Democrats Are Making a Play for Football Fans. It’s a Sign of What They’ve Left Behind.

Update, Aug. 22, 2024, at 9:45 a.m.: Tim Walz spoke at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night to accept the vice presidential nomination, and boy did he go big on the football stuff. In addition to the giant “Coach Walz” signs that were handed out around the arena, Walz was at one point joined onstage by several members of the state-champion Mankato West High School team for which he served as defensive coordinator. His speech was packed with metaphors about getting in trenches and taking things “one yard at a time,” while he compared the Republican Project 2025 plan to a playbook. “It’s the fourth quarter,” he said to begin the final section of his remarks. “We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense, and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And boy do we have the right team.”

You could argue—and many have—that American football is a fundamentally conservative activity. It’s the most conformist and hierarchical sport, its players subject to punishment if they do not follow the detailed orders of an angry older man who often has a military background. As George Carlin once put it, baseball is happy and welcoming, while football is tribal and vengeful; it’s certainly the sport that involves the most frequent references to security. College football in particular tends to be most popular in deep-red parts of the South, and former players and coaches who enter politics usually do so through the Republican Party. Team owners in the NFL have the most power relative to their labor force than their counterparts in other major leagues.

Surveys and studies, though, generally find that fans of the NFL—which is far and away the most watched U.S. sports league—are not disproportionately supportive of either Republicans or Democrats. Its audience is not intrinsically partisan. And with the elevation of “Coach” Tim Walz to the vice presidential nomination, Democrats are making a play for that audience.

Walz, who is also known as the governor of Minnesota, will be speaking at the Democratic convention Wednesday night. The party’s bid to win the politics of football began with the reputation-making July MSNBC appearance during which Walz described Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, as “weird.” The descriptor had immediate resonance; it was a bit mean but undeniably accurate. It captured something important but not quite previously articulated about our era, which is that its Republican leaders have an objectively unusual number of connections to people who admire Adolf Hitler, believe that cannibal pedophilia is widespread in the United States, and say things about “the purpose of the postmenopausal female.” The GOP is represented nationally by people who hold decidedly esoteric, minority views. (They’ve figured out that they can retain power inside the party despite losing elections by simply denying that they lost those elections.)

But you don’t win presidential races with eggheaded formulations featuring the words decidedly and esoteric. You win them by showing voters who you are and what you stand for—and the Harris campaign is trying to use football to show that it represents all that is mainstream. The opposite of weird is normal, and statistically there is nothing more normal in the U.S. than watching Sunday Night Football. Walz is a governor, as well as a former teacher and member of the National Guard, but it is the football-coach part of his biography—he was a linebackers coach and defensive coordinator at Mankato West High School during the late ’90s and early aughts—that Kamala Harris emphasized when introducing him at a rally earlier this month in Philadelphia, calling him “Coach” eight times. There have been reports that Walz plans to make campaign appearances at Friday night high school football games, an all-but-explicit reference to one of the TV shows that exemplified the Obama era’s earnest optimism.

This Sunday, in fact, Walz and Harris visited a high school football practice in the western Pennsylvania town of Aliquippa, where Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis grew up. At the event, Walz employed a go-to Harris campaign rhetorical move, describing football’s agreeably liberal goal (achievement through mutual cooperation) in terms of an inspiring conservative value (hard work):

Whether the subject is sports metaphors or antitrust regulation, Vice President Harris and “Coach” Walz want to be standing where normal Americans meet and find consensus.

Perhaps not coincidentally, that consensus in football is increasingly found slightly to the left of center. A wide majority of fans now support the compensation of college football players, which for many years was the cause of activists who compared NCAA programs with plantations. The era’s most successful college coach, just-retired University of Alabama legend Nick Saban, is a longtime friend of centrist West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who raised eyebrows in recent years by publicly supporting voting rights legislation and the idea of a players union. Democrats have fantasized about getting Saban to run against Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, another ex–ball coach who could be vulnerable because he is—stop us if you’ve heard this before!—an extremist who has carried out an arcane, unpopular crusade against alleged “wokeness” and seems to be a little too comfortable with white supremacists.

