Democratic strategist David Axelrod said Vice President Harris’s new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “delivered some heavy blows” to the GOP ticket Tuesday night but did so with a “gentle humor” that was well received by the audience.
"I live in the Midwest, and, you know, they talk about 'Midwest nice.' He delivered some heavy blows, but he did it with that kind of gentle humor that actually lands well," Axelrod said of Walz on a CNN panel Tuesday night, responding to the Democratic ticket's debut campaign event together.
At the event, Walz took aim at former President Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio).
“I just have to say it. You know it. You feel it. These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell. That’s what you see,” Walz said to raucous applause from the rally crowd in Philadelphia, using the viral new framing of the Trump campaign as “weird.”
The Minnesota governor then knocked his vice presidential rival, saying, “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community. Come on! That’s not what middle America is.”
Axelrod said Democrats had “a great night” and noted the “very joyful and positive” energy in the crowd and on the stage. He noted a change in Trump’s confidence, compared to a couple months ago when the Democratic party began souring publicly on President Biden as the presumptive nominee.
“Trump is getting he's unsettled by this change in the environment. You could see it in his tweets and so on. And there is a kind of grinding quality to the Trump campaign right now that plays very badly against what you saw tonight,” Axelrod said, “which was very joyful and positive.”
“There was this feeling of possibility,” he added.
Axelrod said "we'll see" if Trump's messaging approach is successful, but he suspects Trump might need to find something new.
“It could be that a … negative campaign depicting these people as far-left and so on, will succeed,” Axelrod said. “I think they're going to have to figure out something else because I think that's yesterday's argument. And I don't know that it's going to seize the day today.”
