Tim Walz’s life story is appealing, but his record is complex
Almost everything about the scene in a packed 10,000-seat basketball arena in Philadelphia on the evening of August 6th would have been unimaginable just six weeks ago. First, there was the sheer size and Swiftie-like zeal of a Democratic crowd waving their glow-in-the-dark wristbands, fired by belief that their ticket might actually win in November. Then there were the star attractions on stage: Kamala Harris, now formally ratified as the party’s presidential nominee, and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, her new vice-presidential running-mate. Not since 1968 has one of America’s two major parties switched out a presumptive presidential nominee months before an election. On current evidence of the move’s effects, they might consider doing so more often.
The rally’s purpose was to begin selling the rich Americana in Mr Walz’s biography. Ms Harris selected him after a moderately fraught veepstakes in which progressives campaigned to prevent the possible choice of Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, and who has voiced support for Israel and school choice. The left rallied around Mr Walz and Ms Harris went their way. Republicans accused her of capitulating to her party’s base, but many Democrats rejoiced, as was evident at Mr Walz’s raucous debut.
Mr Walz vaulted to prominence in recent weeks as an energetic advocate for Ms Harris on television. It was his critique of Republicans—“these guys are just weird”—that became a popular Democratic attack line. Mr Walz’s personal history also contrasts with Ms Harris’s Californian upbringing. He was born in rural Nebraska in 1964—six months before Ms Harris—and he likes to say that half his school classmates were his cousins. He taught social studies for two decades, served in the National Guard for 24 years, reaching the rank of a command sergeant major before retiring in 2005. He is a committed hunter, and in his early years in Congress he was given an A rating by the National Rifle Association. Ms Harris seemed particularly impressed by Mr Walz’s long-ago side job as a “Friday Night Lights” American-football coach at his high school.
Ms Harris describes her running-mate’s life story, which is appealingly free of law school or Wall Street fortune-hunting, as a testament to her campaign’s Bidenesque focus on the middle class. At the rally, Ms Harris made no mention of foreign policy or immigration, and her forays into domestic policy largely stuck to familiar ground. Apart from relentless attacks on Donald Trump, Ms Harris’s still-incipient campaign remains long on autobiography and short on an agenda for governing. This is likely to continue through the made-for-tv Democratic convention in Chicago later this month—and perhaps all the way to the election in November, if strong polling numbers allow the campaign to get away with it.
The Trump campaign’s glaringly obvious strategy is to paint Ms Harris and Mr Walz as “dangerous liberals”. At a competing rally in Philadelphia on the 6th, J.D. Vance, Mr Trump’s running-mate, called Mr Walz “one of the most far-left radicals in the entire United States government”. The rhetoric was over-the-top, but it raises the question of what sort of Democrat Mr Walz has actually been during his Minnesota career, and therefore, what his selection says about Ms Harris’s still-elusive brand of liberalism.
The answer is nuanced. Mr Walz first won office in 2006, when he stood for Congress in Minnesota’s first district, a heavily rural area where only one other Democrat had won in the preceding century. Ken Martin, the chairman of the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party (dfl), Minnesota’s affiliate of the Democratic Party, says that he remembers hearing of Mr Walz’s candidacy and thinking: “There’s no way in hell he’s going to win.” But Mr Walz got 53% of the vote. During 12 years in Congress, he won marksmanship contests against other gun-toting members and voted with moderates in his party caucus, which helped him hold onto his district even as other rural Democrats lost theirs.
It is as Minnesota’s governor, since his initial election in 2018, that Mr Walz has developed an unambiguously progressive record. When he was re-elected in 2022, his party won the state house and senate. Mr Walz used the opportunity of this trifecta to increase spending on public schools, introduce free school meals, create a system of paid family leave (due to start operating in 2026), legalise marijuana, expand background checks for gun buyers and strengthen abortion rights. He does not apologise for this record. “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” he told attendees on a fundraising call in late July, adding that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighbourliness.”
Heartland and soul
That folksy formulation reflects a long tradition of progressive and populist politics in the upper Midwest. Mr Walz is best understood as part of the same heartland liberal strain that produced other national candidates, including two vice-presidents from Minnesota who failed in their bids to win the White House: Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Walter Mondale in 1984, whom Ronald Reagan defeated in a landslide.
Mr Walz’s greatest vulnerability to attack advertising down the campaign stretch may arise from the riots that hit Minneapolis in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd. Mr Walz waited a full day to respond to a call from the city’s mayor to send in the National Guard. While he hesitated, a mob set a police station on fire. Mr Walz argued that the National Guard could not be deployed that quickly, but Republicans are already attacking him for being soft on looters and aligned with left advocates who want to “defund the police”. Rather awkwardly for them, there is tape of then President Trump calling Mr Walz and praising him for calling in the Guard and subduing the riots.
Mr Walz has in fact consistently been a thorn in the side of the defund caucus and a strong proponent of policing. In 2021 the Minneapolis city council proposed to genuinely defund the Minneapolis police department and replace it with a new department of public safety. When the idea came to a public ballot, Mr Walz opposed it. Last year he proposed making more than half a billion dollars available to hire police.
The day after their debut in Philadelphia, Ms Harris and Mr Walz carried their pre-convention barnstorming tour of swing states to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where they appeared before another fervent crowd of thousands. The candidates beamed again and reprised their set list from the night before. Ms Harris said she and her running-mate would be “joyful warriors” on the campaign trail. Mr Trump has long taken pride in his emotive, well-attended rallies as an expression of his committed support. For now, at least, he has credible competition. ■
Correction (August 12th 2024): This article originally stated that Mr Walz retired from the National Guard as a command sergeant major. In fact, although he served for a time as a command sergeant major, he retired as a master sergeant.
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