In Kamala Harris’s “veepstakes” – the search for a running mate to take on Donald Trump and JD Vance – the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, came from relative obscurity to seize the glittering prize. So who is he and what should you know about him?
He’s ‘Minnesota nice’
According to the Star Tribune, the well-known phrase refers to “Minnesotans’ tendency to be polite and friendly, yet emotionally reserved; our penchant for self-deprecation and unwillingness to draw attention to ourselves; and, most controversially, our maddening habit of substituting passive-aggressiveness for direct confrontation”. Most of that holds true for Walz, 60, who was born in Nebraska but whose cheerful and friendly demeanour has made him popular in office and even seems to make his political attack lines more effective, as when he went after Donald Trump and JD Vance for being “weird”, the gambit that propelled him into the reckoning to be running mate to Harris.
He’s not that ‘Minnesota nice’
Walz was a high school football coach, a profession known for displaying and encouraging aggression – active rather than passive at that. For more than a decade at Mankato West high school, Walz was defensive coordinator, working out how to best tackle and silence opposing attackers. As he told Pod Save America this year, when he arrived, the school had lost 27 games in a row. “We said, ‘This is nonsense. Let’s turn this thing around.’ Three years later we were state champions, and now they’re a powerhouse.”
He was a sergeant in the national guard
Walz spent 24 years in the national guard, out of Nebraska, and then Minnesota. As reported by Stars and Stripes, he enlisted as an infantryman at 17, encouraged by his father, a Korean war veteran, then put himself through college on the GI bill. Re-enlisting after 9/11, Walz deployed during natural disasters on US soil and to Italy in support of operations in Afghanistan.
In 2005, Walz retired as a command sergeant major in the artillery – and faced criticism for leaving as his battalion prepared to go to Iraq. In comments publicised by the US army as Covid struck, Walz, the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever voted into Congress, said: “In the guard, you put your community first. Everything you do, you do to ensure the health, safety and security of the people who are depending on you. And as governor, those are principles of servant leadership that I rely on every day.”
He’s good at winning elections
Walz was a high school social studies teacher – and adviser to LGBTQ+ students – until, in 2006, he beat a Republican incumbent in a rural area to win a seat in Congress. After six terms in the US House, he ran for governor of Minnesota in 2018. He won that race, against the Republican Jeff Johnson, by 11 points. First-term challenges included the response to Covid-19, imposing and maintaining lockdowns and school and business closures, and the fallout from the police murder of George Floyd, an epochal event that made Minneapolis both the focus of worldwide protests for racial justice and the site of serious rioting. Running for re-election in 2022, against Scott Jensen, Walz won comfortably again.
He’s popular with progressives
On defeating Jensen, Walz told Minnesotans they had “made a conscious choice … to reject negative, divisive politics and choose the whole path of each and every one of us to be the best we possibly can”. On Tuesday, campaigners saluting Harris’s choice of running mate emphasised Walz’s progressive achievements. NextGen Pac, a youth-led group, said Walz had passed “significant legislation … that protects our rights, fights for climate justice, and builds a stronger economy for everyday people … enshrining abortion rights, establishing paid sick and family leave, enacting a nation-leading child tax credit, and signing 40 climate initiatives into law”.
Walz has also overseen significant gun control reform, a notable achievement from a politician once endorsed by the National Rifle Association who was encouraged by his daughter to come out in favour of an assault weapons ban, after a series of school shootings.
He enrages Republicans
The announcement that Harris had picked Walz was greeted with predictable rightwing attacks. Foreshadowing Vance’s invective in Philadelphia at lunchtime, the Republican National Committee called Walz “a far-left radical … weak on border security” (presumably the southern border, hundreds of miles from Minnesota, rather than its northern one with Canada), and slammed him for supporting universal healthcare, taxation to pay for such measures, and abortion and voting rights. Walz, the RNC said, is also “extremely woke … a climate radical who wants to phase out fossil fuels” and “soft on crime”.
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The Republican National Committee also highlighted a remark in which Walz discussed the Minnesota electoral map in terms familiar both to students of national politics and those engaged by his folksy attacks on Trump and Vance: “You see those maps,” Walz said in Minneapolis in 2017. “Red and blue and there’s all that red across there. And Democrats go into depression over it. It’s mostly rocks and cows that are in that red area.”
He’s a family man
Walz’s wife, Gwen Walz, is a public school teacher like her husband and also a prominent campaigner for educational reform, in particular a champion of improving education in prisons as a means of reducing reoffending. Gwen Walz is also the mother of two children, Hope, 23, and Gus, 17, born with the help of in vitro fertilisation, or IVF – treatment under threat from Republicans and rightwing Christians seeking further victories after the removal of federal abortion rights. “If you have never personally gone through the hell of infertility, I guarantee you someone you know has,” Walz said in March, during his state of the state address.
Walz’s children have appeared with him in public. At the Minnesota state fair last year, he told Hope, a vegetarian, she could have a turkey corn dog. “Turkey is meat,” Hope said.
“Not in Minnesota,” her dad said. “Turkey’s special.”
He knows a bit about China
Thanks to a Harvard-run program, Walz taught in China for a year – it happened to be 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square protests and brutal government crackdown – and as a result he speaks some Mandarin. In 1994, he and Gwen spent their honeymoon in China, on a trip they had arranged for a group of students. According to Gwen Walz’s official state biography, the couple continued to arrange such trips through 2003.
He doesn’t drink
In September 1995, when he was 31, Walz was stopped while driving at 96mph in a 55mph zone. Having failed a sobriety test, he pleaded guilty to a charge of reckless driving and paid a $200 fine. Walz has acknowledged the incident and said he no longer drinks. His preferred tipple is Diet Mountain Dew – coincidentally, also favored by Vance, the Republican pick for vice-president.
His name is a mystery to some
Is it “Waltz”, as in the dance, or “Walls”, as in the things that hold up roofs, or even “Wal-tz” as in Walmart? Turns out it’s “Waalls”, as in “Walls” but with a slightly longer “a”. He says it that way himself.