Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), was part of the effort to delay a July virtual roll call vote that would have certified President Joe Biden as the nominee, according to the New York Times.
This came weeks after Walz said Democrat governors have Biden’s “back” while speaking outside the White House in the aftermath of the president’s disastrous debate performance.
As the behind-the-scenes pressure campaign by top Democrats, donors, and Hollywood elites ramped up to oust Biden from the top of the ticket, an anonymous source told the Times that Walz, a rules committee co-chair for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), became directly involved in the effort to delay a virtual roll call vote to lock Biden in as the party’s nominee.
A source told the outlet that during the week of July 15, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) privately agreed that what had been an expedited process to nominate Biden ahead of the convention should be delayed. It was set to take place as early as the week beginning July 22, per the Times.
Another source indicated that Schumer also directly spoke with other party leaders the week of July 15 about postponing the originally planned virtual nomination, which seemed tailored to skirt “Uncommitted” delegates and protests at the Democrat Convention in Chicago that will occur in a few weeks.
It is unclear what days those conversations occurred, but according to the Times, on Tuesday, July 16, just days before Biden bowed out of the race on July 21, Walz called Jen O’Malley Dillon, the then-Biden campaign chair and now the Harris campaign chair, to say that the nominating process should be pushed back:
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the co-chairman of the party’s rules committee, which determines when and how the nomination will proceed, called Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign chief, on Tuesday afternoon to inform her that the roll call should be delayed, according to a person made aware of the call who described it on the condition of anonymity.
Bowing to the pressure, top Democratic National Committee officials announced on Wednesday that the virtual roll call would take place during the first week of August instead.
Just days after the June 27 debate, which marked the demise of Biden’s political career, Walz, who also chairs the Democratic Governor’s Association, attended a meeting with all other Democrat governors at the White House on July 3.
Walz said after the meeting that all the governors and Biden agree they “are all looking for the path to win” and that they have Biden’s “back.”
“He has had our backs through COVID, through all of the recovery, all of the things that have happened. The governors have his back,” Walz told reporters. ‘We’re working together just to make very, very clear on that. A path to victory in November is the number one priority.”
Asked by a reporter if he thinks Biden is “fit for office,” Walz said, “Yes.”
He noted the debate performance was “a bad hit if you will on that, but it doesn’t impact what I believe: he’s delivering.”
While fielding another question about whether or not Biden spoke during the meeting about his debate performance, he said in part, “What we saw in there today was a guy who was the guy that all of us believed in the first time who could beat Donald Trump and did beat Donald Trump.”
A Harvard-Harris poll taken after the debate and published the day before Walz’s July 3 comments found that 66 percent of Americans had doubts about Biden’s fitness for office. Nearly three in four voters said he was “showing he is too old to be President” in the poll of 2,090 registered voters conducted June 28-30.
Walz vouched for Biden in the lead-up to the Democrat primary, which has effectively been rendered meaningless now that several thousand delegates are expected to nominate the Harris-Walz ticket despite Harris never receiving a primary vote as a Democratic presidential candidate.
In December 2023, while discussing the debate between Govs. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Walz said he agreed with Newsom’s assessment that Biden, at age 100, would be superior to any of the Republican candidates in the field.
His comment came on MSNBC’s The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart in December.
“What Gavin said on there, I think was the most pertinent thing was is ‘I’ll take Joe Biden at 100 over any of these guys at whatever age they’re at because he’s delivering,'” he said.
In November’s Harvard-Harris poll, conducted less than a month before Walz’s hyping of Biden, 58 percent of voters had doubts about Biden’s mental fitness, and 66 percent said he was demonstrating he was “too old to be President.” That poll sampled 2,851 registered voters on November 15 and 16, 2023, and was released on Biden’s 81st birthday.
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