Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso has entered the presidential race ... as VP candidate Tim Walz

It took folks who had never heard of Minnesota governor Tim Walz — former high school football coach born in Nebraska — about a nanosecond this week to compare him to another aw-shucks coach from the Midwest.

“Oh my god, I just realized Tim Walz is real-life Ted Lasso,” one X user tweeted after Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris introduced the Nebraska-born Walz as her running mate.

And just like that, a beloved fictional TV character created and portrayed by Kansas City’s favorite son Jason Sudeikis has entered the 2024 presidential race.

Ted Lasso — the guy whose Midwestern-nice personality was inspired in part, plot twist, by Donald Trump.

Sudeikis, former “Saturday Night Live” star and Shawnee Mission West graduate, co-created “Ted Lasso,” the Emmy-winning sports comedy that ended last year after three seasons on Apple TV+.

Lasso is a football coach from Wichita State University hired to manage the struggling AFC Richmond soccer, er, football club in London. He is affable, optimistic, decent, inspirational, enthusiastic — characteristics that social media and political pundits quickly ascribed to Walz after Harris introduced him as “coach” at a Philadelphia rally Tuesday.

Walz coached high school football in Mankato, Minnesota.

A sampling of the social media commentary:

“Am I the only one getting serious Ted Lasso vibes from the Harris/Walz ticket?”

“Tim Walz is America’s real life Ted Lasso.”

“I’m in the UK, but trying to follow what’s going on. Since Walz was announced, it like season 4 of Ted Lasso, except Ted decided to be a politician. It’s almost indescribable, how refreshing this is. He just seems to be a genuinely decent human being.”

After the Trump campaign labeled Walz “dangerously liberal,” the liberal news site Salon wrote that the 60-year-old father of two “reads more like Ted Lasso than Che Guevara.”

Walz is a blank slate to most voters. Before Harris introduced him as her running mate Tuesday, an NPR/PBS News/Marist National poll found that 71% of respondents didn’t know enough about him to have an opinion about him.

But TV and sports fans know “Ted Lasso,” nominated for 61 Emmys and winner of 13 including lead actor in a comedy series wins for Sudeikis. And social media is having fun with the comparison.

“Tim Walz is the Ted Lasso of American politics,” reads an Instagram post in which someone put Walz in a soccer coach’s jacket.

One thing about Lasso. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are fans.

Laura Kelly, the Democratic governor of Kansas, once declared Lasso “Kansas Coach of the Year,” recognizing his “Kansas nice.”

In January 2021, then-governor of Massachusetts, Republican Charlie Baker, quoted Lasso in a speech during the bumpy roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccines.

“During tonight’s #MASOTC address, I referenced a scene from @TedLasso where Ted shared some wise words from Walt Whitman: ‘Be curious — not judgmental.’ These words are important for all of us to keep in mind during these stressful times,” he tweeted.

Later that year as Kansas City campaigned, successfully, to be a host city for the 2026 men’s World Cup, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican, made his own pitch from Washington, D.C.

He pointed out the city’s “rich history of both professional and amateur sports,” successes of the Royals and Chiefs and touted Kansas City as “the hometown of our world-renowned football coach, Ted Lasso.”

Last year Sudeikis and his cast mates met with President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden at the White House for a conversation on mental health. They found a sign that said “BELIEVE,” just like in the show, taped above a door to the Oval Office.

Sudeikis said in an interview last year that he originally created Lasso to be a more “belligerent” fellow than the coach beloved now by so many.

But Trump changed that.

In June 2015 Trump rode down an escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce he was running for president, the first time.

Sudeikis had that moment in mind when he began thinking about revisiting the Lasso character, which he created for a comedy bit in 2013.

The original coach was “belligerent,” Sudeikis told The Guardian newspaper last year. But Sudeikis was unwilling to unleash such a character onto the world when the series began in 2020 during the height of COVID and Trump’s second run for the presidency, against Biden and Harris.

So Sudeikis took Lasso in a different direction.

“It was the culture we were living in,” he told The Guardian. “I’m not terribly active online and it even affected me. Then you have Donald Trump coming down the escalator.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is silly,’ and then what he unlocked in people ... I hated how people weren’t listening to one another. Things became very binary and I don’t think that’s the way the world works.

“And, as a new parent — we had our son Otis in 2014 — it was like, ‘Boy, I don’t want to add to this.’ Yeah, I just didn’t want to portray it.”

Sudeikis isn’t known for talking publicly about politics, though he did portray presidents George W. Bush and Biden during his 10-year-run on “SNL.”

In 2018, though, he appeared at an event to support Virginia congressional candidate Leslie Cockburn, a Democrat and mother of his former partner, actress Olivia Wilde.

But in this year’s presidential election, one of Sudeikis’ fellow celebrity partners in the annual Big Slick fundraiser for Children’s Mercy has already picked a side.

Comedian David Koechner participated in the livestream fundraiser “Comics for Kamala” earlier this week alongside Ben Stiller, Whoopi Goldberg, Patton Oswalt and others.

Some Sudeikis fans are already clamoring to see him do a Lasso/Walz mash-up when “SNL” returns for its 50th season in September.

No word from Lasso himself yet.