With Vice President Kamala Harris wrapping up her first week as the all-but-official Democratic candidate for president, who she will pick as her running mate remains an open question. But on Sunday, contenders to join her ticket auditioned for the role by stumping for her and slamming former President Donald Trump in TV news appearances and campaign stops.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz continued making his increasingly popular argument that Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are “very weird.” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker echoed Walz and made the case that their party’s pick for vice president doesn’t necessarily need to be from a battleground state. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg went on Fox News and tore into Trump on his home turf. And Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear lashed back at Trump for calling Harris a “bum” on Friday, telling the Republican presidential nominee “he ought to look in a mirror.”
“Listen to the guy. He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind,” Walz said of Trump on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Have you ever seen the guy laugh? That seems very weird to me, that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye — if he has laughed, it's at someone, not with someone — that is weird behavior, and I don't think you call it anything else.”
Walz, a progressive former congressman serving in his second term as governor in Minnesota, made waves last week when he said of Republicans in another TV appearance “these guys are just weird” and that Trump and Vance seem like they are running for “He-Man Women Haters Club” of “The Little Rascals” fame. Since then, Harris and Democrats have adopted that line of argument as Vance’s previous comments about “childless cat ladies” and his belief that Americans with children should have more voting power than those without have gained newfound attention.
Later in the day, stumping for Harris in Minnesota, Walz continued to deliver that message one day after Trump and Vance campaigned in his state.
“Don’t give them the power. Are they a threat to democracy? Yes. Are they going to take our rights away? Yes. Are they going to put people’s lives in danger? Yes,” Walz said. “But don’t lift these guys up like they’re some kind of heroes. Everybody in this room knows — I know it as a teacher — a bully has no self-confidence, a bully has no strength, they have nothing.”
“The fascists depend on fear. The fascists depend on us going back. But we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid,” he added.
Vance attempted to repair the damage those resurfaced comments have caused to his burgeoning candidacy in an interview with Megyn Kelly last week. He said “obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I’ve got nothing against cats,” but doubled down on his belief that Democrats are “anti-family and anti-child.”
“They’re just weird. I mean, they really are. The things that they stand for — Donald Trump, of course, is afraid of windmills and, you know, he talks about all kinds of crazy stuff,” Pritzker said on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday, before referencing a false story about the Ohio senator and a couch that has become fodder for Democrats to make jokes about Vance. “And then just broadly, the attack on people who are childless and saying that we ought to raise taxes on childless people and calling them ‘cat ladies,’ I think, you know, he apologized to cats, but he hasn’t apologized to women.”
Pritzker, the two-term governor of deep-blue Illinois and a billionaire member of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, went on to make the case that Harris’ running mate doesn’t necessarily need to be from a key swing state — with North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly among the top contenders who would meet that requirement.
“Winning those battleground states is most important. There’s no doubt. But I think we’ve seen over the last, well, decades that who you pick as your vice president doesn’t determine whether you’re going to win a state or not,” Pritzker said. “What it does determine is whether you’ve got the message right across the board.”
He then rattled off a list of his accomplishments as governor, including banning assault weapons, shoring up abortion access and outlawing book bans. While Pritzker said he’s talked to Harris in the last week and pledged his support, he declined multiple times to answer if he was being vetted for the vice presidential slot.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore made a similar argument on Sunday that Harris shouldn’t necessarily pick a swing state Democrat to join her on the ticket, noting it historically hasn’t made much of a difference. While most running mates for major party candidates in recent decades haven’t hailed from swing states, one notable case is the selection of then-Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan by Mitt Romney in 2012. The Republican ticket lost Wisconsin by around seven percentage points that year before flipping it in 2016 during Trump’s first presidential campaign.
Moore, who was first elected in 2022, has said he is not interested in making the jump to vice president and continued to say so on Sunday.
“I've been very flattered by the level of interest and I absolutely love my job. And I want to continue doing my job,” Moore said on “This Week.” “I think the thing that she needs to look for most is the person that gives her a sense of comfort, that ‘this is going to be my partner in the work.’ I do not think that she needs to go through an exercise of being able to find what boxes to check or what part of the country.”
Campaigning outside Atlanta on Sunday, Beshear called out Trump for calling Harris a “bum” at a religious gathering in Florida on Friday and landed a shot on Vance in the process.
“If he wants to see a bum, he ought to look in a mirror. And what he’ll see looking back are multiple bankruptcies and 34 felony convictions,” Beshear said, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter. “JD Vance looks in the mirror, he doesn't see any conviction at all.”
Beshar told the AJC reporter that it's his “dream job” to serve as the governor of deep-red Kentucky, but that he would consider joining Harris on the national stage “if I could help Kentucky more and if we could take a little bit of what we’ve done in Kentucky and spread it around the U.S.” The son of a former Kentucky governor himself, Beshear is serving his second term and boasted of beating Republicans “hand picked” by Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the senior senator in the bluegrass state.
And on Fox News, Buttigieg railed against Trump for broken promises and for advocating for the end of Roe v. Wade, imploring viewers not to believe the former president when he claims not to support a national ban despite successfully installing three justices on the Supreme Court who ended the constitutional right to abortion access and naming a running mate who does support a nationwide ban on abortion.
“Let's be very clear, he is proud of the fact that he demolished the national right to choose in this country, period,” Buttigieg said. “He's disavowed a lot of things. I don't believe him. He lies all the time.”
Buttigieg, a 42-year-old politician who has gone from mayor the fourth largest city in Indiana to a Cabinet secretary position to a vice presidential contender in just four years, also made the case that — with 81-year-old President Joe Biden out of the race — the 78-year-old Trump is now the candidate about whom questions of age and mental acuity should be asked. (Harris turns 60 in October.) He, too, relied on the argument about Trump's peculiarities made by Walz, Pritzker and others.
“In Trump's personality cult, [Republicans] will take a look at Donald Trump and say he's perfectly fine, even though he seemed unable to tell the difference between Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, even though he's rambling about electrocuting sharks and Hannibal Lecter, even though he is clearly older and stranger than he was when America first got to know him — they say he's strong as an ox, leaps tall buildings in a single bound,” Buttigieg said. “How could anybody not watch the stuff he's saying, the rambling on the trail, and not be just a little bit concerned?”