“She’s terrible, but she’s getting a free ride,” said former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald J. Trump of his new opponent Kamala Harris in his X interview with Elon Musk earlier this week. While legacy media have lavished non-stop adulation on the incumbent vice president since President Biden withdrew from his reelection bid on July 21 and nominated Harris to run in his place, it is curiously her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has born the brunt of conservative criticism.

Chosen over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a popular politician with national reach who might have been of greater help by delivering his swing state to Harris—but who appears to have been uncomfortably close to Israel for the taste of radical Democrats—Walz’s image as a benign Midwestern leader faltered within hours of his selection. In the intervening 10 days, he has been assailed by daily revelations about his state’s corruption scandals, his extremist positions on gender and sexuality, his ruinous California-like economic policies, his sophomoric attempt to brand Republicans as “weird,” his DUI arrest, his mismanagement of Minnesota’s 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, his alleged lies about his military service, his disturbing praise for a Muslim cleric who appears to have celebrated terrorism and Adolf Hitler, and other foibles.

All Walz’s issues are worth exploring in detail, and time will tell whether these attacks will succeed in discrediting the presumptive Democratic vice-presidential candidate. But therein lies the problem. So what if they do? Whatever may be the seriousness of Walz’s scandals, he is on the bottom half of the ticket, where he represents no demographic of any electoral importance and leads a reliably blue state that has only gone Republican once since 1956. If elected, his main jobs will be to go to the proverbial funerals that vice presidents attend when the president is too busy and be prepared to step in to replace the president in the unlikely event that becomes necessary.

Vanishingly few Americans will cast their votes in November because of Walz, even if much of electorate believes the worst of him. Partisan Democrats will excuse or minimize any problem with Walz—and indeed already are doing that. They will still vote for Harris. GOP loyalists will line up behind Trump with what polls suggest is about as much enthusiasm as before Walz was selected. Indeed, despite being a virtual unknown in American politics just two weeks ago, and after all the attacks in the meantime, Walz now enjoys the highest favorability ratings of this year’s four presidential ticket candidates.

Republicans may yet succeed in casting Walz as a villain, but what can it achieve? Harris, the candidate for president, will continue to bask in favorable media coverage and, possibly, add to her polling gains as election day approaches. In this the GOP appears to have forgotten that the successful 2004 “swift boat” ads were directed against Democratic candidate John Kerry, who headed the ticket, rather than against his half-forgotten running mate John Edwards, a senator whose biggest scandals exploded only years after his and Kerry’s failed campaign.

It is obvious what accounts for this strange and unprecedented diversion away from the main candidate, a woman of color (which color has been questioned), and toward the vice-presidential candidate, a white male who seems to have a lot of problems. As Democrats insisted, and as establishment GOP types compliantly parroted in the first days of Harris’s campaign, serious criticism of her is almost totally off limits for fear of being considered racist or sexist.

That premise, however, is ridiculous. Whatever her race or gender, Harris is a human being seeking election to the most powerful office in the world. Although race and gender played a major role in her political rise and should be fair game for critics, she clearly has flaws and liabilities that have nothing to do with her pigmentation or chromosomes. Responsible citizens should strongly question her on the merits of who she is, what she believes, how she has led and would lead, her public record, her policy positions, and her current and former statements and actions. As some publications are already musing, she should be challenged on a significant number of issues and asked hard and potentially embarrassing questions at a time of extreme national and international turmoil. Without that boldness, the country could wake up with a long and by then uncurable hangover on Nov. 6.