[The White House. Photo Credit to Unsplash]

Vice President of the U.S., Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate for the 2024 presidential election.

Following President Joe Biden’s surprising (yet not entirely unexpected) announcement that he would not run for re-election, Ms. Harris and her team quickly became involved in one of the fastest processes of screening potential candidates to be her running mate.

Early indications suggest that the choice may be paying off.

According to a Marist College poll, Harris now leads former President Donald Trump by a narrow margin of 3 percentage points, with 51% of respondents favoring her compared to 48% for Trump.

This is in stark contrast to the polling results in early July, when President Biden was trailing by a nationwide average of 3 points.

Governor Walz has recently gained national attention, particularly after his “weird campaign” against the Republican Party.

The campaign unofficially began when Walz, in a candid MSNBC interview, described his opponents as saying, “These are weird people on the other side… These are weird ideas.”

His use of plain talk, characteristic of his Midwestern roots, may speak volumes to the American people.

The progressivism of the Democratic party has long been at risk of expressing contempt toward those who are more conservative, a characteristic that may have played a key role in Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump in 2016 when she referred to Republican voters as “deplorables.”

This attitude also represents a sharp turn from the rhetoric that Democrats have employed against Trump since the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021, where they have emphasized the message that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy through powerful statements and phrases.

A rule of thumb requirement for selecting a vice-presidential candidate in an election is simple: do no harm.

Political analysts agree that vice presidents rarely boost chances; rather, the choice can be detrimental to the campaign.

Harris’s team appears confident that Walz's background, hailing from the National Guard, becoming a teacher through the G.I. Bill, then a football coach, while also being a hunter and gun owner may appeal to the heartland of America.

Walz is having a positive effect on the Democratic voter base, as evident from the turnout at the Philadelphia rally, which was held seven hours after he was announced as Harris’s running mate.

“We’ve got 91 days. My God, that’s easy. We’ll sleep when we’re dead,” Mr. Walz said.

Walz has come under fire from Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, for various reasons.

The Trump campaign quickly released a statement labeling Mr. Walz as “dangerously liberal,” and attacked several of his views, including expanding voting rights for felons.

Democrats have ridiculed this attack, primarily because Mr. Trump himself faces 34 counts of felony.

More publicly, Mr. Walz is facing criticism for his response to George Floyd's death in Minneapolis in 2020.

Republicans claim that he was slow to react, which led to the city being "literally burned to the ground," as one spokesman for the Trump campaign said on Fox News.

Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, has claimed that “the lunatic left has completed its takeover,” and many of his Republican colleagues express a similar view.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repudiated this claim, stating that Mr. Walz is “right down the middle.”

“To characterize him as left is so unreal,” she added.

The presidential election is now less than 90 days away.