HARRISBURG, Pa. — Participants in a town hall event featuring Donald Trump and “Fox News” host Sean Hannity last week delivered a clear message to Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz: “Your candidate doesn't stand a chance here.”
“The message to Tim Walz is clear: Pennsylvanians will not give him the opportunity to do to our Pennsylvania cities what he allowed in Minneapolis in 2020 while he was governor,” Zach Halkias, 22-year-old vice president of his local Slatington Borough Council, told The Washington Post.
Halkias and other Trump supporters were at the former president's event in Harrisburg just hours after Walz, who is infamous for his botched response to the 2020 George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, made his stop in Lancaster.
Joyce Portok, a retiree from Lake Wynona, attended town hall meetings in key battleground states with her daughter.
Portok called Walz's visit to Lancaster a “waste of time” and pointed to the lack of concrete policy proposals from Kamala Harris' campaign, which he said was enough to discourage Keystone voters.
“The candidates don't tell us what they're promising, so how can we make an informed decision about who to vote for?” she said.
Another mother-daughter duo from Yardley, Mary Lou Flores and Kristin Mitchko, disagreed with Walz being portrayed as a “moderate.”
“He seems pretty left-leaning, but they portray him as a centrist, like a good ol' boy with a gun,” said Mr. Mitchko, a 54-year-old software engineer.
“People should start asking him about his history and he should really be honest about the defamation accusations,” she added, referring to the controversy surrounding Waltz's claims about his rank in the Army National Guard and the circumstances surrounding his discharge.
“I think that's really important,” she said.
“He's a very strong man,” Flores, a 76-year-old retired nurse, said of South Dakota's Republican governor. Kristi Noem's comment On Walz's move from being a moderate Democratic congressman with whom he had a good working relationship to being the “radical” governor of Minnesota.
“Someone in the Legislature said she served with him and he was a great guy and seemed like a real moderate at the time,” Flores said of Noem's comments.
“But now that he's governor, and I look at his record, I think he [policies]”She's a very strong candidate,” she said of Walz, who is running alongside running mate and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris against President Trump and runner-up J.D. Vance.
