As vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz brings rural roots, Midwestern sensibility but low profile
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Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday named as her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a moderate Democrat who when serving in Congress demonstrated the ability to work with Republican lawmakers.
“I’m all in,” Walz wrote on X. “Vice President Harris is showing us the politics of what’s possible. It reminds me a bit of the first day of school. So, let’s get this done, folks!”
Harris said of Walz that “as a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his. It’s great to have him on the team.”
During Harris’ search for a vice presidential candidate — an intense vetting process completed in just two weeks after President Biden dropped out of the race — Walz’s name emerged among other, better-known contenders from important swing states, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
Though popular at home, Walz did not have much of a national profile until his recent plainspoken critique of Republican nominee Donald Trump and Ohio’s Sen. JD Vance, his running mate — that they are “weird.” That one word has been surprisingly effective in confounding a former president known for name-calling.
“These are weird people on the other side,” Walz said in an interview with MSNBC in July. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.”
It was a language pivot after years of Democrats calling Trump a threat to democracy, and the Harris campaign latched on to it, issuing a statement that called Trump “old and quite weird.”
Walz later explained that constantly calling Trump an existential threat “gives him way too much power.”
Citing polls that show Harris closing the gap with Trump in nearly every battleground, her campaign plans to court voters in states that lean blue as well as those in the Sun Belt.
“Tim Walz would be the worst VP in history!” Trump wrote in a fundraising email after Harris’ decision was leaked Tuesday. He went on to attack Walz on immigration and environmental spending.
Walz appeared with Harris at a rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
He touched his hand to his heart as Harris introduced him to thousands of cheering supporters at Temple University’s Liacouras Center, saying Walz is a “fighter for the middle class — a patriot who believes, as I do, in the extraordinary promise of America.”
He bent his head when she described him as a governor, a husband and father, a sergeant major in the National Guard, and a high school football coach who signed up as faculty advisor for the school’s first gay-straight alliance student club.
“Wow,” Walz said. “Thank you, Madam Vice President, for the trust you put in me. ... I’m thrilled to be on this journey with you.”
He told the crowd that he shares Harris’ commitment to reaching across the aisle and improving the lives of ordinary Americans. Growing up in Nebraska and working summers on the family farm, he said, he’d learned “to work for the common good.”
“Minnesota’s strength comes from our values: our commitment to working together, to seeing past our differences, to always being willing to lending a helping hand,” Walz said.
“Now, Donald Trump, he sees the world a little differently than us,” he added. “First of all, he doesn’t know the first thing about service — he doesn’t have time for it because he’s too busy serving himself.”
In a statement Tuesday, the Trump campaign branded Walz a “dangerously liberal extremist” and said it’s “no surprise that San Francisco Liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running mate.”
The Minnesota governor “pretends to support Americans in the Heartland,” but “when the cameras are off, he believes that rural America is ‘mostly cows and rocks,’” the statement claimed.
Walz has deep rural roots, which could prove a counterpoint to Vance, whose political ascent began with his bestselling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which chronicles his upbringing in Middletown, Ohio.
Harris cited Walz’s rural bona fides as one of the deciding factors in choosing him as her running mate.
“One of the things that stood out to me about Tim is how his convictions on fighting for middle-class families run deep,” Harris said in a statement. “It’s personal.”
Often appearing in public in T-shirts and ball caps, Walz brings an amiable, Midwestern-dad sensibility to the ticket.
Walz, 60, was born in rural Nebraska and went to high school in the tiny town of Butte, where he graduated among a class of 25 students. He told the New York Times that the class included 12 cousins, so “finding someone to date was kind of a problem.”
After his father died of cancer when Walz was 19, his family relied on Social Security survivor benefit checks to make ends meet, according to the Harris campaign. He used his GI Bill benefits to help pay for college.
In 1989, Walz graduated from Chadron State College in Nebraska with a bachelor’s degree in social science education.
He moved to Mankato, Minn., a small city south of Minneapolis, in 1996. He taught social studies at Mankato West High School and helped coach the team that won the school’s first state football championship.
He and his wife, Gwen, a teacher, have a son, Gus, and a daughter, Hope.
Walz also spent 24 years in the Army National Guard, having enlisted at 17. He attained the rank of command sergeant major before retiring in 2005.
He said he first decided to get involved with politics in 2004 after trying to take a group of students to an appearance by then-President George W. Bush in Mankato. They were denied entry, he said, because one of the students sported a John F. Kerry sticker.
“Having just returned from military duty in Italy in support of Operation Enduring Freedom I wished to hear directly from the President and my students, regardless of political party, deserved to witness the historical moment of a sitting president coming to our city,” Walz wrote on Twitter, now known as X. “Above all, I was struck by how deeply divided our country was becoming that a veteran & a group of high schoolers would be turned away at the door.”
Angered by the incident, Walz volunteered for the Kerry campaign and, two years later, was elected to Congress to represent southern Minnesota’s rural, Republican-leaning 1st District. He won reelection five times.
As a congressman, he was lauded for his bipartisanship. From 2015 to 2017, more than half the bills he co-sponsored were introduced by legislators who were not Democrats.
The highest-ranking enlisted soldier to serve in the U.S. House, he was named the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in 2017.
Once embraced by the National Rifle Assn., which endorsed him and gave him an “A” rating, Walz denounced the organization after the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. He began endorsing gun control measures, including an assault weapons ban.
“The world’s changed,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2018. “I’ve changed.”
Walz was elected governor of Minnesota in 2018.
Conservatives heavily criticized Walz for his executive actions early in the COVID-19 pandemic, including stay-at-home orders, mask mandates and closures of businesses and school campuses.
What happened to all the Trump signs? Election day is just three months away, and you wouldn’t know it by visiting or driving through many rural stretches of Michigan.
Critics also said he did not do enough to quell the chaos after Minneapolis was overwhelmed by protest and mayhem after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer. Walz deployed the Minnesota National Guard three days after Floyd’s death. Some said he waited too long to act.
Despite the criticism, Walz was reelected in 2022, and recent polls show that most Minnesotans approve of his performance.
As governor, he has signed laws that codified the right to abortion and reproductive care, guaranteed free school meals to all K-12 students regardless of income, banned so-called conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ minors and vulnerable adults, and allowed immigrants without legal status to get driver’s licenses.
And like Vance, he has a taste for Diet Mountain Dew. At a rally in July, Vance joked that Democrats might call his fondness for the drink racist.
Walz’s affinity for the neon green soda has been well-documented for years. In 2022, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan posted a photo on X that showed Walz grabbing a Diet Dew from a store refrigerator.
“He’s Dew’n it again! #dadjoke” she wrote.
“Had to Dew it,” Walz responded.
In a statement Tuesday, former President Obama said that Walz’s “signature is his ability to talk like a human being and treat everyone with decency and respect.”
Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) praised Walz as someone who “will never shy away from standing up to MAGA extremists and calling out Donald Trump and JD Vance on their backward policies and hateful rhetoric.”
The selection of Walz was also celebrated by many in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
“I’m smiling a mile wide right now,” David Hogg, the gun control activist, posted Tuesday on X.
Times staff writers Noah Bierman and Jenny Jarvie contributed to this report.
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