MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will face a national audience that’s still getting to know him when he headlines the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Wednesday night.
Walz wasn’t widely known outside of Minnesota before Harris chose him to join her on the Democratic presidential ticket. But they clicked when Harris interviewed him, and she was impressed by his record as a governor and congressman — and the splash he made on TV. His attack line against former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance — “These guys are just weird” — spread like a prairie fire.
Since Harris announced her pick, the campaign has raced to introduce the country to the 60-year-old governor and self-described “Midwest dad.” At the same time, Republicans have tried to deflate Walz by poking holes in his biography, and some of his past uses of imprecise language and misstatements of facts by him or staffers are resurfacing.
Here’s a look at Walz as he prepares for his biggest speech of the campaign so far:
From teacher to VP pick
The Nebraska native was a geography teacher and assistant football coach at Mankato West High School in southern Minnesota before he ran for Congress and upset Republican Rep. Gil Gutknecht in 2006. He was seen as a centrist, known for his work on veterans issues. Walz was elected governor in 2018, and was reelected in 2022 in an election that gave Democrats full control of state government.
Walz and legislative leaders seized the moment to enact broad protections for abortion and trans rights. And they raised aid to families, including free school meals for all students, new tax credits for families with children, and paid family and medical leave.
Republicans say Walz took a sharp turn to the left. They say the governor should have returned a massive $17.6 billion budget surplus to taxpayers instead of enacting a record $72 billion two-year state budget that was 40% higher than the previous budget.
They also say Walz moved too slowly to deploy the National Guard amid rioting after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, although Trump praised his response at the time. And they say lax oversight on his watch cost pandemic-related programs hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud losses.
Military service
Walz’s elevation has revived conservative criticism of his departure from the Minnesota National Guard. He retired in 2005 with 24 total years of service to run for Congress, knowing his unit could get deployed to Iraq, but three months before it got the official order. Walz legally had the right to retire, but it doesn’t sit well with some of his critics that he left when he did. The Harris campaign counters that Walz continued to serve by being a “tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform” while in Congress.
Another controversy over Walz’s service is over how he has described his rank. His rose as high as command sergeant major — one of the top enlisted ranks in the military. But he held the rank for less than a year and retired before completing coursework and other requirements associated with his promotion, so he was reduced in rank for benefits purposes to master sergeant.
The Harris campaign initially referred to Walz as a “retired Command Sergeant Major.” Walz has described himself that way, too, over the years. The campaign has corrected its official biography for him to say just that he “served” at that rank.
Yet another dispute has involved a tweet by the Harris campaign of a snippet from a 2018 speech in which he spoke out against gun violence by saying, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” Critics said Walz was portraying himself as someone who served in a combat zone, when he hadn’t. The campaign later acknowledged that Walz misspoke back then.
Walz’s family
Tim and Gwen Walz got married in 1994. They met when they were both teachers in Nebraska and later moved to her native Minnesota, where they both worked at Mankato West High School. Former pupils remember them as allies and advocates for LGBTQ+ students. As Minnesota’s first lady, she has championed gun safety legislation, education and criminal justice reform.
They have a 23-year-old daughter, Hope, and a 17-year-old son, Gus.
A viral video that now has nearly 7 million views showed Walz and Hope jousting at the Minnesota State Fair about what to eat.
Hope rejected his proposal for a corn dog, saying, “I’m vegetarian.”
“Turkey then,” the governor responded.
“Turkey’s meat,” she fired back.
“Not in Minnesota,” he said. “Turkey’s special.”
The video closes with them screaming and laughing on the “Slingshot” thrill ride. He said she tricked him into it. “It was so worth it,” he conceded.
Gus is a high school senior. His parents recently disclosed to People magazine he has a non-verbal learning disorder, ADHD and an anxiety disorder. But they called his condition “his secret power” and said he’s “brilliant” and poised for success. He got his driver’s license last fall.
When Walz was elected governor, Gus cheered because it meant he could get a dog. They adopted a black lab named Scout a few months later.
Fertility struggles
Hope was born in 2001 and graduated from college last year. Tim and Gwen Walz chose her name after seven years of fertility struggles.
Walz strongly opposes restrictions on in-vitro fertilization (IVF), which is opposed by some anti-abortion groups because it can require the destruction of embryos, because of his family’s experience. He criticized Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, saying “If it was up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF,” and his team earlier this year referenced his family’s “IVF journey” in a fundraising email.
However, Walz and his wife used a different procedure known as intrauterine insemination (IUI), and Republicans accused him of misconstruing his personal story to make a political point.
On the campaign trail
Walz has drawn large crowds on the campaign trail, from his first appearance with Harris in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, to a solo appearance at a union convention in Los Angeles, to a Nebraska homecoming in Omaha on Saturday. Harris and Walz reunited in Pennsylvania Sunday for a bus tour through towns where the ex-coach gave pep talks to fire up local volunteers.
“Politics isn’t that much different than this,” Walz told a high school football team on Sunday. “It’s about something bigger than themselves. It’s about setting a future goal and trying to reach it.”
Poll numbers show that voters feel more positively toward Walz than Vance, and Republicans are scrambling for ways to dampen Democrats’ momentum. Some have pointed to his 1995 arrest for drunken driving and subsequent distortions about it.
When the arrest surfaced after Walz entered politics, his campaign team gave misleading information about it, falsely claiming that the charge was dropped and that Walz failed a field sobriety test because of deafness.
For his part, Walz said he quit drinking after the arrest.
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Associated Press reporter Chris Megerian contributed from Washington.
