Republicans have turned Tim Walz’s trip to a dog park nearly three years ago this week into an attack on the Democratic vice presidential nominee, creating a false online narrative to paint Walz as a liar.
The intended conclusion was that Walz had somehow lied about the identity of his dog, Scout, by describing two different dogs as his beloved pet in separate X-posts. Social media users shared screenshots of the posts as supposed evidence that the Minnesota governor has engaged in a pattern of deception, garnering thousands of likes, shares and comments across all platforms.
In one message, from June 2022Walz is pictured hugging a black dog. The caption reads, “A special birthday hello to our favorite pup, Scout.” The other, posted in October 2022, showed Walz next to a brown and white dog with the caption, “I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a beautiful fall day than at the dog park. I know Scout enjoyed it.”
In response, Walz supporters shared messages on social media to show that Walz was just playing with someone else’s dog and mentioned Scout in the caption.
The seemingly innocent message wasn’t the only thing used against Walz in recent days. A joke he made in a campaign video with Vice President Kamala Harris about eating “white guy tacos” was used to accuse him of lying about how much he spices his food. Opponents have also criticized Walz for describing himself as a former coach of the high school soccer teamnoting that he was the defensive coordinator.
False and misleading claims of such a trivial nature may not seem all that damaging, but a flood of them can easily lead to real damage at the ballot box, experts say. This is especially true when they go after a figure like Walz, who still relatively unknown nationally, though his lack of top spot could lessen the impact on Harris-Walz’s campaign.
“It may seem trivial, and in some cases it really is, but they’re trying to make a larger attack on a character that fits into a larger narrative that’s being created around that persona,” Emily Vraga, a University of Minnesota professor who studies political disinformation, said of the recent attacks on Walz. “This becomes kind of a puzzle piece that they’re trying to put together.”
She added that the “vast amount” of false claims can give the impression that there is some truth to them, even if voters do not believe everything.
Nathan Walter, an associate professor at Northwestern University who also studies misinformation, agrees that one piece of misinformation doesn’t have to be significant to be harmful.
“The idea is to attack someone’s personality, and then these attacks almost become the canary in the gold mine, right?” he said. “So if he’s lying about his dog, if he’s lying about his illustrious coaching career, he’s probably lying about a lot of other things.”
Democrats have recently launched a similar superficial attack on the Republican ticket, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio and former President Donald Trump, and label the couple as ‘weird’.
Mixed in with the frivolous attacks on Walz has been criticism of other inconsistencies. Earlier this month, for example, Walz went after Vance, saying, “If it were up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF.” But his wife, Gwen Walz, released a statement last week revealing that she relied on another fertility treatment known as intrauterine insemination, or IUI.
Walz’s military record has also come under fire from the right. One concern is that he portrayed himself as having spent time in a war zone when he spoke out about gun violence in 2018. “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in the war, are the only place those weapons are,” he said then.
Waltz never served in a combat zone for 24 years in the Army National Guard, but served in many other roles. These included service as an infantryman and field artillery gunner, as well as a deployment to Italy in a supporting role to active-duty troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Vraga described the more superficial attacks as a “spaghetti approach,” with Republicans throwing out a bunch of claims to see if they stick, rather than a more solid narrative that has come to dominate online discourse. Moreover, the idea that Walz is a liar “plays into this established worldview that we have of politicians as untrustworthy,” Walter said.
Even in the polarized political climate of 2024, where many people on all sides have strongly held beliefs that aren’t likely to be changed by online name-calling, negative campaigning could turn off potential voters altogether.
Such attacks can be used to demobilize voters, especially those who are not deeply engaged. “You might start to think, why bother with politics at all?” Vraga said. “It’s just gross.”