Until about two weeks ago, Tim Walz was on nobody’s shortlist of running mates for Kamala Harris. This is not an insult to the Minnesota governor. Minnesota is not a crucial swing state. And Walz, a 60-year-old former geography teacher-turned-congressman-turned-governor with the genial bearing of “a guy you would meet at a backyard barbecue in the Midwest”, as one colleague described him, was not exactly a rising star of the Democratic Party or a well-known national figure. But then he went on television and called Donald Trump and JD Vance “weird”.
“They want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room,” Walz said during the MSNBC interview on 23 July. “These are weird ideas.” He posted a clip on Twitter, which at the time of writing has 5.6 million views. More importantly, the term “weird” immediately permeated the Democratic political firmament. Within days, Harris had worked the attack line into her campaign speeches and prominent Democrats, including the top vice-presidential contenders, could not stop talking about how “weird” their Republican opponents were.
Walz embarked on a blitz of television studios, podcasts and campaign events, expounding on his “weird” philosophy. Whereas Democrats had previously tended towards grave warnings about Trump and Vance as an existential threat to democracy, Walz poked fun at them. “These guys are just weird, that’s who they are,” Walz told supporters in St Paul, Minnesota, on 27 July. “But we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.” The New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein spoke for many on the left when he asked: “Is Tim Walz the Midwestern dad Democrats need?”
On 6 August, Harris decided that the answer to that question was yes, asking Walz to be her running mate. “It is the honor of my lifetime to join Kamala Harris in this campaign,” Walz wrote in a social media post. “I’m all in.”
Born in rural Nebraska in 1964, Walz likes to talk about how he grew up in a small town of 400 people, contrasting his own experience of life in the American Midwest with the version depicted in JD Vance’s bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. “My hillbilly cousins did not go to Yale,” he told one interviewer recently. “But I’ll tell you what they did. They contributed to our community and they’re proud of it.” Vance is right to diagnose the anger of struggling communities in the former manufacturing heartlands, Walz says, but wrong about where to direct the blame. “We’re angry because robber barons like him gutted middle America,” he said. “They took our jobs.”
After graduating high school at 17, Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard, part of the US reserve forces, where he served in a field artillery battalion and rose to the rank of command sergeant major over the next 24 years before he retired in 2005. He studied social science education at university and taught English in China for a year after graduating in 1989, before becoming a high-school geography teacher in Minnesota. He met his future wife, Gwen, a fellow teacher, at the school, who complained that his voice was so loud it interrupted her lessons.
Walz was the first faculty adviser to the high school’s gay-straight alliance and coached the football team to win the state championship in 1999. He volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004 and ran for Congress in 2006, defeating the Republican incumbent and winning re-election five times in a predominantly rural, previously Republican-leaning district. He was elected governor of Minnesota in 2018 and re-elected in 2022, where he has pushed through legislation to provide free meals for all schoolchildren and vowed to make Minnesota the best state in the country to raise a family.
Walz is also a passionate hunter, who has boasted of his prowess at shooting pheasants, but he has supported an assault weapon ban and tighter restrictions on gun ownership since the mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. He subsequently denounced the National Rifle Association (NRA) and said that he would donate the equivalent of the money they had previously donated to his campaigns to charity. Walz has attacked attempts by some Republicans to block access to in vitro fertilisation (IVF), noting that he and his wife relied on fertility treatments to conceive both their children. Walz has shared details of their seven-year struggle before their first child was born, telling a Minnesota newspaper, “There’s a reason we named her Hope.”
The Republican line of attack on Walz will be that he is too left wing. Trump and Vance have already been pushing the message that Harris is a “dangerously liberal” progressive from California. Immediately after Harris selected Walz as her running mate, the Trump campaign released a statement attacking him as a “dangerously liberal extremist” and “West Coast wannabe”. They will argue that Harris has caved to the demands of the left, which mounted a concerted campaign against Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as the vice-presidential pick in the days leading up to the announcement. Shapiro, who is Jewish, was attacked by members of his own party over his past support for private-school vouchers, fracking and most significantly Israel, with pro-Palestinian campaigners calling him “genocide Josh”. By contrast, Walz had emerged as the consensus choice among progressives and the anti-Shapiro crowd. Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2016, publicly backed Walz.
Yet it was not only progressives who pushed for Walz. Shaun Fain, the head of the United Auto Workers union, threw his support behind him. As, more quietly behind the scenes, did the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. After Walz was announced as Harris’s choice on 6 August, Pelosi pushed back against claims that his politics are too far left. “He’s right down the middle,” she said in an interview on the popular breakfast news show Morning Joe. “He’s a heartland of America Democrat.”
Unlike Shapiro, who is wildly popular in Pennsylvania, a must-win battleground state for the Democrats, Walz does not come with a significant home state advantage. Minnesota should already be well within Harris’s grasp. She will hope instead that his combination of Midwestern appeal, small-town roots, and backing from veterans’ groups and teachers’ unions will enable him to push back against Trump and Vance in the crucial northern rustbelt states and assuage swing voters’ concerns. In her first major test in this campaign, Harris has chosen party unity, concerned that Shapiro’s candidacy would have divided the left. Certainly, Tim Walz offends no one, but the affable Minnesota governor will now need to show that he can win.
[See more: Can Kamala Harris save America?]
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