New McLaughlin Democratic primary poll.

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Walz will go down as an all-time campaign punchline, a female Beltway consultant’s idea of a politician with crossover appeal whose unfavorability ratings shot like a rocket from the moment of selection and haven’t started back down yet. Walz the political idea was fascinating. Democrats didn’t know whether to sell him as traditionally manly or as a vessel for “redefining” masculinity. They ended up taking the fork in the road, smothering the “folksy” Minnesotan in male-stereotype outfits (baseball hats, “dad in plaid” flannel shirts) every day while also trotting him out as a froglike hermaphroditic improvement, a “joyful warrior” and emblem of “tonic masculinity” who’d draw a pleasing contrast to “bros” and “cavemen” of the right.

The result was a psychedelic gender pukeshake, in which “redefined” tonic super-coach-Dad mainly came across as gayer than Corky St. Clair in Waiting For Guffman but also tinged with gripping slapstick menace. Aides dove for cover when he tried to clear his own rifle on a “pheasant” hunt, a fiasco photo op that produced a Vesuvius of vicious memes (Twitter filled with images of Walz loading weapons with tampon-shells) but no game. “One member of Walz’s hunting party shot a rooster,” the Washington Post concluded sadly, “but the carcass was not recovered.” In an election in which voters longed to pull a lever for reassuring normalcy, the Walz identity crisis signaled that Democrats couldn’t agree what men were for anymore, except listening to “smart women.” It was a major factor in Trump winning 55% of the male vote.

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