Vice President Kamala Harris has picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate, adding a popular Midwestern state executive to the Democratic ticket as the party prepares to hold key northern states this fall.
Harris’ campaign sent text messages to supporters Tuesday morning, calling Walz “a battle-tested leader who has an incredible track record of getting things done for Minnesota families” and asking for donations to support the new ticket.
In choosing Walz, who is in his second term and also served 12 years in Congress, Harris will have at No. 2 someone with a proven track record of winning over white, working-class voters in Rust Belt states while also boasting a track record robustly progressive.
Democrats hope the combination of attributes will help the Harris-Walz ticket bolster support in the former “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — longtime Democratic strongholds at the presidential level that Donald Trump flipped in 2016 and Joe Biden went back. 2020. This year, they were seen as the most viable path to victory for Biden, and now Harris.
Walz, 60, was initially seen as a longshot in a field of vice presidential candidates. That list included the party’s rising stars, some of whom have been mentioned as future presidential candidates, including Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who praised Walz in a statement and said he was “fully committed to electing the Harris-Walz ticket.”
Now Harris has chosen a governing partner who has at times leaned into a folksy Midwestern reputation while also proving to be a reliable attack dog against Trump.
Walz’s experiences early in life, as a public school teacher and member of the Army National Guard, could also bolster his ability to speak to different voting blocs — including veterans and organized labor — that Harris will need to win in November.
Ultimately, Harris had very strong chemistry with Walz when they met Sunday at his residence, according to four sources familiar with the selection process, playing a key role in his decision because she was clearer with him than she was. with the other main candidates. Harris also appreciates how different Walz is from her in terms of the contrast he can provide, sources said.
A fifth source close to the process put it this way: “Is this someone you would like to have lunch with every week for four years?”
But Walz begins the campaign largely unknown: A new NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Monday showed that 71% of Americans said they either had no opinion about Walz or had never heard of him. Another 17% viewed him favorably, while 12% viewed him unfavorably. Both campaigns will now race to define it.
Walz’s path to the entrance
Walz, a Nebraska native, enlisted in the National Guard when he was 17 and served for more than two decades in national and international deployments. He later was a social studies teacher and football coach in Mankato, about 80 miles south of Minneapolis, before winning a congressional seat in a largely rural and agricultural district in 2006.
He represented Minnesota’s 1st District for 12 years before his successful run for governor in 2018. A 1995 reckless driving arrest in Nebraska, during which, an official said, Walz failed a field sobriety test, emerged in his campaigns for the House and governor, but he was elected anyway. Walz called it a “gut-check moment” in an interview with Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2018, saying he later stopped drinking.
Walz’s allies have spoken frequently about how his experience representing rural communities is much needed in the party, noting that he was reelected in a red-leaning district — a district that was nearly evenly divided in 2012 but has swung strongly to Trump in 2016 — and could help Democrats compete for some moderate or conservative voters skeptical of Trump this time around.
Walz also had the most experience on Capitol Hill of anyone on Harris’ short list, with relationships in Congress that could help a new president move a legislative agenda forward.
As governor, Walz oversaw an abundance of progressive political accomplishments – particularly during his second term, during which Democrats also controlled both chambers of the Legislature.
He signed laws protecting abortion rightslegalizing recreational marijuanarestricting access to weapons and providing legal refuge for trans youth whose access to gender affirmation and other medical care has been restricted elsewhere. Progressives elsewhere have pointed to Minnesota as a case study in how to effectively use the power of a legislative trifecta to achieve policy priorities.
Walz also enacted laws expanding paid family leaveprohibiting most non-compete agreementsproviding universal school lunch for students and capping the price of insulin in Minnesota (three years before Biden did it nationally) — a list of legislative victories that his colleagues and supporters said would translate nationally.
In recent days, Walz has ramped up the publicity, testing lines of attack against Trump and Senator JD Vance in a series of media appearances.
In an interview at the end of July in MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” he branded Trump and Vance as “weird,” gaining wider attention. Harris herself began using the “weird” line almost immediately.
The pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., immediately painted Walz as “incompetent” in a statement and called him and Harris “both far-left radicals who don’t know how to govern.” Karoline Leavitt, press secretary for the Trump campaign, called Walz a “West Coast wannabe” who tried to “reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State.”
Walz used his preselection media appearances to attack the Republican ticket, emphasizing its strong cultural ties to the middle of the country — and to demonstrate to Democrats how he would campaign to win over those voters.
“What I know is that people like JD Vance don’t know anything about small-town America,” Walz said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on July 23. “My town had 400 people, 24 children in my graduating class, 12 were cousins. And he gets it all wrong.
“It’s not about hate. The golden rule is to mind your own business,” Walz said, adding that “Republican policies are what destroyed rural America. books to read.”
“And what I think Kamala Harris knows is uniting people around shared values, strong public schools, strong unions that create the middle class, affordable and accessible health care, those are the things,” Walz said.
Choosing Walz is not without risk. While his selection highlights Democrats’ effort to aggressively pursue Midwestern voters, it does not bring a specific advantage to the battleground state: Minnesota has not been in the red in a presidential race since 1972.
Additionally, as Walz’s stock has risen in recent days, critics have reintroduced questions about his governing record. They include concerns about the delay in calling in the National Guard when protests took over Minneapolis following the killing of George Floyd by city police officers in May 2020, as well as the fact that the largest case of pandemic fraud in the US happened under the its supervision. MAGA Inc. got both points right in its press release after news of Walz’s selection broke.
Another alleged contributor to Walz’s vice presidential chances early on was his role as co-chairman of the Democratic National Convention’s rules committee — a job that, in the chaotic days after Biden dropped out of the race, led him to help Harris win. quickly become the party’s presumptive candidate.
Any potential criticism about a conflict of interest was largely rendered moot when precisely no high-profile competitors challenged Harris for the nomination.
Walz told reporters that “anyone [who] If you want to put your name in “be nominated” you can do so.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
