Tim Walz, Kamala Harris and the Hotdish Ticket

The Minnesota governor and possible future vice president’s hot dish recipe is, er, a whole lot. It includes, among other things, whole milk, semi-skim milk, two kinds of meat, three cups of cheese (specifically Kraft), nearly a stick of butter and an entire package of tater tots. It’s sumptuous, thoroughly Midwestern and, I’m sure, delicious. In fact, Walz won the Minnesota Congressional Delegation’s Hot Dish Cooking Contest in 2013, 2014 and 2016.

Tim Walz loves Food. He loves corn dogs and the all-you-can-drink milk stand at the Minnesota State Fair and—I’m sorry to break it to you—dunk cinnamon rolls in chili. He’s passionate about lemonade. He posts pictures of his sandwiches. He loves eating so much that people on X are already writing short fanfictions about it. Throughout his political career, but especially recently, he’s made a special effort to talk about food, the fattier and folkier the better. Last week, in a discussion with CNN’s Jake Tapper that was ostensibly about Joe Biden’s mental fitness, Walz recounted that he got a call from the president while eating the Minnesota delicacy Juicy Lucy, a cheese-stuffed hamburger. The next day, he posted on X about a different award-winning hot dish recipe from him, this time with two different kinds of canned soup.

We are living through perhaps the most food-centric presidential campaign in American history. Kamala Harris is, by all accounts, an extraordinary and enthusiastic home cook, and has made cooking part of her political brand—surely a conscious calculation given the negative connotations that could arise if the potential first female president openly embraced domesticity. In 2019, she gave an impromptu lesson in brining turkeys while being wired for a television appearance: “Just soap the baby,” she said, her eyes shining. The next year, she launched an amateur cooking show; in it, she cracks an egg with one hand and bonds with Mindy Kaling over the fact that their parents both kept spices in old Taster’s Choice jars. She laughs a lot in the kitchen.

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Unlike her running mate, Harris is unlikely to throw four types of dairy in the oven for dinner—she’s a Californian and cooks like one: swordfish with toasted cardamom for her pescatarian stepdaughter and herb-seasoned Mediterranean meatballs in an Instagram Live with celebrity chef Tom Colicchio. But she’s not immune to the humble charms of ice cream, gumbo, Popeyes chicken, red velvet cupcakes or bacon, which she describes as “the spice” in her household. She seems sincere in her love of food but sophisticated in her tastes. When a 10-year-old asked her at a recent event what her favorite taco filling was, she responded with the rapt expression she might wear when explaining foreign policy on a debate stage: carnitas with cilantro and lime, no raw onions.

Mentioning food on the campaign trail is a cliche for a reason: Food is an easy and literal way to prove you’re human. But the Democratic Party hasn’t always been good at it. In 2003, John Kerry visited Philadelphia’s cheesesteak institution Pat’s and ordered a sandwich not with the traditional whiz, American or provolone, but with Swiss cheese. If voters needed proof that he was anything other than the intellectual elitist they thought he was, this wasn’t it: In Philly, Swiss cheese is “an alternative lifestyle,” The Philadelphia InquirerCraig LaBan, restaurant critic for , said at the time: “You don’t get the feeling that Walz or Harris would walk into Pat’s and order Swiss cheese – not because they are embarrassed to avoid a faux pas, but because they have great respect for American eating habits and are interested in enjoying food the way it is meant to be enjoyed.”

Their approach differs significantly from the Obama era – with its well-meaning but not entirely Fun Focus on childhood obesity and the infamous seven almonds – and from the current leaders of the Republican Party. Donald Trump doesn’t really talk about liking food; he famously eats a lot of fast food, but that’s supposedly because he’s afraid of poisoning, not because fast food tastes good greatHis most famous food tweet — “Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made at the Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!” — reads more like an obligatory advertisement than a serious appreciation of the look, smell and taste of the taco bowl: all business, no pleasure. Meanwhile, Trump’s running mate JD Vance says he loves Diet Mountain Dew, but he seems mostly annoyed by it. To the extent that he has When you get specific about why he likes the drink, the praise is purely functional: “high caffeine, low calories.” The main message here is that food is not the place of joy and togetherness, but of anxiety and alienation, or at best, utilitarianism. This is all a bit, well, weird.

Food is one of the most popular things on Earth. It’s smart to base a presidential campaign on it for all the obvious reasons, but for the Harris-Walz team, it’s also a signal. The rhetorical challenge of progressivism is that it’s inherently abstract: It imagines a world that doesn’t yet exist, rather than advocating a return to an earlier version of the world we know. I find it telling that Walz uses the word over and over again. Joy when he talks about the election campaign and his running mate. It’s a straightforward message that’s even more concrete than Barack Obama’s. Hope: Hope is the future, but joy is the present. It’s cold milk on a hot day; a perfectly beaten egg; a steaming casserole full of God knows what, enjoyed at a crowded table. By putting food front and center, Harris and Walz make themselves candidates for earthly pleasure and sheer abundance. It’s really quite simple.