Did the Harris/Walz campaign miss an opportunity?

If you look at the front page of the website, one of the areas I say that I’ll cover is political communication. Yet, I really haven’t done that until this post. This post will answer the question, “Did the Harris/Walz campaign miss an opportunity to highlight one of their potential strengths?”

To answer this question, I want to discuss a speech from Gov. Walz that he gave at the ESRI Industry Conference in July 2024. Unfortunately, the conference information doesn’t give the exact date of his speech, but it was part of one of the plenary sessions of the conference. ESRI is a company that makes geographic information systems software. They make ArcGIS, a program used by many local and state governments to overlay data and maps together in one interface.^[1]I know it’s more complicated than that, but I also don’t have a master’s in geographic information science. But I know that my employer does offer a certificate in that area!

What’s interesting about the speech is that Gov. Walz, who in his past was a geography and social studies teacher, was identified by one of ESRI’s leaders as “one of us.” Walz himself in this speech describes himself as a geographer. Walz mentioned attending the National Geographic Summer Institute which described standards for what well-educated 4th graders through adults should know about geography.^[2]He really did mean 1992, although he said “1992 or 1993” in his speech, since his capstone class that he mentions later was in 1993. He then goes into a story that hasn’t been told as much as it arguably could/should have — his students in his capstone class used a pretty early version of ArcGIS to conclude that the next world genocide would take place in Rwanda. 12 months later, they were proven right. Walz spent a great deal of the speech, both in its beginning and later in the speech, about the idea of mapping to convey complex information.

About 15 minutes into the speech, he mentions more about the way in which he used geographic information science. He observed that the state of Minnesota was user #40 of 680,000 when it comes to ESRI’s software. Walz uses the persona of a teacher in combination with that of a legislator to make very technocratic arguments about how technology has come together to inform Minnesota’s plans such as adopting the California car standards, protecting carbon sinks in the state, dealing with COVID-19, and finding people who were eligible for refundable tax credits but had not been filing taxes. Within 6 months of the beginning of one such tax credit program, the state of Minnesota had an 82% uptake, which beat the typical 5-year uptake of 70-75%.

Most politicians campaign with plans — and the 2024 election is no exception. What’s different about Walz’s speech is that he was able to demonstrably show that his plans could be implemented. Walz’s image as defined by the Harris campaign has been centered around Coach Walz. Some of that was for obvious reasons, such as being able to appeal to certain male demographics. I wonder if Harris could have beaten back some of the questions about the vagueness of her policies by arguing that Minnesota has been able to implement significant changes that impacted people’s lives, and that she had as her running mate someone who knew how to communicate and assess how policies impacted the poeple of his state. He brought the receipts, as the kids say, when it came to the universal breakfast and lunch program he implemented, and was able to cite specific information down to the school district level during that speech and how the program impacted such areas as truancy and school behavior.

So my question to the Harris/Walz campaign: why didn’t we get to see this version of Gov. Walz — the teacher taking us through how his policies (and ostensibly some of the policies his ticket would propose) actually made a difference in people’s lives? While there’s some degree of antipathy toward colleges and universities, Pew Research has done research that shows that parents are generally satisfied with their children’s teachers. I suspect that if parents learned what Teacher Walz had done in his classes, and seen how Teacher Walz influenced Governor Walz, that his positive rankings would have been much higher. And he wouldn’t have even had to call other politicians weird.