Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, announced Tuesday morning she has selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
“As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his,” Harris wrote in a post on X. “It’s great to have him on the team.”
Harris is due to hold a rally with her vice presidential pick in Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon.
Harris chose Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Walz, Shapiro and Beshear all met with Harris at her home in Washington, D.C., on Sunday.
Given Minnesota’s status as a reliably, albeit narrowly, Democratic state, the selection of Walz does not immediately put a battleground state in play for Democrats.
But the plainspoken, second-term state chief executive has emerged recently as a prominent attack dog against former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), Trump’s running mate.
Lighting into the Republican Party’s efforts to restrict abortion rights and certain books in public libraries, Walz coined Democrats’ “weird” moniker for the GOP. “These are weird people on the other side,” he said on MSNBC in July.
Walz has also drawn upon his and his wife’s experience needing fertility treatment to argue against what he claims are Republican efforts to ban in vitro fertilization (IVF).
“My oldest daughter’s name is Hope. That’s because my wife and I spent seven years trying to get pregnant, needed fertility treatments, things like IVF ― things that they would ban,” he said on a “White Dudes for Harris” virtual fundraiser on July 29.
Walz, a former high school social studies teacher, football coach and veteran of the U.S. Army National Guard, previously represented southern Minnesota in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019.
He has highlighted his upbringing in a small town in Nebraska to go on offense against Vance, arguing that the GOP vice presidential pick fails to appreciate the small-town truism, “Mind your own damn business.”
Walz made his career in Mankato, a small Democratic city amid a sea of rural, conservative agricultural communities in southern Minnesota.
Stephen Maturen via Getty Images
Since his reelection in 2022, Walz leveraged a narrow legislative majority to pass a bevy of major progressive reforms, including a Medicaid buy-in, paid family and medical leave, a phase-out of fossil fuels, and free school lunches for all.
But Walz’s southern Minnesota roots have failed to arrest Democrats’ steady slide at the polls in the rural areas known as Greater Minnesota. The Republican incumbent carried Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District — Walz’s former House seat — by more than 11 percentage points in 2022.
As in other parts of the country, Democrats’ coalition in Minnesota now depends more on college-educated voters in once-Republican suburbs than on farmers, miners and factory workers outside of major cities. The latter groups once had their own individual farmer and labor parties that merged with the Democratic Party in 1944 to form the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party ― the official name for the state’s Democrats to this day.
As a candidate for statewide office in 2018, Walz likewise jettisoned his past opposition to stricter gun regulations, which had been a selling point for him in his more conservative, rural House district. Citing his own identity as a gun owner and hunter concerned about gun violence, Walz in May 2023 signed a red flag law and a bill ensuring universal background checks in the state.
For that and other reasons, Walz might not assuage the concerns of some Democratic pundits concerned that the left-wing positions Harris took while running for president are a general-election liability, and needed to be offset with the selection of a moderate running mate.
“We can get out there, reach out, make the case, and for one thing — don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” he said on the “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
The vice presidential selection process turned unexpectedly contentious, particularly in the final days, as progressives lobbied against Shapiro, the popular governor of a key battleground state. Shapiro’s detractors took issue with his views on pro-Palestinian campus protesters and support for private-school vouchers, but soon helped orchestrate a veritable avalanche of unflattering coverage about Shapiro’s record.
Renewed attention on the case of Philadelphia school teacher Ellen Greenberg’s 2011 death cast further negative light on his candidacy. As attorney general, Shapiro’s office reaffirmed ― in 2019 and 2022 ― that Greenberg’s death by 20 stab wounds was a suicide, against the appeals of her parents who believe she was murdered. The office of attorney general handed the case back to local prosecutors in 2022 after it emerged that Shapiro knew family members of Greenberg’s fiancé, Samuel Goldberg, whom many believe murdered her.
A development last week helped bring the case back into the headlines. On July 30, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court announced it would hear arguments from Greenberg’s parents to determine whether they have standing to challenge how Greenberg’s death was classified.
Some Democrats have bristled at the scrutiny Shapiro, an observant Jew, has received for pro-Israel views they say are shared by Walz. Walz has spoken at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and suggested that anti-Zionism is antisemitic.
In response to Walz’s selection, the Uncommitted National Movement, which spearheaded the effort to get Democratic primary voters to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary as a gesture of protest against President Joe Biden’s support for the Israeli invasion of Gaza, circulated a video of him reacting receptively to the movement’s strong showing at the Minnesota polls in March.
“Governor Walz has demonstrated a remarkable ability to evolve as a public leader, uniting Democrats’ diverse coalition to achieve significant milestones for Minnesota families of all backgrounds,” Elianne Farhat, a Minnesota-based senior adviser to Uncommitted, said in a statement. “While his past positions as a Congressman may have conflicted with anti-war voters, we hope he can evolve on this issue as he has on others, such as shifting from an A to F rating from the NRA.”
