Tim Walz’s DNC Speech Was a Masculinity-Themed Populist Pep Talk

Tim Walz’s performance reclaimed patriotism and a confident, yet compassionate, vision of masculinity.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks at the third day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 21, 2024 in Chicago. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz introduced himself to the country with a rousing acceptance speech on the third night of the Democratic National Convention last week in Chicago. Many commentators observed that the energetic 16-minute speech sounded more like a pep talk by “Coach Walz” than a piece of traditional political oratory.

But it was both.

Like many great political speeches, it was a powerful confection of substance and passion. Mario Cuomo famously quipped that successful politicians need to “campaign in poetry” and “govern in prose.” If Walz’s speech was a type of poetry, it had elements of a slam performance. He used blunt, evocative language—as one might expect from a man who’s been a high school teacher, Army master sergeant, football coach and politician.  

He knows how to command people’s attention, especially men’s.

In fact, from the moment Walz emerged as Kamala Harris’ choice for VP, people in the chattering classes observed that the national Democratic Party has sorely missed his type of persona and mode of communicating for a very long time. 

In particular, his identity as a conventional Midwestern white man who hunts, fishes and was a highly successful football coach might just be the perfect complement to that of his running mate, Kamala Harris, who clearly has formidable political skills of her own. A liberal woman of color from the San Francisco Bay area, Harris needs the votes of working and middle-class white men in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. 

Many of these voters have deserted the Democratic Party in recent decades, in part because they believe the party doesn’t care about people like them. Underlying macroeconomic factors like deindustrialization, automation, rising imports and competition from low-cost countries, and successful conservative attacks on organized labor have all played an important role.

So has the right-wing political info-tainment media complex, which has relentlessly advanced the narrative that Democrats have contempt for average people and their way of life.    

This characterization of the Democrats has always been a caricature. While Democratic administrations have been complicit in neoliberal policies such as free-trade that advanced these macroeconomic trends, they have also supported policies that protect working people from the worst impacts of the changing economy. 

“Coastal elites” exist in both major parties, but tens of millions of people who vote Democrat are working and middle-class people of all ethnicities and racial identities who struggle like anyone else to make a better life for themselves and their families, and are anything but pretentious snobs. 

Until very recently, the Democratic Party has done a poor job of counteracting right-wing propaganda that paints anyone even mildly left of center as either a smug elitist or a totalitarian communist, rather than someone who simply believes that everyone deserves a fair shake, that powerful systems get in the way, and that government has a critical role to play.   

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on stage with family at the Democratic National Convention at the United Center. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Tim Walz’s presence on the Democratic ticket is a symbolically powerful corrective to the cartoonish and distorted perception about Democrats that millions of white voters have been fed for decades via conservative talk radio and Fox News. Many of these voters think Democrats hate white men in particular. Partly because of this perception, 70 percent of high school-educated white men voted for Donald Trump in 2020, over the 28 percent that voted for Joe Biden.

Breaking Down Walz’s Acceptance Speech

The Harris-Walz team is counting on Walz’s communications skills to navigate the fraught cultural politics of (white) masculinity, in the hope of making inroads with this critical group. Both the content and delivery of his DNC speech provide some clues about why he might succeed at this task—which is why I’ve analyzed a number of key lines from the speech.

Gov. Tim Walz accepts the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nomination.

I grew up in Butte, Nebraska, a town of 400 people. I had 24 kids in my high school class. And none of them went to Yale.

Walz delivered this line near the beginning of his speech to establish: 1) his rural bona fides, and 2) his class credentials. He did this to preempt two of the major lines of right-wing attack against the Democratic Party over the past half-century.

Plutocratic populists have persuaded millions of working people to support political agendas friendly to the wealthy and powerful in part by convincing them that the very people who work hardest to advance the interests of workers and consumers—liberals and progressives—look down on regular people. With his evocation of small-town life and use of a good-natured rib against the Ivy League, Walz, a graduate of public schools and a public university, established his everyman chops and got in a dig at his adversary JD Vance, who has family roots in rural poverty but went on to graduate from Yale Law School and build a career in finance under the sponsorship of uber-wealthy venture capitalists.    

But they’re your neighbors. And you look out for them. And they look out for you. 

Much commentary about Walz has emphasized his Minnesota niceness. Some have compared him to Ned Flanders from The Simpsons, a caricature of dorky earnestness. By all accounts Walz is genial and approachable, and represents a “positive masculinity” built on commitment to family, community and country.

But listen to the way he speaks. Underneath the “nice guy” vibe is a tough, assertive, take-charge guy. You don’t build a record of success like his in the military, coaching football and politics just by being friendly and lovable. 

I proudly wore our nation’s uniform for 24 years.

Walz’s assertion of patriotic pride is part of the stunning effort at the DNC to rebrand the Democrats as the party of patriotism and loyalty to country. The equation of patriotism solely (or primarily) with militarism is something feminists and progressives have long critiqued. But the political benefits of “taking back the flag” are incalculable.

Walz’s statement sets up a stark contrast with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he leads, a movement of radicals and insurrectionists that has fully taken over the Republican Party and is indifferent at best to the principles of American democracy. Just as important, Walz’s statement reminds people that he has—and will use—the masculine street cred that redounds to men who have worn the uniform. 

We ran a 4-4 defense, we played through to the whistle on every play, and we even won a state championship.

