Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced this morning that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz would be her running mate, opting for the rural Midwesterner over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
Walz, 60, went from generally beloved governor, largely unknown outside his own state, to vice presidential frontrunner seemingly overnight. Following former President Donald Trump’s naming of JD Vance as the Republican’s number two man, the internet blew up with stories of Vance’s dishonest retellings of his personal history and insane views on pretty much everything. In Midwestern fashion, Walz cut through all the noise and summed up Vance and MAGA folks in general with a single word that continues to resonate: weird.
As governor, Walz has a track record of pushing for legislation that actually improves the lives of Minnesotans, from a new Amtrak route between St. Paul and Chicago that turned a profit (one of only two state-sponsored routes in the country that can say that) in its first month of operation to laws mandating higher use of clean-energy alternatives and e-bike tax credits. He advocated for the legalization of recreational cannabis when he was campaigning for governor in 2017, and he signed recreational marijuana into law in 2023.
He also opposes vouchers to send public money to private schools and supports lowering tuition at public universities. And while Arkansas’s governor was signing laws that rolled back child-labor protections and sought to gut public schools in the state, Walz was enacting a bill to provide free school meals — both breakfast and lunch — for Minnesota students at participating schools, regardless of their family’s income.
Walz is similarly strong on workers’ rights. He signed a law last year that banned non-compete clauses in employment contracts. He mandated paid sick leave for employees, increased safety inspections and gave construction workers more protection against wage theft.
Like Vance, Walz brings military experience to the ticket. Unlike Vance, however, Walz did not simply spend four years in service as resume padding. Walz spent 24 years in the Army National Guard, enlisting when he was 17 and reaching the rank of command sergeant major before retiring in 2005.
Walz taught high school geography and social studies — first in Nebraska, then in Minnesota — before he got into politics. In fact, Walz credits an event from his teaching days as the impetus for his getting into politics in the first place, saying he decided to run for office in 2004 after he and some of his students were denied entry to a George W. Bush speech because the students had volunteered for Democrats.
When Walz ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006, despite running in Minnesota’s conservative-leaning 1st Congressional District, he was a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage. This was not political opportunism; Walz had a track record of LGBT+ support. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2018:
Tim Walz was an enlisted soldier in the Minnesota National Guard in 1999 and defensive coordinator of the Mankato West High School football team. A student at the school, where Walz taught geography, wanted to start a gay-straight alliance.
This was three years after the president, a Democrat, signed a law forbidding same-sex marriage. Soldiers suspected of being gay in Walz’s own unit could be discharged from the military. But Walz, now Minnesota’s Democratic candidate for governor, had seen the bullying some students endured and agreed to be the group’s faculty adviser.
“It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz said. In other words, he would be a symbol that disparate worlds could coexist peacefully.
Walz served six terms in the House, from 2007 until 2017. At the time he was sworn in, he was the highest-ranking retired enlisted soldier to serve in Congress and the first Democrat to hold Minnesota’s 1st District seat since 1995. He served on the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, the Armed Services Committee and the House Agricultural Committee. While in D.C., Walz voted to raise the minimum wage, support stem-cell research and allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. He voted against a law that prohibited federal funding for abortion services, and for the Affordable Care Act.
On Arkansas Twitter, reaction to the Walz pick was generally enthusiastic, with moderates and progressives happily sharing memes and applauding the choice. A funnier reaction came from Sanders, who tweeted this generic thought moments after the choice was announced:
“Far left.” Despite days of knowing it would either be Walz or Shapiro, all Sanders could muster when Walz was announced was a repeat of the same meaningless dreck she spouts about anyone to the political left of Mussolini.
Beyond Sanders’ uninspired attacks, the other trope being used as a knock on Walz is that Shapiro would have helped Harris win Pennsylvania, while Minnesota is already a lock for Democrats. This is silly, frankly. First, if Harris cannot win Pennsylvania without Shapiro on the ticket, she never had a real chance to win the presidential election anyway. Second, there is no reason Shapiro cannot continue to campaign on Harris’ behalf in Pennsylvania and sing Walz’s praises as VP, so there’s also no reason to suspect that picking Walz hurts Harris’s chances in Pennsylvania. And that is without even getting into how Shapiro carried a lot of potential baggage as a running mate.
Is Walz perfect? Of course not. But then, expecting a candidate to be perfect is ridiculous. It’s how you wind up with bland, uninspiring candidates, since conventional wisdom acts like boring is almost as good as perfect.
Walz is perfect for Harris’s campaign in 2024, however. He’s a military veteran, an outdoorsman, a hunter, a fisherman, a sports fan, a teacher, a coach, a congressman and a governor. He’s pro-choice and an LGBTQ+ ally.
And, perhaps most importantly, he’s not weird.