Heading into the vice presidential debate, Tim Walz is fighting nerves

(CNN) — Tim Walz is telling people he’s just as nervous about facing JD Vance as he was the Sunday afternoon in August when he warned Kamala Harris in his running mate interview that he was a bad debater.

Maybe more nervous, according to multiple people who’ve spoken to him.

And the pressure is even higher, when for the first time in modern campaign history, the vice presidential debate Tuesday is likely to be the last marquee event before Election Day. With many voters still saying they don’t know enough about Harris, it could be up to Walz to help convince them to trust a vice president he barely knew himself before she picked him.

Talking to the aides who have coalesced around him in Minnesota and other supporters, Walz constantly comes back to how worried he is about letting Harris down, according to close to a dozen top campaign staffers and others who have been in touch with the governor and his team. He doesn’t want Donald Trump to win. He doesn’t want Harris to think she made the wrong choice.

He feels genuine contempt for and confusion over what he views as Vance’s abandonment of their common roots, and for flipping so many of his positions to fit with Trump. The digs he takes at Vance by saying he didn’t know many Midwesterners who went to Yale are a glimpse into his anxiety that his opponent learned to be a sharp debater there, according to people who know Walz.

And aides insist this isn’t just about setting expectations.

“He’s a strong person,” said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who’s known Walz since they were each first elected to Washington in 2006. “He’s just not a lawyer-debater type. It’s not like he was dreaming of debates when he was in first grade.”

Walz is confident in Harris’ vision. But the governor fears he won’t make his case as well as he needs to, according to people who have been speaking with him.

“How’s debate prep going?” one person at an exclusive high-dollar fundraiser asked Walz as he stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows in megadonor Alex Soros’ penthouse living room in Manhattan on Monday.

“As teachers, we are trained to answer the question, and we train our students to answer the questions,” the person recalled Walz saying. “That’s not how this goes.”

Inside Walz’s debate strategy

In long sessions that have gone late into the night and through weekends, Walz and his team have been balancing managing the Minnesota governor’s headspace, watching videos of Vance and holding mock sessions with stand-ins for the moderators, with Pete Buttigieg playing the Ohio senator. (Though the Transportation secretary is not going as method as Harris’ Trump stand-in did and growing out a beard.)

The plan for Tuesday night, several people involved told CNN, will be to largely skip Vance and go right at Trump – but to also squeeze the senator between his attempts to appeal to undecided voters and the always tricky task of satisfying America’s most prominent audience of one.

If they get their way, Trump will be triggered into a storm of anger, jealousy and pique as easily as he was when Harris poked him at their debate. Their goal is for Walz to lean into his likability to hammer Vance over “Project 2025” and for “selling his soul to Donald Trump,” as Walz put it at another New York fundraiser.

People involved say Walz may even try a line that originated when Harris was preparing for a vice presidential debate before Joe Biden dropped out: asking Vance what promises he made to Trump so the former president wouldn’t send an angry mob after him with a gallows, like Mike Pence experienced on January 6.

Walz and his team want commonsense indignation to come across, according to several in the know. Their worry is that Vance is going to eviscerate the governor’s hand-to-his-heart, dad-joke persona and make Walz come across as either a moron or a raging bull, or even an out-of-whack liberal vouching for another out-of-whack liberal.

Making people feel ‘joyful and hopeful’

Traditionally, running mates serve as attack dogs.

For the past six weeks of calibrated campaign appearances, Walz has been more emotional support animal for his party – whether, according to people who’ve been with them, that’s Harris feeling buoyed by his energy and vindicated by voters’ reactions to her pick (she was the one who suggested calling him “Coach” as they got ready for their first joint rally) or the voter who waited half an hour on a rope line last week for a fist bump and walked away squealing to a friend, “That’s all I needed.”

“People assume that he is a walking permission structure for rural, exurban, White male hunters,” said a senior campaign aide. “Yes, for the 1 or 2 points of those we want to move. But it’s much deeper than that: He’s a walking permission structure for people to feel joyful and hopeful themselves.”

That appears to be working: whether it’s the Human Rights Campaign black-tie gala in Washington, where his remarks drew tears from many at the high-priced tables (he changed into his tuxedo in the convention center bathroom after flying in wearing a sweatshirt) or the stuffy gym at the conveniently named Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where people like retired federal government worker Ana Gallardo said they loved Walz even if they couldn’t say why.

Asked to name her favorite thing about the governor she was so thrilled to see, Gallardo paused.

“I really don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to listen closer today.”

What Walz highlights about Harris – and what he is careful not to

With his 12 years in the House and nearly six so far as governor, Walz has more government experience and a deeper record than many men who’ve served as president. But he’s leaned into the feeling of being a guy who just wandered in wide-eyed to find thousands of people cheering for him and his name on the logo.

