Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, is a magnet for internet comparisons, memes, and clichés: he’s the Midwestern dad you always wanted, he’s Friday Night Lights’ Coach Taylor, he’s a fount of avuncular normal-guy aphorisms.

But to me, Tim Walz is an archetype I first encountered twenty years ago at an eerily similar political fork in Democrats’ road. His vice-presidential nomination this week once again offers a glimmer of hope for a new path — even amid warning signs that the party will take the old path.

In 2004, I helped elect that era’s version of Tim Walz to the governorship of deep-red Montana. Save for the military service, Brian Schweitzer was all the adjectives now used to describe Walz — small-town, blunt, plainspoken, pragmatic. In an election year when Democrats got destroyed up and down the ballot, Schweitzer pulled off his seemingly impossible victory by being decidedly populist and normal (read: not weird).