The Political Appeal of the Aggressively Normal Dad

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota presents as a regular dad from the Midwest. He hunts. He fishes. He ice fishes. He is a fan of football, whether high school, college or pro. He takes photographs of fun birds and posts them to social media. He is so normal that his normality has become exceptional.

As soon as Mr. Walz made a splash on MSNBC last month, where he branded Donald J. Trump and JD Vance as “weird,” a crowd of Walz fans — many of whom had just learned that he existed — raced to produce digital evidence of the governor’s own radical wholesomeness. Photographs of Mr. Walz hugging a piglet or casting a line rose alongside dadcore fan fiction about how he would teach America to drive a stick-shift without making it cry and kneel down to re-chain its lawn mower while raising its wages and securing it free school lunches.

Every new image of Mr. Walz became an ad for how popular and inevitable his vice-presidential candidacy could be. On the day Kamala Harris announced that she had picked him, Walz was styled online as a jolly imp with a camo hat on his head and a dad joke in his pocket, “an REI hire” and a “Swiss Army Knife candidate,” the guy so benignly folksy that he could reclaim progressive politics as a nostalgic masculine pastime, too. For years, Democrats have vied to defeat Mr. Trump by pitching themselves as the normal ones. But only through Mr. Walz’s joyful performance, and his online boosters’ enthusiasm, has acting normal become a revelation and a thrill.

There’s something about the speed with which Mr. Walz burst from the Minnesota wilds to become America’s next top dad that helped alchemize the typical into the sublime. In a regular election contest, voters may have learned of a vice-presidential candidate like Mr. Walz in an unfocused manner over many months, as he perhaps slogged through an ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign of his own, then loitered in our awareness as he vied for the runner-up slot. Mr. Walz’s cozy persona has instead unspooled through a breakneck internet montage, which gives him the energy of a sitcom dad, one who embodies the archetype so winningly that he walks onto the pilot set and immediately becomes a star.

An internet darling is not spun from thin air. Mr. Walz and his team have spent years building a dense archive of wholesome images to draw from. The scenes in which we find Mr. Walz often represent standard political photo opportunities — inspecting the stalls at the state fair, signing a bill amid a crowd of local schoolchildren — but Mr. Walz himself appears ridiculously chuffed to be involved, like he’d just won a sweepstakes to sculpt butter or tour an elementary school. In the photograph of Mr. Walz embracing a dozing piglet, it’s not clear who’s happier, the governor or the pig.

Finding these shots requires the fan to sift through the many hundreds of photographs of Walz performing vibes-neutral gubernatorial duties such as standing onstage with a microphone or conversing with veterans under the flag. This process has proved so propulsive that when a mug shot from Mr. Walz’s 1995 arrest on drunken driving charges surfaced, showing him as a broad-shouldered young man in a vintage cap and wire-rimmed glasses, the image was unblinkingly churned into grist for the Walz meme machine.

Since Mr. Trump’s political rise, Democrats have labored to present themselves as a serious and frankly boring contrast to Mr. Trump’s chaos. At the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama put it this way: “When they go low, we go high.” And when Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president in 2019, he said: “The American people want their government to work, and I don’t think that’s too much for them to ask.” The pitch was that you could vote for Mr. Biden and not have to think about having a leader at all.

Mr. Walz’s “weird” attack — he later added the phrase “creepy as hell” to his repertoire — recasts that strategy. He presents his normality as a treat, not a bore. A former high school football coach, he urges Americans to take the competition seriously while reminding them to have fun out there. The words “weird” and “creepy” are milder than ones like “fascist” or “felon,” and more fun to say. On MSNBC, Mr. Walz compared the Republican ticket to the uncle who makes Thanksgiving dinner awkward for everyone, underscoring his role as the father who can reclaim the lost, simple joy of American family life that has long been the apocryphal image on which political nostalgia is built.

Mr. Walz is 60 years old. By Election Day, Harris will be 60 too. But he looks as if he could be her dad. He is balding and thick, with freckled forearms and ruddy cheeks. One Walz meme tosses his photograph next to Brad Pitt’s and notes that Mr. Pitt is actually older than he is. But even this meme is, somehow, flattering to Mr. Walz. It is deployed to emphasize how he has spent his decades not moisturizing but teaching high school and consuming unconventional deep-fried foods.

In this way, he stands in opposition not just to the “weird” Republicans but to the prototypical Democratic candidate, too, the technocrat lawyer who seems to have sunk considerable effort into grooming himself for prime time. During his interview last Friday with the Harris team, Mr. Walz reportedly informed them that he had never used a teleprompter.

There is something uncomplicated about the dad persona, of how easily it burnishes the reputation of a United States governor who has been in politics for 20 years. Mr. Walz has often integrated his parenting into his politics, recruiting his children for photos and videos, and discussing his family’s fertility journey to defend the right to I.V.F. and reproductive choice. There is seemingly no downside to being pitched as America’s genial father figure. The same is not true for political moms.

Mr. Walz’s online persona coalesced just as Kamala Harris’ own status as a parent came under review. Harris is the stepmother to Doug Emhoff’s two children, who call her “Momala” and consider her a third parent, though that did not stop Vance from characterizing her, in a resurfaced 2021 comment, as a “childless cat lady.” On the other hand, when Ms. Harris appeared on “The Drew Barrymore Show” in April, and a weepy Barrymore took the vice president’s hand and told her that she needed her to be “the Momala of the country,” it came across as condescending.

For Ms. Harris, appearing maternal has been both a requirement and a risk. But now she’s in charge, and she can pull in a V.P. with enough boundless dad energy to neutralize that sexist double standard. The day after the Walz announcement, the Harris campaign released a compilation of Mr. Walz posting photos of his cat. “My God, they went after cat people, good luck with that,” he says in a voice-over. “Turn on the internet and see what cat people do when you go after ‘em.”