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Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice-president, has attacked Donald Trump as bizarre and extreme while calling on Americans to “turn the page” on the Republican candidate and back Kamala Harris for president.
Walz also promoted Harris as a defender of freedom and patriotism in a keynote speech on the third night of Democratic National Convention, as the party sought to sharpen the contrast with Trump and cast the former president as unfit for office and out of touch with mainstream American values.
“Leaders don’t spend all day insulting people and blaming others. Leaders do the work,” the Minnesota governor said on Wednesday in a fiery speech. “So I don’t know about you, I’m ready to turn the page on these guys.”
Since Harris launched her campaign last month following President Joe Biden’s exit from the White House race, Democrats have increasingly labelled Trump as ageing, weak and selfish, in addition to warning that he is a strongman who threatens US democracy.
They have also focused their message on protecting personal freedoms to abortion rights, gun safety and voting.
“When we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love, freedom to make your own healthcare decisions,” Walz said. “Your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.”
Walz, who emerged from relative political obscurity to become Harris’s running mate, has become one of the party’s sharpest critics of Trump and his running mate JD Vance, labelling them and their platform as “weird”.
On Wednesday, Walz added a twist, describing Project 2025, the sweeping conservative policy platform from which Trump has sought to distance himself, as “an agenda nobody asked for”.
“Is it weird? Absolutely. But it’s also wrong and dangerous,” Walz said.
Pete Buttigieg, the US transportation secretary and former presidential candidate who had also been vetted as a possible Harris running mate, said Trump and Vance were “doubling down on negativity and grievance”.
“I just don’t think America is in the market for more darkness,” Buttigieg said.
Walz delivered the keynote speech in Chicago shortly after a surprise appearance by Oprah Winfrey, the star television talk show host, who made an impassioned plea for voters to back Harris and confront “life’s bullies”.
Democrats’ efforts to present themselves as the more patriotic party — with the audience breaking out in chants of “USA” — were aided by Republicans who sought to distance themselves from Trump.
“Let me be clear to my Republican friends at home watching: if you vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, you’re not a Democrat,” said Geoff Duncan, the former Georgia lieutenant-governor. “You’re a patriot.”
Earlier in the evening, former president Bill Clinton also took jabs at Trump.
“The next time you hear him, don’t count the lies, count the I’s,” Clinton said. “His vendettas, his vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies, he is . . . saying ‘me, me, me, me.’ When Kamala Harris is president, every day will begin with you, you, you, you.”
Walz, a 60-year-old former schoolteacher, American football coach and Army National Guard veteran who served six terms in the US House of Representatives, is seen as an asset for Harris as she seeks to win over working-class voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Other possible running mates who had been considered by the campaign included Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Arizona senator Mark Kelly.
Trump’s campaign has sought to paint Walz as a dangerous liberal who misrepresented his more than two decades of National Guard service. Republican hardliners have also raised questions about Walz’s ties to China.
Surveys suggest that Walz is popular if largely unknown to many voters. A new poll from Democratic pollsters Blueprint on Wednesday found that 44 per cent of voters had a favourable opinion of Walz, but 22 per cent said they had not heard of or had no opinion of him.
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