In the NFL, meanwhile, the most recent season’s major storyline was the ultimately triumphant partnership between Taylor Swift, a known lib, and Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce, who was already an enemy to MAGA Republicans for appearing in a beer commercial and encouraging citizens to receive a dose of a vaccine that has an 80 percent uptake rate nationally. Talk about abandoning the center!

But part of appealing to the mainstream means not holding opinions that might make an average person upset. And the Harris–Walz campaign is also a repudiation of what you might call the Democratic Party’s Colin Kaepernick era, when its ideas were often aligned with those of the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who knelt during the playing of the national anthem in 2016 and was subsequently blackballed from the league.

Kaepernick and other players who followed his lead said they were, in essence, protesting the United States’ failure to extend its promise of opportunity and equality before the law to its Black citizens. For a time in the late 2010s, similar concerns about structural racism were a top priority of Democratic voters and elected officials. Countless Democrats participated in or expressed support for the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis—and the ones well before that. (The unforgettably graphic nature of the video depicting Floyd’s death seems to have obscured, in the memories of many pundits, the earlier cases of videotaped police brutality and exposés of systemic discrimination that made racial inequality into an urgent national issue long before the 2020 primary.) Among Democrats, like Harris, who were running for president, shrinking the racial wealth gap was a major topic of discussion. Reparations were on the table. After Floyd’s death, the party proposed a police reform bill that would have, among other things, weakened the “qualified immunity” protections that allow officers to avoid prosecution for acts of violence.

But those times seem to have passed, for a variety of reasons. Top Democrats believed that the activist slogan “Defund the Police” hurt the party, particularly amid a COVID-era surge in violent crime. Democratic primary voters decided en masse in 2020 to prioritize Joe Biden’s “electability” over Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s ambition. Biden subsequently adopted many of the left’s proposals on a number of economic issues that weren’t directly related to race, which reduced the pressure he may have felt to explicitly address discrimination. Voters became increasingly concerned about undocumented border crossings and supportive of “tough” enforcement efforts to reduce their frequency. Leading Dems have also distanced themselves from or directly criticized campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza because some of the groups involved have used or tolerated antisemitic or violent rhetoric.

What this has added up to is a Democratic Party and a Harris campaign that has, let’s say, chosen to de-emphasize the commitments to criminal justice reform and the role of protest that Democrats (including Harris herself) made four or five years ago. This version of the party touts its success funding police departments and attacks Trump for preventing the hiring of border agents. Harris is, once again, a prosecutor rather than a reformer. Reparations are not on the table.

Should this be cause for cynicism for people who care about, like, rectifying the injustices that the stains of slavery and racism have left on American society? Maybe not. For one, according to the polls, the Harris–Walz strategy is working—and that may have tangible significance to people still interested in making progress on the racial wealth gap when the alternative is another four-year term for Trump, who made his first appearance in public consciousness decades ago as a landlord accused of instructing employees not to rent apartments to Black applicants.

Harris, like Biden, has also shown a willingness to adopt the left’s ambitions on certifiably structural issues like housing, debt, and universal entitlements to family leave and child care. Before he was famous for the word weird, Walz was famous for signing a bill guaranteeing free lunches to students in Minnesota public schools.

“I see a lot of these pivots as being less about abandoning or leaving behind policies or constituencies and more about strategy,” one Dem who works in progressive policy—and whose work frequently touches on the various legacies of racial discrimination—told me. (They asked for anonymity so that they could give their opinion on matters that are not strictly related to their current job.) In their view, the very fact that a Black woman and a white football coach can run together as the happy-go-lucky, “normal” choice for voters makes its own kind of radical statement.

“Lots of progressive politics over the last decade has kind of insisted on being dour and depressed, but that turns people off,” they told me. “But we can tackle big, serious issues and do so in a way that builds community and is positive. Black people have always resisted and struggled in a joyous manner.” In remarks to the high school team, Walz said: “When football is done right, it is just fun as heck.” Maybe it turns out politics is like that too.