In a packed music venue in Savannah, with polls showing Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump in a dead heat in Georgia and beyond, the lights were dim and the room was focused.
Gov. Tim Walz leaned into the lectern and locked eyes with his audience.
“This thing is tied, and you know it,” he said the other day, lifting both hands forward, fingers slightly spread. “Two minutes left on the clock.”
He paused, rubbed a thumb on his nose, and then shot his index fingers toward the crowd.
“The good news is we’ve got the damn ball,” he said to cheers. “We’re driving that thing down the field.”
Mr. Walz has kept up a frenetic pace in the last stretch of the race as he crisscrosses the country, giving closing arguments that evoke the final timeout on the sideline of a game from his days as a high school football coach. His pep talks, as he dubs them, have mixed urgency with optimism. Mr. Walz has simultaneously sought to cast Mr. Trump as a chaotic opponent interested only in his own statistics, and to convince his supporters that change in leadership is in their control — if they pull together as a team.
But everywhere he has traveled, the constituency he was entrusted to reach with his “Coach Walz” persona and his hunting gear — white working-class voters without a college degree — has seemed out of reach. In such a tight race, the Harris campaign needs only to shave off a small number of votes from that group to make a difference, but a New York Times/Siena College poll of the seven key battleground states on Sunday showed that Mr. Trump continued to hold a strong grip on that bloc.
In interviews with dozens of voters at Mr. Walz’s events and rallies over the past month, Democrats were asked if they were feeling the hope and joy infused in his stump speech. The responses were often the same.
A pause with a wrinkled brow. A sigh. A deep, long breath.
“I’ve been praying and praying a lot as the election has been getting closer,” Ajani de Roock, 19, a college student, said at a Saturday rally in Tucson, Ariz.
Four hours north, in Flagstaff, where Mr. Walz had spoken just hours before on a stage decked with marigolds and bales of hay, Cheryl Meilbeck, 59, a math professor at a community college, clutched a blue baseball cap embroidered with the words “Make Lying Wrong Again.”
She was feeling “hopeful but nervous,” she said. “I have felt sick for the last eight years, just absolutely sick,” she said, referring to Mr. Trump’s rise to power and transformation of the Republican Party.
Mr. Walz was feeling “nauseously optimistic,” he told a handful of students from Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities when he met with them Sunday morning in a hotel conference room. But with age, he said, he had learned the best way to soothe the nerves before a big moment was to stir into action.
The idea that on Wednesday morning, people could wake up with a “Madam President,” he added, “the optimism of that, it feels like the rain has kind of stopped and the sky opened up that sunshine — we get to do that.”
Never mind that, as he said that, the skies he glanced at outside the nearby windows were overcast and dreary.
When Ms. Harris selected Mr. Walz as her running mate, he blazed onto the national stage with Midwestern charm, the little-known governor of Minnesota who sharpened the word “weird” into a signature attack on Republicans. He came across as a lovable dad or uncle who, as several voters put it, had not been lost to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.
On the trail, Mr. Walz quickly proved adept at connecting with people no matter the venue. He has appeared equally comfortable discussing hate crime legislation before L.G.B.T.Q. advocates in Washington, D.C., talking about climate issues with tribal leaders in Wisconsin, and learning about the apple dehydration process from orchard owners in Pennsylvania. Voters were more likely to say that Mr. Walz was honest, trustworthy and caring than they were to say the same about Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, according to September polls from The New York Times and Siena College.
But Mr. Vance drew more favorable views among men, many of whom continue to believe Mr. Trump is better for the economy, and whose anger and frustration Mr. Vance has been better able to tap into, pollsters said.
Early on in the campaign, Mr. Walz seldom talked to reporters and wasn’t very accessible, leaving right-wing conservative media personalities to define him as a liberal governor who had enacted left-wing policies.
“That is not what the voters we are talking about have wanted to hear,” said Dennis Darnoi, a Republican strategist in Michigan, referring to working-class white men without a college degree.
Mr. Walz did not help his case with an uneven debate performance in October, or by telling inaccurate anecdotes, including that he had been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre 35 years ago, which he later acknowledged was not true.
Still, Mr. Walz’s supporters said they did not understand why the race remained so close so late in the game — not when Mr. Trump is a felon and has been escalating his violent, angry rhetoric. Monica Whatley, 35, an immigration advocate who watched Mr. Walz speak at a rally in Columbus, Ga., said she believed the Democrats’ lack of traction was in part because they had been so divided. She said that even her own loyalty was being tested by her disappointment with the party’s handling of immigration policy.
Yet, she was heeding Mr. Walz’s calls to pull together in the face of what she saw as a more dangerous force: Mr. Trump. “I am going to try to unite and be a team player, but I am not happy about it,” she said.
In his final days on the campaign trail, Mr. Walz emerged from the bubble wrap armed with a stockpile of zingers and with his daughter, Hope, at his side. He has hit multiple cities a day, slapping backs with bar patrons and huddling with voters in buzzing coffee shops and union halls.
If Mr. Walz has not won over male voters handily, he still draws plenty of women and young people, who often wear what became one of the year’s most popular Democratic merch items, a camouflage cap emblazoned with the Harris-Walz logo in neon orange. Vivian Jones, 50, a real estate agent in Charlotte, N.C., said at a Walz event in Atlanta that she did not believe Mr. Walz’s positivity was enough to counter the falsehoods about Ms. Harris or the hostile ideas Mr. Trump was letting percolate online and in society, but that it was needed, nonetheless.
“I’m very nervous for me, my family, and just democracy altogether,” she said.
The chances of a vice-presidential candidate delivering a battleground state are remote. But running mates can make a difference in shaping how people perceive the candidate at the top of the ticket.
In this respect, Mr. Walz has been consistent, emphasizing Ms. Harris’s credentials, her life experience and the barrier-breaking potential of her candidacy, something she does not tend to mention herself.
“Kamala Harris has done everything we could ask of her,” he said, warming up canvassers preparing to knock on doors on Sunday in an Atlanta suburb. “Now it’s our turn to get her over the goal line.”
On a rally stage later that day, the coach-candidate clapped his hands and closed his speech with a booming shout: “Win it for America, Georgia, let’s go!”
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