‘Coach Walz’ Delivers a Last Round of Fiery Pep Talks

In a packed music venue in Savannah, with polls showing Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump in a dead heat in Georgia and beyond, the lights were dim and the room was focused.

Gov. Tim Walz leaned into the lectern and locked eyes with his audience.

“This thing is tied, and you know it,” he said the other day, lifting both hands forward, fingers slightly spread. “Two minutes left on the clock.”

He paused, rubbed a thumb on his nose, and then shot his index fingers toward the crowd.

“The good news is we’ve got the damn ball,” he said to cheers. “We’re driving that thing down the field.”

Mr. Walz has kept up a frenetic pace in the last stretch of the race as he crisscrosses the country, giving closing arguments that evoke the final timeout on the sideline of a game from his days as a high school football coach. His pep talks, as he dubs them, have mixed urgency with optimism. Mr. Walz has simultaneously sought to cast Mr. Trump as a chaotic opponent interested only in his own statistics, and to convince his supporters that change in leadership is in their control — if they pull together as a team.

But everywhere he has traveled, the constituency he was entrusted to reach with his “Coach Walz” persona and his hunting gear — white working-class voters without a college degree — has seemed out of reach. In such a tight race, the Harris campaign needs only to shave off a small number of votes from that group to make a difference, but a New York Times/Siena College poll of the seven key battleground states on Sunday showed that Mr. Trump continued to hold a strong grip on that bloc.

In interviews with dozens of voters at Mr. Walz’s events and rallies over the past month, Democrats were asked if they were feeling the hope and joy infused in his stump speech. The responses were often the same.