As she pulls even or exceeds Republican candidate Donald Trump in the polls, US Vice President Kamala Harris has announced who she is taking with her into the November election as her running mate: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Before becoming governor in 2019, he served 12 years in the US House of Representatives, meaning he barely overlapped with Harris during her four years as a US Senator.
A former high school teacher and 17-year veteran of the National Guard, Walz managed to win his rural House district six times despite a heavy regional trend to the right, holding it both in the 2010 midterms that saw Democrats decimated across the country and in 2016 when Hillary Clinton nearly lost his state altogether.
As governor, Walz has become popular among progressive Democrats thanks to several concrete policies he has signed into law.
Among other things, the state has restored voting rights to people with criminal records and legalised recreational cannabis use. Minnesota also guarantees free breakfast and lunch to schoolchildren, offers a child tax credit, and has abortion and other reproductive rights codified into its constitution — all thanks to legislation Walz has signed.
These and other laws put him well in line with Harris’s agenda, and they have already earned him crucial goodwill from a progressive base whose enthusiasm Harris is only now reviving.
How he made it
Despite his depth of experience, Walz was initially one of the least-known names to appear on Harris’ shortlist.
However, once she became the party’s presumptive nominee and her accelerated hunt for a running mate began, he quickly emerged as a leading contender — not least thanks to several interviews in which he made a powerful case against Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance.
Two days after sitting US President Joe Biden announced he was ending his candidacy and endorsing Harris as his successor, Walz appeared on the popular politics show Morning Joe and rolled out what has become the Harris campaign’s main attack on Trump and his party.
“We do not like what has happened, where we can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with our uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary,” he said. “These guys are just weird. They’re running for he-man women-haters club or something. That’s not what people are interested in.”
The “weird” epithet has now been used by the Harris campaign in official press releases and throughout its social media, targeting Trump’s public behaviour and erratic speech as well as Vance’s apparent preoccupation with a supposed social decline allegedly caused by childless women.
Walz steadily began appearing in more and more places as the “veepstakes” continued, steadily developing something of an online fanbase as previously released social media clips were recirculated — several of them featuring fun days out with his daughter, Hope.
In a sign he was being seriously considered for the ticked, the campaign deployed him on its now-famous “White Dudes for Harris” fundraising Zoom call, where he appeared alongside figures like Mark Hamill and Jeff Bridges to raise some $4 million (€3.6m) in campaign donations.
On that call, as he has before, Walz explained that his own family is an illustration of how the right’s increasingly extreme position on abortion and reproduction would affect the lives of millions of people: his daughter was conceived via IVF, a process that an increasing number of hardline conservatives are attempting to ban because it can involve the destruction of fertilised eggs.
“Gwen and I have two beautiful children because of reproductive health care like IVF,” he wrote on Facebook earlier this year. “This issue is deeply personal to our family and so many others.”
“Don’t let these guys get away with this by telling you they support IVF when their handpicked judges oppose it. Actions speak louder than words, and their actions are clear. They’re bringing anti-science government into your exam room, bedroom, and classroom.”
