When Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Minnesota Gov. 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.
And then, at the convention itself in Chicago last month, Walz received his own pep rally when a parade of his former players took the stage wearing their old jerseys.
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.
Embracing football is a striking play because it is something of a shift for a party that had been growing steadily more critical of the game — particularly on player safety.
“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.”
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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. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a rising star in the party who played football at Johns Hopkins University, suited up for a University of Maryland practice in July. And prominent Democrats like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro routinely include football metaphors and references in interviews and on the stump.
“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.”
'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. “Want to win? Lose Cruz.”
Republicans, though, say Democrats’ football focus comes off as inauthentic. With Walz, they say it presents yet another opportunity to call out what they see as an inflated biography. 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. Murtaugh said he expected the lack of distinction here would lead voters to more closely scrutinize other parts of Walz's story that Republicans have zeroed in on.
“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. “They think that it makes him appeal to people. It really reveals his lies.”
Not all Republicans see the football messaging as a mistake. 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.
Presented with the Republican criticism of how the governor has framed his coaching career, one Walz ally burst out laughing.
“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’m not buying it — not with these guys. 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.
The line of scrimmage moves
The field of play has shifted in recent years. 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. And he does not hold the same reservations expressed by Obama years ago, noting his son plays the sport.
“For those who don’t want their children to play, I’m not passing judgment on them,” the Maryland governor said. “But what I am saying is, that’s not me. 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. But football has long played a much bigger role in Republican electoral politics. 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.
A number of NFL players, including former Reps. Anthony Gonzalez, Jon Runyan and Steve Largent, and current Rep. Burgess Owens, were elected as Republicans. Coaches, including Tuberville and former University of Nebraska head Tom Osborne, were elected to Congress as Republicans, too. Others, like former NFL stars Herschel Walker and Lynn Swann, lost statewide bids atop the GOP ticket.
Meanwhile, Allred and former Rep. Heath Shuler, of North Carolina, were the only ex-NFL players in recent history to be elected to Congress as Democrats. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., played college football at Stanford.
But the political conversation around football started to change when former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick chose to take a knee during the national anthem to protest injustice and police brutality in 2016 — which sparked backlash from conservatives who felt his actions were disrespectful. 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.
That episode helped color political discourse around professional football for years, seeming to pit it against conservative interests. 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. Last month, Trump posed for a photo with multiple members of the Las Vegas Raiders during a Nevada campaign stop. 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.
Still, Democrats feel they’ve gained some yards.
“Republicans can’t claim football just like they can’t claim patriotism,” Moore said. “These things aren’t [owned] by anybody.”
