from the Democrats’ experiment. One is that skillful campaigns have a way of erasing the line between pandering and effective politics. Another is that football has shrugged off the brain-injury-fueled crisis of a decade ago—one that led Barack Obama to say that, if he’d had a son, he wouldn’t put him on the field. Politico reports that Walz suggested campaigning at swing district high school games this fall.
On Wednesday, Walz darted around the stage after he gave his speech. I was reminded of the spasmodic movements of football coaches, the way they try to guide field goal attempts through the goalposts by bending their bodies.
I asked Cwodzinski whether he thought those movements were a part of the character of Coach Walz. Cwodzinski wasn’t sure. “That might be from the diet pop,” he said.