Tim Walz’s Folksy Appeal Makes Him a Contender for Harris Running Mate
(Bloomberg) -- Tim Walz was retired from the Army National Guard and a high school social studies teacher and football coach in southern Minnesota when he made his first run for public office.
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Now, after serving six terms in the US House and as Minnesota governor for more than five years, Walz, 60, is being seriously considered as Kamala Harris’s running mate.
Minnesota Democrats say Walz would help Harris win the critical Blue Wall battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and appeal to rural and swing voters with his plain-spoken, down-to-Earth style. That was on full display when his characterization of Donald Trump and Republicans as “weird” went viral.
“It’s not just his folksy way of talking about these issues but the fact that he’s authentic, he’s genuine, people can relate to him,” said Ken Martin, a friend and chairman of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
Martin said he met Walz in 2004 when Walz volunteered for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s campaign. Walz, he said, was motivated to volunteer after taking students to a rally for President George W. Bush and getting kicked out because one had a Kerry sticker.
Walz challenged a six-term Republican congressman in 2006 in a mostly Republican and rural district and won in one of the state’s biggest election upsets that year.
Walz was born in the small town of West Point, Nebraska, and says there were “24 kids in my class, 12 cousins.” He enlisted in the Army National Guard at 17 and retired 24 years later as command sergeant major. He’s the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever to serve in Congress.
Walz taught in China and Nebraska, where he met his future wife, Gwen Whipple. They moved to her native southern Minnesota in 1996, where they both taught at Mankato West High School. In Congress, Walz emphasized veterans’ and transportation issues.
As Minnesota governor, Walz enacted a sweeping legislative agenda last year after Democrats won the state legislature with a one-seat margin in the Senate. It included paid family and medical leave with the highest child tax credit in the US and caught the eye of former President Barack Obama.
“If you need a reminder that elections have consequences, check out what’s happening in Minnesota,” Obama said in social media posts last year.
That agenda would provide plenty of fodder for Republicans to label Walz a liberal like Harris, said Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman David Hann. He said Walz’s handling of pandemic lockdowns and the unrest in Minneapolis after the 2020 murder of George Floyd would also be issues.
“He would be, and rightfully so, considered to be a very left-wing progressive linked up with Kamala Harris and other left-wing liberal progressives,” Hann said. “They would be just two peas in a pod.”
But friends say Walz defies political stereotypes. He’s an avid hunter and gun owner who likes to wear jeans and a baseball cap at public events and drinks too much Diet Mountain Dew like Ohio Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate.
“We’re in a time when things feel vitriolic and polemical,” said Jacob Reitan, a Minneapolis attorney who was a student of Gwen Walz’s and befriended Walz and his wife over their support for gay rights. “And then you’ve got Tim Walz, who’s authentic and kind and caring and who believes in hope. His daughter’s name is Hope, for God’s sakes.”
Not being a governor from a swing state like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and others being considered as Harris’s running mate “is a real obstacle and out of his control,” said former Republican Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who ran for president in 2011.
But Walz’s 12 years in Congress would allow him to be a governing partner for Harris — who knows what’s required of a vice president, said Larry Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota.
“To have someone like Tim Walz, who knows the bureaucracy, who knows Congress, is a big plus for the kind of meat-and-potatoes governing that will be required,” Jacobs said.
R.T. Rybak a former Minneapolis mayor and friend of Walz’s, said he thinks the governor would decisively beat Vance in a debate because the Ohio senator is “a hundred percent inauthentic, and Tim Walz is as authentic as it gets.”
“This is the exact same battle he’s been in for his whole career,” Rybak said. “He just happened to do it in his school and now he’s happening to do it in at the highest level of politics, but he’s the same person fighting for the same values and fairness.”
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