Tim Walz’s surprise in October is not a shock, but it will shake the swing states

Opinion polls have done that razor-thin margins in the seven states that will change their vote counts next month.

And as if on cue, a narrative-shaping story emerges that may or may not be true, but lets us know how little swing-state voters know about the man who could have ultimate proximity to the presidency.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, reportedly had a big secret romance with the daughter of a Chinese communist official.

About a week before the election, Jenna Wang made the surprising claim that she and the Democrat had a passionate relationship that began in 1989 with making out to the sounds of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” only to end in a long-distance dissolution, with talk of marriage and Wang’s move to America ended in impeachment.

Timing is everything in a story like this, and this is the classic October surprise, a trick-or-treat bag that leaves us wondering how, after Walz’s many years in politics, this smoking gun will now become a reality.

Think about it: “Coach” went to China a few months after the brutal subjugation of freedom martyrs in Tiananmen Square, which led to mass arrests, a crackdown on the media and protests, and the end of perestroika— period before Beijing.

And he woos and goads someone who is said to have been born into party loyalty.

She says Walz forced her to sleep in his compartment on the train. If we can believe her, they wrote to each other for years before it became clear upon his return in 1992 that they would not marry.

What does this possibly mean?

Does this mean that Walz was cultivated by someone who could very easily be an agent of foreign influence, with blackmail material kept behind him until he could use it?

Many of us certainly have ex-girlfriends or boyfriends. But how often are they able to make narratively plausible cases about clandestine relations with communists? A “passionate” love affair, Wang says, made her despair and feel like a ‘prostitute’?

Or was he just a young man in the making?

Whatever the answer in the end, the song remains the same, and it’s a sour note.

It’s just the latest walzism that doesn’t add up, like when he was caught in a lie during the JD Vance debate. The old’knucklehead‘ was wrong about where he was during the aforementioned 1989 massacre.

But it’s okay. The coach just got “caught up in the rhetoric.”

There’s even his cosplay about football.

First ‘coach’ and then ‘assistant coach’. He plays that for all it’s worth, but somehow he can’t score on AOC in a game of Madden while playing as the Vikings, with the biggest wideout in the game as a cheat code advantage.

As if the failure of video game football, which for some insane reason was designed as counter-programming for the actual NFL wasn’t enough, he then demonstrated his central political flaw: he doesn’t know the difference between a good play and a serious mistake.

“You could run a mean Pick Six,” said the leading candidate as the man with the least football knowledge of anyone with a Y chromosome in the United States.

Then there’s his Elmer Fudd era.

Walz pulls out a gun and cosplays as such a hunter should impress anyone who has ever gutted a fish or cleaned and quartered a deer, bumbling and stumbling while trying to load his gun.

In a way, he is the perfect candidate for this presidential candidate, which started with the hype of Obama 2008, but seems to be in a downward spiral like at the end of Clinton 2016, when the patina of inevitability was eroded by the revelation and curdled. The bright rhetoric of joy is a reminder amid the closing talk, the waxworks of former leaders approving, along with pop stars closer to their fall and closer to their rise.

Walz is just a simulacrum of masculinity. If Vice President Kamala Harris will tell youDemocrats are in crisis with men, who themselves are in crisis with a society they often believe has eliminated their male prerogatives.

They were raised by men who cosplayed. And for better or worse, they view former President Donald Trump as authentic. That’s why young men break for him and why the polls we cover holds Also breaking Trump’s path.

Can Democrats reverse that narrative? That doesn’t seem likely unless there are more surprises in October.