This year’s Democratic playbook features a lot of football

Tim Walz as her new running mate at their first rally together, she called him “coach.” One of the first stops on the campaign’s pre-convention bus tour was to a town in Pennsylvania where Walz spoke to a high school football team. Walz’s football ties are a lynchpin of the Democratic effort to brand itself as the “normal” party this fall, right up there with Walz’s love of hunting and Harris’ time working at McDonald’s. “The libs somehow winning football in the culture wars, I don’t think I would have had it on my bingo card but I’m pretty psyched about it,” a Harris campaign official said. “Democrats are just winning on normal things.” Follow live updates on the 2024 election This cycle’s Democratic football messaging goes far beyond Walz, too. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, a former NFL linebacker running for Senate against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, has promoted his football ties extensively in the campaign, including during a speech before the Democratic convention. “Football opens doors that are completely nonpolitical and every Texan understands,” Allred said of the role the game plays in his campaign, adding, “It’s a language that we speak here in Texas pretty fluently.” Gov. J. Scott Applewhite / AP file ‘It just makes them seem more moderate’ With Election Day just two months away, Democrats say their pigskin playbook is going to see more action across battleground states as football season kicks off — including with the NFL’s Thursday opener. On Saturday, for example, Allred tweeted a campaign ad hitting his opponent for “The Ted Cruz curse,” pointing to a series of losses suffered by Texas teams when Cruz was either in attendance or had posted in support of them on social media. “Ted’s curse shattered the dreams of Texas teams,” the narrator said. Lose Cruz.” Republicans, though, say Democrats’ football focus comes off as inauthentic. Following Walz’s convention speech, Trump posted to his Truth Social platform that the governor, who served as the defensive coordinator at Mankato West High School in Minnesota, “was an ASSISTANT Coach, not a COACH.” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., a college football head coach for 21 seasons, homed in on this by criticizing Walz for allegedly inflating his record of service in the National Guard and for retiring from his unit to run for Congress before it deployed to Iraq. “Walz has intentionally lied about both his military rank and his coaching position,” Tuberville said in a statement, adding Walz “was never a head coach.” “In fact, the weak character he exemplified when he abandoned his unit before deployment to Iraq is the exact opposite of what any coach I know would instill in student-athletes,” Tuberville said. “I wouldn’t let him anywhere near my locker room, and we sure don’t want him anywhere near the White House.” Walz has not referred to himself as a head coach. But Tim Murtaugh, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said framing himself as a coach is misleading enough, adding that how Walz and Harris have discussed his role would lead voters to believe he was in the top spot. “They think that calling him coach is good for them, but what it really does is highlight his dishonesty about his own biography,” Murtaugh said. One Trump ally told NBC News they thought the effort was “smart” and “subtle,” part of the party’s broader effort to portray itself as more moderate and more patriotic — a theme of Harris’ convention speech — than their GOP rivals. “It just makes them seem more moderate — I would put it together with the way over-the-top patriotic displays” at their convention, this person said. “If you’re attacking your opponent for the position they were in when they won a high school state championship, you’re losing,” this person said. This person said football has helped Walz relate in past campaigns to voters in the middle, adding he has routinely made appearances on football programs, at practices and at games. They added it’s safe to expect Walz to lean-in on his football background this fall, whether on sports-related shows or in settings like the Aliquippa High School football practice in Pennsylvania he spoke at last month. “Who’s going to look more comfortable at a football game?” this person said of Walz, contrasting him with Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. “This old school idea that Republicans are more comfortable at a football game, I don’t know. I think they’re in the back now.” At that July visit to the Aliquippa football practice, Walz, standing alongside Harris and NFL Hall of Fame running back Jerome Bettis, praised the “men of character” who have come out of the school’s football program, talked up his time as a defensive coach and tied football to politics, saying the latter “isn’t that much different than this.” Dwan Walker, the mayor of Aliquippa who gave a shout out to the high school’s three NFL hall of farmers as he introduced the Pennsylvania delegation at the Democratic convention, called the visit “special.” “You can tell he was definitely a coach,” he said. Tim Walz, with second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Vice President Kamala Harris, greets the Aliquippa High School football team in Pennsylvania on Aug. 18. Ten years ago, then-President Barack Obama told a reporter that, if he had a son, he “would not let” him play pro football — a comment that rocketed around the football world when increasing attention was being paid to brain injuries suffered by players. That same year, Donald Trump, who briefly owned a football team in the short-lived USFL, posted repeatedly about how “soft” the sport was becoming as a result of efforts to cut down on heavy hitting. “I’m not going to be watching much NFL football anymore,” he tweeted in October 2014. “Too time consuming, too boring, too many flags and too soft.” Moore, who considers himself to be a lifelong, almost religious fan of the sport, called it “the perfect game,” in part because of the high-level of team cooperation it requires. “For those who don’t want their children to play, I’m not passing judgment on them,” the Maryland governor said. I want my son to play football … and I want us to be out there every single weekend watching.” Moore, eager for what he believes will be a successful season for the Baltimore Ravens, added the sport should not be viewed through a political lens. “I’m not a football head because I’m like, ‘Oh, this is going to make me popular in Maryland,’” he added. “I’m a football head coach because I enjoy the game, I love the game.” Polling for years has shown that roughly the same percentage of Democrats and Republicans consider themselves football fans. President Gerald Ford played football at the University of Michigan, while Rep. Jack Kemp, R-N.Y., who was GOP nominee Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996, played quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. By the following season, as the protests became more widespread, Trump was calling for fans to boycott the NFL and suggested league owners should fire any player who took a knee, saying, “Get that son of a b—- off the field right now.” Within weeks, then-Vice President Mike Pence walked out of an Indianapolis Colts game when several 49ers took a knee. Earlier this year, right-wing conspiracies gained traction around pop star Taylor Swift’s relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in the team’s run-up to the Super Bowl, with conservative influencers claiming the relationship was a ploy to boost Democrats in the fall. J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, said the party’s embrace of football “sort of coincides with conservatives turning on football multiple times.” “Sports and cultural relevance were not always our strongest suit,” he said. “But now it’s actually weird, it just flipped on its head a little bit.” Trump, who has for years touted his connections to the sports world and made appearances at football games, has also recently used football to promote his own image. And after Brittany Mahomes, wife of Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes, recently liked an instagram post outlining parts of Trump’s agenda, the former president praised her on his Truth Social platform Wednesday. “Republicans can’t claim football just like they can’t claim patriotism,” Moore said. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/democratic-playbook-football-tim-walz-rcna168284