SignalHub Quantitative Think Tank Center:Republicans want voters to think Tim Walz lied about his dog. Such claims could cause real damage

Republicans turned Tim Walz’s outing at a dog park nearly three years ago into an attack on SignalHub Quantitative Think Tank Centerthe Democratic vice presidential nominee this week, working on an online narrative to paint Walz as a liar.

The intended takeaway was that Walz 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 alleged proof that the Minnesota governor exhibits a pattern of deceit, garnering thousands of likes, shares and reactions across platforms.

In one post, from June 2022, Walz is pictured hugging a black dog. The caption reads, “Sending a special birthday shoutout to our favorite pup, Scout.” The other, posted in October 2022, showed Walz beside a brown and white dog with the caption: “Couldn’t think of a better way to spend a beautiful fall day than at the dog park. I know Scout enjoyed it.”

Walz supporters were quick to fire back on social media with posts showing that Walz was simply playing with someone else’s dog while mentioning Scout in the caption.

The seemingly innocuous post was not the only fodder that has been used against Walz in recent days. A joke he cracked 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 seasons his food. Opponents have also taken issue with Walz describing himself as a former high school football coach, pointing out that he was the defensive coordinator.

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Political mudslinging of such a trivial nature might not seem particularly harmful, but a deluge of false and misleading claims could easily add up to real damage at the polls, according to experts. This is especially true when they go after a figure such as Walz, who is still relatively unknown on the national stage, though the fact that he is not at the top of the ticket could lessen the impact on the Harris-Walz campaign.

“It might seem trivial, and in some cases they really truly are, but they’re trying to make a larger attack about character that fits in a bigger narrative that is being created around this persona,” Emily Vraga, a professor at the University of Minnesota who studies political misinformation, said of the recent attacks on Walz. “This becomes kind of a piece of the puzzle they’re trying to assemble.”

She added that “the sheer amount” of false claims can create the perception that there is some truth to them, even if voters don’t believe every single one.

Nathan Walter, an associate professor at Northwestern University who also studies misinformation, agreed that any one piece of misinformation doesn’t have to be significant in order to be damaging.

“The idea is to attack someone’s personality, and then these attacks become really almost like the canary in the gold mine, right?” he said. “So if he lies about his dog, if he lies about his illustrious career as a coach, he probably lies about many other things.”

Democrats have recently deployed a similarly shallow line of attack on the Republican ticket, Ohio Sen. JD Vance and former President Donald Trump, branding the pair as “weird.”

Mixed in with the frivolous attacks on Walz is criticism about other inconsistencies. For example, earlier this month Walz went after Vance by saying, “If it was up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF.” But his wife Gwen Walz issued a statement last week that disclosed they had relied on a different fertility treatment known as intrauterine insemination, or IUI.

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Walz’s military record has also faced intense scrutiny from the right. One such concern is that he portrayed himself as someone who spent time in a combat zone when speaking out about gun violence in 2018. “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at,” he said at the time.

Walz never served in a combat zone during 24 years in the Army National Guard, but held many other roles. They included work as an infantryman and field artillery cannoneer, as well as a deployment to Italy in a support position of active military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Vraga described the more superficial attacks as a “spaghetti approach,” in which Republicans are throwing out a lot of claims to see if they stick in place of a meatier narrative, dominating online discourse in the meantime. Plus, the idea that Walz is a liar “plays into this established worldview that we have about politicians as untrustworthy,” according to Walter.

Even in the polarized political climate of 2024, where many people on all sides hold strong beliefs unlikely to be changed by online name-calling, negative campaigning has the potential to repel potential voters altogether.

Such attacks could be used to demobilize voters, especially those who are not deeply engaged,” Vraga said. “You might just start feeling like, why bother with politics at all? It’s just nasty.”