Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been chosen to run alongside Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and while current polling shows that most Americans aren’t familiar with him past polling shows he is popular with voters.
Unlike Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, Walz has decades of political experience, having first been elected to represent Minnesota’s 1st district in the House of Representatives in 2006 with 52 percent of the vote.
Despite his experience, an ABC News and Ipsos survey from July found that out of 1,200 Americans, most did not know who Walz was.
Tracking 18 years of Walz’s re-election and approval rating, can lend some early insight into what he brings to the Democratic ticket and how he compares to his counterpart on the Republican side.
From 2006 until 2016, Walz’s constituents in Minnesota’s first district re-elected him, often by a considerable majority every two years.
When he ran for governor in 2018, he came away with 53.9 percent of Minnesota’s vote – the largest margin a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate won by in more than 30 years. In 2022, he was re-elected with 52 percent of the vote.
His re-elections are often tied to a respectable approval rating. A January 2024 approval rating poll, conducted by local Minnesota news outlet KAAL-TV, found that 55 percent of respondents thought Walz was doing a good job.
When another local outlet asked people who Harris should pick as her running mate, 22 percent indicated their governor would be a good choice.
Those numbers are slightly higher than the ones Vance has seen from his state of Ohio – though as a freshman senator, he does not have the same amount of polling information.
Vance, a businessman and memoirist-turned-politician, initially won his seat in the Seante in 2022 after obtaining 53 percent of the vote.
The Hillbilly Elegy author earned notability from his New York Times bestselling memoir, which later spurred a Netflix movie. An enthusiastic endorsement from Donald Trump also helped put his name on the map.
A 2023 survey by Morning Consult found that he had a 44 percent approval rating and 34 percent disapproval rating from voters in his state.
But voters across the nation seem less passionate about Vance as a vice president candidate. Polling from NPR, PBS and Marist College found that Vance has a 33 percent disapproval rating – a drop from 28 percent when he was first made Trump’s running mate.
FiveThirtyEight, which compiles polling from across the nation and creates an average, puts Vance at a 40.6 percent unfavorable rating.
Vance has found himself at the center of various strange controversies since becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee – resurfaced anti-abortion comments, inconsistent feelings about Trump and allegations of becoming intimate with a couch may contribute to the public’s opinion of him.
Future polling will indicate how voters may feel about Walz joining Harris’s ticket – once the public gets to know the Minnesota governor.