WHERE ‘STUFF GETS DONE’ — After an intense, decades-long focus on Washington, Democrats have learned to stop worrying and love the states. Democratic vice presidential pick Tim Walz is the first sitting governor to join a Democratic ticket since Bill Clinton, a change of pace for a party that has put forward an almost uninterrupted streak of standard-bearers who made their names as Washington lawmakers. It's the capstone of an effort to reinvigorate a party that had been singularly obsessed with power in D.C. The 21st century Democratic Party has largely been defined by three residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — that had left the nation’s 50 state capitals as an afterthought. Under Obama, state Democrats languished, losing a net of nearly 1,000 state legislative seats and governors seats across the nation, decimating the bench of talented pols ready to serve in higher office, be it in their home states or in Washington. But Democrats started to learn after Donald Trump defeated Clinton. The 2018 blue wave that swept into Washington also came alongside an arguably bigger reinvigoration of statehouse Democrats, netting 7 governorships and a handful of legislative chambers and restocking that bench with talent for the future — including Walz, who defended his state’s open governorship from the Republicans, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’ JB Pritzker and Colorado’s Jared Polis. And when 2022 rolled around, Democrats flipped several state legislative chambers and added rising stars to their gubernatorial ranks, including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Maryland’s Wes Moore and Massachusetts’ Maura Healey. In these Democratic governors, the party finally saw its future bench of young leaders, excited party operatives and donors told me at a Democratic Governors Association retreat in New Orleans in December 2022 — a list that, at the time, didn’t even include the affable Walz, who incidentally is still younger than your average senator at 60-years-old. The past six years of Democratic state wins has reawakened the party to the idea that perhaps D.C. is not where the action is. If voters are frustrated by Washington gridlock, the governors say, they should instead turn their eyes toward their blue capitals for a vision of what could be. Walz, speaking to me and a handful of other reporters last year in June, said that he had been telling Democrats who wanted sweeping change to focus on winning with governors. “For what it's worth, my advice to them was that ‘you’ll not get that done, you’ll have to do it by state,’” he said, speaking of paid medical leave. “Whatever the Supreme Court did with Dobbs, and [countering] some of the things Republicans have messaged over the years, the states are the place where this stuff gets done.” And it was policy wins for Democratic governors that fueled their rise. For Walz, the chance came after 2022, where Democrats won both legislative chambers for the first time in a decade. Despite narrow majorities in both, Walz and legislative leaders passed a laundry list of progressive policy wins that included everything from legalizing recreational marjuana, paid family and medical leave and free school lunches. That string of victories — the last which spawned what was arguably Walz’s first mini-viral moment, a group of schoolchildren hugging the visibly overjoyed governor — was dubbed a “Minnesota Miracle” and earned the first inkling of a national profile for Walz. “Somebody will write a book,” Walz said at the time, “because I think it did transform Minnesota to where I think we saw ourselves in a lot of ways — a progressive Midwestern state.” So it wasn’t a particular surprise that Kamala Harris picked a Democratic governor as her running mate, with almost the entirety of her shortlist being state chief executives. The development comes as Republicans move in the other direction: This year features the first GOP ticket since 1996 without any gubernatorial experience. Perhaps the only surprise was that Walz was the Democratic governor who ended up on the national ticket. But it shouldn’t have been — the seeds of something bigger have always been there. Walz has long been a happy warrior and is a natural on the campaign trail. When I visited the state in October 2022 to follow around another Minnesota pol, I detoured to a Walz union event for the afternoon. He delivered a fine stump speech, but more impressively, he effortlessly worked the room. All the while, his team has been quietly pushing the Minnesota Miracle, and the governor was taking small steps to elevate his profile. That includes regular national media appearances and taking over as chair of the DGA — a role he turned over to Kansas’ Laura Kelly, another governor from the 2018 class, after joining the ticket — a position that got him a bit more facetime with party leaders and donors. He notably did not rule out national ambitions in an interview in December after taking over the DGA. I last spoke with Walz in February, at another roundtable with reporters, when he was fresh off a fundraiser that he dubbed the largest in DGA history. The support, he said, shows “that folks out here are pretty tired of dysfunction in Congress. And some of the folks who are most engaged are turning back toward the governors to try and get things done.” And now Harris and the national party seem to have recognized that. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at zmontellaro@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ZachMontellaro.
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