This one sentence does the work of reminding people that he was not only a blood and guts football coach, but one who demanded full effort on the part of his players. “Playing through to the whistle” is a football metaphor for all-out, aggressive commitment to the mission. And the fact that many of the now-middle-aged (and all white) players on that championship team appeared on stage at the DNC in their high school football jerseys before Walz spoke was a powerful show of loyalty he earned from the men he led, a tangible testament to his leadership.  

They [his players and students] saw in me what I had hoped to instill in them: a commitment to the common good.

One of the great tensions in American life is the never-ending struggle between the masculinist ideology of rugged individualism and a larger (and in binary gender terms, more “feminine”) sense of community and the common good. The brand of masculinity that Walz embodies honors individual effort, but always in service to the group. He rightfully boasted in his speech that as governor of Minnesota, his administration made sure that every kid in the state gets breakfast and lunch every day.

“So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.”

This commitment to the collective welfare—what is suggested, for example, by the name the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—doesn’t diminish a man’s stature (or any political leader’s). It enhances it. This stands in stark contrast to the malignant narcissism and “what’s in it for me?” transactionalism of the Trumpian worldview.    

I learned how to compromise without compromising my values.

Walz is saying that compromise is not capitulation. This is a strong refutation of the “my-way-or-the-highway” approach associated with ego-driven, hypermasculine, competitive aggression. But it can also be read as a commitment to pragmatism, a preemptive response to either left-wing or “woke” self-righteousness, where compromise is sometimes incorrectly described as “selling out.” It suggests the truism in politics that giving up something to get something is usually a requirement if you actually want to get things done. In fact, the refusal to compromise is a character trait associated with the authoritarian personality, a rather stark contrast to the more collaborative temperament required for democratic governance.

Look, I know guns. I’m a veteran. I’m a hunter, and I was a better shot than most Republicans in Congress, and I’ve got the trophies to prove it. But I’m also a dad. I believe in the Second Amendment, but I also believe our first responsibility is to keep our kids safe.

By invoking his credentials as someone who is comfortable around guns and skilled at using them, he established his standing to argue for restrictions on their access. His gun-friendly credentials also provide a permission structure for men—whether or not they own guns—to argue for greater gun safety restrictions.

Also, by invoking his status as a dad, he offers a reframe about the ways in which parents can protect their children. It’s not just about having powerful firearms at the ready. In fact, you can be an even more effective protector by supporting and enacting policies to make sure those firearms can never fall into the hands of troubled boys or young men.  

We’ve got a golden rule: mind your own damn business.

With this one line, delivered firmly and unapologetically, Walz sends a message to men that they shouldn’t shy away from openly supporting reproductive justice. Many pro-choice men are unsure of how forcefully they should enter this women-led debate. Walz gives them a way to do this without needing to articulate the many nuances surrounding the gender politics of this issue. It also aligns directly with the grand strategy in the reproductive justice movement to frame the issue as a matter of freedom from government coercion, which polls show resonates with a strong majority of male voters.    

She’s fought on the side of the American people. She’s taken on the predators and fraudsters. She’s taken down the transnational gangs. And she’s stood up to powerful corporate interests. She has never hesitated to reach across that aisle if it meant improving your lives.

Once he had established himself as a powerful, confident man and assertive leader, Walz was ready to pivot to Kamala Harris’ qualities of leadership and why he supports her, helping her to rebuild her identity as a tough prosecutor. Notice the words he used to describe her: she fought; she’s taken on; she’s taken down; she’s stood up to. This is the language of masculine aggression, spoken about a woman in a tone of respect and admiration from a man who, we already know, is a proven leader of men—and who is clearly impressed, not threatened, by those qualities in his female running mate.

Perhaps more than anything, this is the role that Walz plays on the Democratic ticket. His very presence and persona says to men—including some fairly traditional white men in the Midwestern battleground states—that Kamala Harris is someone they, too, can and should support. 

Our job is to get in the trenches and do the blocking and tackling … Look, we’ve got 76 days. That’s nothing. There’ll be time to sleep when you’re dead. We’re gonna leave it on the field.

Walz ended his speech with a flourish that resonated deeply with anyone who’s been in a locker room before a game and heard an impassioned coach’s pep talk. But people who played football, or know the sport well, heard something else as well. Football is a tough, blue-collar sport, but it has a glamorous side. There are star quarterbacks like Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, and star receivers like Tyreek Hill and Justin Jefferson.

It’s nowhere near as glamorous for the men “in the trenches,” the offensive linemen and (defensive) linebackers who do the “blocking and tackling.” But anyone who knows football knows that it’s in the trenches where you win or lose football games. In that sense, Walz’s use of a populist football metaphor has special resonance with blue-collar white men. It says to them: “You can retain your identity and be part of a historic movement to elect a Black and Asian American woman president of the United States. We respect you and need you. Let’s get to work!”

By all accounts, Walz’s speech electrified the arena. Many others watching at home reported shouting out in joy. Even some working journalists admitted that they were excited. MSNBC star Rachel Maddow said that at one point everybody at the network’s “mothership” got out of their seats and were “stamping and clapping.” 

It seems likely that some of the excitement stems from the ways in which Tim Walz’s performance reclaimed for the Democrats not only patriotism, but also identification with a supremely confident and yet compassionate vision of masculinity.

What remains to be seen, of course, is whether the excitement Walz generates can help Kamala Harris win enough votes—including those of men—to secure the state-by-state majorities she needs to secure 270 electoral votes.

This was originally published in Ms. Magazine on 8-26-24.