Jamming this guy into a campaign that Harris had to suddenly take over, with different camps among the staff competing for dominance, has been tricky. While some on the campaign have been eager to milk as many different appearances and fundraisers as they can out of an unexpectedly in-demand running mate, others have questioned why he is not being kept focused on the necessary basics of appealing to White men in what aides on the day he was picked were calling the “Blue Walz” states.

This also plays out in day-to-day engagement: a governor who until six weeks ago was one of the most eagerly accessible Democratic politicians in the country and who essentially manifested himself as the running mate with a few spicy TV appearances has done only a few interviews since being picked, all lower profile. He doesn’t take questions from reporters and rarely comes to chat off the record on his campaign plane. Aides declined requests for even a brief interview with CNN.

As they monitor how Vance has been fencing with reporters in Q&As after his many events, Walz aides know their approach risks Walz getting rusty.

Their hands are tied, multiple people involved acknowledge: The vice president’s staff doesn’t want a contrast that would highlight how few unscripted events Harris has done.

Walz, though, has reminded staffers that he wasn’t the head football coach back in Minnesota. He was the assistant coach and defensive coordinator, and that’s the experience he’s turning to now.

Walz very deliberately – and without being told by Harris or her inner circle – never asks a crowd to elect him vice president. He never talks about what he’d do on the job. He doesn’t even talk about electing “us” or what a Harris-Walz administration would be. He talks about Harris, how important it is to get her into the White House and how excited he is to see what she’ll do on the job.

“The guy is reclaiming old White dude masculinity away from toxicity,” said one person who’s spoken with Walz often since he was picked.

To Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, that’s the difference between what he calls the “machito” of the Republican ticket and true machismo, in a way that he believes will ripple well beyond the people who look and sound like Walz.

“Tim Walz epitomizes the Latino dad. He loves his family. He loves families generally. He’s got a good sense of humor. He’s warm. …. He’s just there to support, and he takes great pride in the success of others,” Fontes said. “‘Machito’ – it’s less mature. It has sort of to do with the big trucks and the loud music version of the Latino men. And there’s plenty of those guys out there, don’t get me wrong. But we grow out of that pretty quickly.”

Fontes said that distinction is reinforced by “the physical appearance that this is sort of a dad here who’s super proud of his daughter.”

Walz has maintained that relatable demeanor, even as he seems to still be wrapping his head around how much his life has changed – and might even more.

“What’s it been like the past six weeks?” he said at the beginning of his speech in Pennsylvania. “Pretty strange.”

Up on the 36th floor of the InterContinental Hotel in Manhattan in a suite where most of the seats were filled by billionaires and the refreshments were a thick wooden box of macadamia nut cookies and brownies kept under a glass dome, Walz deflected when one of the hosts said how excited she was to have the next vice president with them.

“That still sounds really weird,” he said, shaking his head.

“I know, but we’ve got to keep saying it,” she said.

Behind the scenes and on the stump

Behind the scenes, the man who goofs around through doughnut shops and convenience stores can also be the harder-nosed politician who won a longtime Republican US House seat by hustling around a district that didn’t have its own major media market.

Walz, according to people familiar with the internal discussions, was the one whom Jimmy McCain, the late Sen. John McCain’s son, first reached out to when he wanted to endorse Harris. Walz was the one put on the phone with Joe Manchin when the West Virginia senator was demanding to talk to Harris as a pre-condition for an endorsement. (Manchin has since said he was not endorsing Harris.)

Walz has also, according to people who have been talking with him, been the conduit for former House colleagues and labor leaders, including conversations with firefighters’ union president Ed Kelly that the Harris campaign is optimistic will soon help land an endorsement. Or he’s the one calling digital influencers to thank them for their posts about the campaign.

Walz spent part of a recent weekend replacing the seals on the washers and dryers in the house he’s living in while the governor’s mansion in St. Paul is being remodeled. Inspired to learn as they met a marching band on their August bus tour in Georgia that Harris had played the French horn in high school, Walz has mused to aides that that who they really should be going after is high school band kids and alumni – trust him, he says, that’s the group with the best-organized infrastructure and email lists in a school.

Whatever Walz does, no one on his staff or Harris’ believes he can move the needle much during Tuesday’s debate, especially not with a line or two. More than anything over those 90 minutes in the CBS studio in New York, his aides just want him to keep giving off that feeling of joy and reassurance.

To Tim Ryan, the former Ohio congressman who was lauded for his performance in two 2022 debates against Vance in a Senate race he went on to lose, that’s the advice he relayed to Walz’s team without talking to his old House colleague directly.

“If I was Tim, I wouldn’t be the least bit intimidated by (Vance),” Ryan told CNN. “Just be who you are. Everyone is enjoying seeing you and seeing who you are. Just be that guy.”

This story’s headline has been updated.

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