Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, with US media reporting she has chosen a progressive policy leader and easy-going speaker from the US heartland to help win over rural white voters.
Walz, a 60-year-old U.S. Army veteran and former teacher, was elected to the House of Representatives in a Republican-leaning district in 2006 and served 12 years before being elected Minnesota governor in 2018.
As governor, Walz has pushed a progressive agenda that includes free school lunches, climate change goals, tax breaks for the middle class and expanded paid leave for Minnesota workers.
Walz has long been a supporter of women's reproductive rights, but she has also expressed conservative views while representing a rural district in the U.S. House of Representatives, defending agricultural interests and supporting gun rights.
Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, is adding another big name to the Midwest, whose home state often votes Democrat in presidential elections but is also close to key battleground states Wisconsin and Michigan.
Those states are seen as crucial in deciding this year's election, and Walz is widely seen as having the ability to connect with rural white voters who in recent years have voted for Republican Donald Trump, Harris's rival for the White House.
Harris's campaign hopes Walz's long career in the National Guard, coupled with his success as a high school football coach and funny videos about his father, will appeal to voters who are not yet committed to a second term in the White House.
Harris, 59, revived Democrats' hopes of winning the election after succeeding President Joe Biden, 81, who ended a failed re-election bid under party pressure on July 21.
Walz was relatively unknown nationally until Harris' “vice president” bid started to gain traction, but he has since risen to prominence. He is a popular lawmaker, reportedly backed by influential former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was instrumental in persuading Biden to drop out of the race.
Harris and Walz will face Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, also a Midwestern veteran, in the November 5 election.
Walz, who has sometimes donned a camouflage baseball cap and T-shirt to campaign in support of Harris, has attacked Trump and Vance as “weird,” a derogatory term that has been used by Harris’ campaign, social media and Democratic activists.
Unicorn
Walz gave Harris' fledgling campaign a new attack line in a late July interview, saying, “These are the weirdos on the other side. They want to take your book. They want to be in your exam room,” referring to banning books and women's reproductive consultations with doctors.
Walz also slammed Trump and Vance's claims that they have middle-class maturity.
“They keep talking about the middle class, the real estate tycoons who are thieves and risk investors who try to tell us that they understand who we are, they don’t know who we are,” Walz said in an interview with MSNBC.
The approach resonates with a younger generation of voters that Harris needs to re-engage. David Hogg, co-founder of the gun safety group March for Our Lives, called Harris a “great communicator.”
Walz is “a unicorn in some ways,” said Ryan Dawkins, a political science professor at Carleton College in Minnesota. He was born in a small town in rural Nebraska and has the ability to get Harris’ message across to key Democratic voters and groups the party has been unable to reach in recent years.
Dawkins has praised his ability to connect with rural voters, a group the Biden administration has been trying to reach with infrastructure spending and other hands-on policies, but so far there have been few signs of success with its messaging.
In the 2016 election, Trump won 59 percent of rural voters, and in 2020, that number rose to 65 percent, even though Trump lost the election, according to Pew.
In the 2022 gubernatorial election, Walz won with 52.27 percent of the vote, beating his Republican opponent by 44.61 percent, even though some rural Minnesotans voted for his opponent.
While Walz supports traditional Democratic beliefs on issues ranging from legal abortion to same-sex marriage to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, he has also had a history of centrist voting throughout his congressional career.
He is a staunch defender of government support for farmers and veterans, as well as gun rights, and has been honored by the National Rifle Association and featured in The Almanac of American Politics.
He later received a failing grade with the NRA after he supported gun control measures during his first gubernatorial campaign.
Walz's transition from a centrist representing his only rural district in Congress to a more progressive governor may be a response to the needs of voters in big cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul, but Dawkins said in a phone interview that the change has made him a target for Republicans.
“He risks exacerbating people’s worst fears about Kamala Harris being a San Francisco liberal,” Dawkins said.
Waltz has a ready counterattack.
“It’s a monster. Kids are eating well and going to school. Women are making their own health decisions,” Waltz said in a CNN interview in July. “So if they want to label me that way, I’m more than happy to do that.”
As state executive, Walz enacted a mask mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic and signed legislation that criminalized marital rape. He served as Minnesota's budget surplus chairman for several years before running for president again in 2022.
During the campaign, Walz has hailed the support of several influential unions, including the state AFL-CIO, firefighters, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), teachers and others.
His tenure was marked by the May 2020 killing of a white Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, a black man. Walz assigned the state's attorney general to lead the prosecution in the case, saying people “don't believe justice has been done.”
