Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was a 40-something-year-old dad, high school social studies teacher and football coach when he dove into politics 18 years ago.
Now he’s Kamala Harris’ pick to be vice president as she sets her sights on winning the presidential election — and keeping Donald Trump out of the White House.
Here are things to know about the folksy 60-year-old military veteran and former congressman.
Rooted in small-town middle America
Walz grew up in the Nebraska town of West Point, population 3,000, and loves hunting and fixing cars. His high school graduating class had 24 people in it, of whom 12 were his cousins.
After graduating from high school, Walz went to a teacher training college and joined the Army National Guard. He met his wife, Gwen, when they were both teachers in western Nebraska, and they moved together to her hometown of Mankato, Minn., after getting married in 1994.
Walz was by all accounts a popular teacher at Mankato West High School, teaching social studies and geography while helping its long-losing football team score its first-ever state championship.
A daughter named Hope
The couple struggled to have children and underwent IVF treatments for seven wrenching years before Gwen Walz became pregnant.
“It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope,” Tim Walz explained. A second child, Gus, followed four years later.
Walz decided to run for Congress in 2006 when he and two students tried to attend a rally in Mankato addressed by then-President George W. Bush but were turned away because the kids had volunteered for local Democrats.
Walz framed himself as a moderate Democrat and supporter of gun rights. He beat a GOP incumbent to win the seat.
Shifting stance on guns
A big shift on guns came for Walz after the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., when he quit the NRA and advocated for stricter gun laws. He credited Hope Walz, then a high school senior herself, with helping him make the decision.
“I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s. And I sleep just fine,” he quipped.
Walz won a competitive race for governor months later. He was confronted with the biggest challenge of his political career in 2020 when Minneapolis erupted in violent riots over the police killing of George Floyd, and he was criticized for taking too long to respond to rioters.
He himself admitted that the initial response to the riots was an “abject failure,” a toxic quote that is certain to be featured on Republican attack ads against him.
Record of Democratic success
In 2022, Walz won reelection fairly easily, and Democrats grabbed control of the state legislature. Those wins allowed him to engineer a series of progressive policy wins, including free school lunches, abortion rights and expanding Medicare.
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