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The week after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, Minnesota governor Tim Walz and a host of Democratic governors gave a press conference firmly stating their support for the president. During the Republican National Convention, Walz showed up in neighboring Wisconsin for counter-programming.
Then, Biden announced he would not seek re-election, and passed the torch to Kamala Harris. All of a sudden, the former high-school football coach with a heavy midwestern accent — also a former congressman who represented a district that voted for Donald Trump — found himself in the race to be Harris’s running mate.
Walz faced stiff competition from contenders such as Arizona senator Mark Kelly, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania. As time went on, rumors swirled, especially around Shapiro — but ultimately, Harris picked Walz on Tuesday morning.
“Someone like him or someone like Governor Beshear [as a veep pick] would be absolutely beneficial to competing for rural votes,” Matt Barron, a political consultant who worked with Walz in the past and specializes in electing Democrats in rural areas, told The Independent ahead of the announcement.
Walz has also earned plaudits for passing a series of progressive policies, such as free school meals for children regardless of income status, paid family leave, paid sick leave, and gun legislation.
“It’s one of those things where Minnesotans are having this [moment], like, ‘Oh my gosh, do we have to share him with the rest of the country?’” Erin Maye Quade, who serves in Minnesota’s legislature as a senator, told The Independent. “This was a really lovely secret that we kept from the rest of the country. Like, they still think we’re flyover world.”
Walz, who calls himself the “anti-Tommy Tuberville,” delivered a pep talk during the White Dudes for Harris Zoom call.
“How often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world?” he said. “And how often in the world do you make that b*****d wake up afterwards and know that a Black woman kicked his ass and sent him on the road?”
But since his rise to prominence, Walz has set the main tone for Democrats by hitting their Republican opponents with one word: weird.
“These are weird people on the other side,” he said on MSNBC last month. “They want to take books away. They want to be in your exam room.”
Since then, Harris’s campaign team, along with Democrats as a whole, have glommed onto the idea that their opponents are weird. The term has irritated numerous Republicans, from JD Vance to former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. And it might just have been Walz’s ticket to becoming Harris’s teammate.
“I think the governor will also be an outstanding contender for the job, and he is really demonstrating over these last few weeks ... what those of us in Minnesota have known for a long time. He’s a straight shooter who knows how to talk to people like he’s a human being,” senator Tina Smith of Minnesota told The Independent.
Some progressives also appreciate that Walz has taken a more empathetic tone toward activists who are worried about Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. When a large number of Minnesotans voted “uncommitted” in the state primary, he said on CNN: “Their message is clear that they think this is an intolerable situation and that we can do more, and I think the president’s hearing that.”
“I think that [Walz] brings something special to the table, in the sense of, while there is no bad option, he’s able to speak to this group that feels so disenfranchised in a way that no one else can,” Sunjay Muralitharan, the national vice-president for the College Democrats of America, told The Independent.
Being on a ticket as a progressive champion is a peculiar bookend for Walz, who won his first election to Congress as a Blue Dog Democrat representing a rural district in 2006. That year, Democrats recruited numerous pro-gun rural candidates and veterans like Walz, who was a command sergeant major in the National Guard.
But in 2016, as Donald Trump began to dominate in rural areas, Walz won re-election by a little more than 2,549 votes after Trump won his district.
In the next election, he chose to run for governor. And in 2018, after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, he gave away money he had received from the National Rifle Association – an act that has earned him praise from activists focused on ending gun violence, such as March for Our Lives co-founder David Hogg.
Since then, he’s passed a red flag law as governor and has received “F” ratings from the NRA.
Trump has also criticized Walz for allowing rioting in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd.
“I sent in the National Guard to save Minneapolis,” Trump said at a rally last month — though actually it was Walz, not Trump, who deployed the National Guard, albeit later than some in Minneapolis wanted.
Walz has stayed firmly on the offensive as the election cycle continues. When Trump held a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina recently and spoke about the fictional Silence of the Lambs character Hannibal Lecter as if he were a real person, Walz went to his usual response on X/Twitter.
“Say it with me: Weird,” he wrote.
