WASHINGTON (AP) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is branching out this week and holding his first solo events as Vice President Kamala Harris ’ running mate, making a five-state dash for campaign cash and addressing a key union gathering.
Walz will speak Tuesday at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees convention in Los Angeles before headlining a campaign fundraiser in Newport Beach, California. The 1.4-million-member union has endorsed Harris.
“With all the anxiety and uncertainty in the country, we have a responsibility to bring people together around common values,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders said in his convention keynote address on Monday. Then referring to top Republicans, he added, “Instead, antiworker forces have decided to double down on the most extreme, divisive agenda you can imagine."
On Wednesday, Walz will address fundraisers in Denver and Boston, and he'll do more of the same on Thursday in Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York.
Walz's focus on fundraising this week comes after he stormed through a series of battleground states with Harris last week to introduce himself to voters nationally. The two held rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.
Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who was announced as Republican Donald Trump 's running mate during the GOP convention in Milwaukee, had his own rollout largely overshadowed by unforeseen events. It came after an assassination attempt against the former president the previous weekend and before President Joe Biden abandoned his reelection bid and endorsed Harris during the following one.
Walz has salted his early campaign appearances with talk of joy and positivity, stressing that he and Harris are championing being kind and neighborly. But he has frequently laid into Trump's policies and the former president's 34 felony counts in a New York hush money case.
Vance, meanwhile, has leaned more heavily into the traditional No. 2 role of lobbing political attacks on the opposition. He spent much of last week holding his own events in the same states that Harris and Walz visited and arguing the Democratic ticket was too ultra-liberal for most Americans.
The senator has also suggested that Harris chose Walz over another contender for running mate, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, because Shapiro's public support for Israel in its war with Hamas might have angered some progressives.
Vance said picking Walz meant that Harris took advice from the “Hamas wing of her party." He also criticized Walz's military record, arguing that his retirement ahead of his National Guard Unit’s deployment to Iraq and his implication that he had served in a combat zone suggested “stolen valor garbage.” Over the weekend, the Harris campaign said that Walz “misspoke” when he referenced "weapons of war that I carried in war.”
Orange County Republican Party Chairman Fred Whitaker, picked up on charges that Walz has been imprecise with his characterizations of his military service, saying in a statement Monday that the governor, "may walk away heavy with campaign cash from liberal donors but he will leave with the same empty and fake record he came in with.”
Vance has also faulted Harris and Walz for not sitting for media interviews. When his plane coincided with Harris' on a tarmac in Wisconsin, where both sides held events last week, Vance began walking toward the vice president's motorcade, saying he wanted to talk to reporters traveling with her since she'd not done it herself.
Harris has yet to sit for a major interview since Biden left the race but has said she wants to do that later in the month. She briefly took questions from the press traveling with her twice during her battleground travels last week — something Walz did not do, except for one session, answering questions off-the-record, which meant his answers couldn't be publicly shared.
Vance has appeared on a variety of podcasts angling to appeal to a younger voter set. At age 40, he’s closer to that demographic than any of the other three top-of-the-ticket contenders. Trump is 78, Harris is 59 and Walz is 60.
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Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard contributed to this report from Columbia, South Carolina.