Along with Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement that she was choosing Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate for this November’s election, came plenty of online exuberance about his history as a high school football coach, music lover, and dad who frequently dons the hunter’s camouflage pattern often made by Realtree and a telltale bright orange vest. In the video of the call where Harris invited Walz to join the campaign, he was even wearing a camo hat.
An in-house campaign design team—the same one responsible for the mug featuring a youthful photo of second gentleman Doug Emhoff—took note and used it as an opportunity to pounce on another trend cycle. By the end of Tuesday, a camouflage hat reading “Harris Walz” (with union- and American-made credentials) was posted to the campaign’s website. A Philadelphia-based printer whipped up a handful for the Walz family to wear at that night’s rally. Walz posted a beaming photo featuring a new cap, and he posted it to his social media accounts with an appropriate dad joke.
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According to the campaign, the team designed the hat by noon, whipped up a prototype by 1:30 p.m., and sold through their initial run of 3,000 hats in only 30 minutes. More preorders were offered, and so far they’ve netted approximately $1 million for the campaign.
Walz’s history as a hunter was an obvious part of his appeal to Harris, and she mentioned it at the rally while running down his policy bona fides. “Tim is a hunter and a gun owner who believes, as the majority of gun owners do, that we need reasonable gun safety laws in America,” she said. “So, as governor, he expanded background checks and increased penalties for illegal firearm sales.”
But the accessory also has another cultural meaning. Fans of pop star Chappell Roan noticed that the new hat bore quite a bit of resemblance to the “Midwest Princess” hat available in her merch store, which has become a must-have item on the streets of New York City since her rapid rise to mainstream fame. Last month, the campaign was ready and willing to jump on the bandwagon and have a “brat summer,” and now they’re getting in on the year’s other major pop music trend.
It comes amid a larger reconfiguring of a symbol most associated with rural America. Roan’s hat is a tip of the cap to the singer’s upbringing in a small town in Missouri, but it has a cult status reflective of camouflage’s recent popularity on high fashion runways. She isn’t the only musician to make hunter’s camo merch—Morgan Wallen is a particular fan, and earlier this summer Megan Moroney followed suit, to name but two—but Roan has managed to make it urbane and queer-coded.
Though there have been plenty of camo revivals throughout history, this one is notable for its focus on Realtree, a pattern that’s beloved by modern-day hunters. Invented by hunter and apparel manufacturer Bill Jordan in 1986, Realtree patterns overlay photorealistic images of branches, leaves, and twigs to create a three-dimensional effect that can be altered to suit different terrains and times of year. In clear contrast to the MAGA hat‘s fire engine red, Realtree camo has a much more subtle appeal.
In response to the selection of Walz and the embrace of his hat, some conservatives argued that it smacks of inauthenticity. “Putting someone in a camo hat doesn’t make them a moderate or appealing to red state people,” Meghan McCain said in a social media post. “No one is that dumb.”
Nevertheless, the Harris campaign is moving forward with the merch, and on Wednesday, rocker Justin Vernon, who performs as Bon Iver, donned the camo hat when he performed at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Ultimately, it’s proof of something the campaign is pinning its hopes on: The signifiers of red and blue America aren’t quite as clear-cut as they used to be.
