(Bloomberg) -- Vice President Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate makes it clear Democrats aim to hold on to their “Blue Wall” of northern states in an effort to deny Republican Donald Trump the White House.
The trio of states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — will likely be crucial to determining the election outcome. Walz is seen as a candidate who can mobilize progressives and working-class voters, whose support for President Joe Biden had weakened, to return to the Democratic fold in November.
Who is Tim Walz?
The two-term Midwest governor was a latecomer to political life. Walz, 60, was born in small-town Nebraska, and at 17 enlisted in the Army National Guard, serving during the early years of the global war on terror and rising to the rank of command sergeant major.
Walz was also a teacher, working in China before settling in Minnesota. He was a high school social studies teacher and football coach when he first ran for Congress in 2006, scoring a major upset as he unseated a six-term Republican incumbent.
The governor’s Upper Midwest roots and his image as a plain talker — he went viral for mocking the Republican ticket and its policies as “weird” — will be a complement to a campaign helmed by Harris, a Californian popular on the coasts whose support with blue-collar voters in the middle of the country is more uncertain.
Walz will be critical to Democratic messaging in battleground states where the party will need to appeal to the White, working-class voters turned off by Biden’s handling of the economy. And his military experience — Walz is the highest-ranking enlisted soldier in congressional history — could help counter Republican criticism of Harris, whom Trump has cast as unready to deal with foreign leaders or the challenges posed by US adversaries.
What has Walz accomplished in office?
Walz served six terms in the US House, representing a mostly rural, conservative district now held by Republicans. In Congress, he focused on veterans, military and agricultural issues, serving on the Agriculture Committee as well as the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, where he also enjoyed a stint as the top Democrat. Most notably, in Congress, he pushed the Stock Act, aimed at restricting equities trading by lawmakers.
Elected Minnesota’s governor in 2018, Walz over two terms has promoted a number of policies that allies have hailed as bolstering working-class families. They included providing free breakfasts and lunches to students from kindergarten to the 12th grade, expanding grant funding for child care programs, signing a paid family and medical leave bill into law and overseeing a settlement between Minnesota and Eli Lilly & Co. to cap the price of insulin.
What does Walz bring to the ticket?
Those policies expanding benefits for working-class families have made Walz a favorite of progressives and union groups.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in praising Walz, highlighted his support for organized labor.
“I want somebody that’s super pro-labor, that really gets unions and can speak to a core constituency of ours,” she told CNN.
Gun-control activist David Hogg enthusiastically pushed Walz, calling him “the most qualified person to be vice president” and “a great communicator.” Hogg become a national figure after the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida — an event that sparked a change in Walz’s stance on gun rights.
Walz’s record on the issue once earned him an endorsement from the National Rifle Association, but after the 2018 Parkland shooting, he endorsed universal background checks and an assault weapons ban.
Walz’s unabashedly progressive record and support for restrictions on gun ownership, however, will also be a lightning rod for Republicans eager to cast the Harris-Walz ticket as too liberal for American voters.
What do the polls say?
Walz serves as the chair of the Democratic Governors Association but lacks the national profile of some of the other candidates seen as potential Harris picks.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll from July 26-27 found 57% didn’t know who he was, and about a third had no opinion of him.
At home, however, he’s popular with his own party. About 91% of Democratic voters said they approved of his job performance as governor in a July Morning Consult poll.
Minnesota is a state that has been reliably Democratic in every presidential election going back to 1972, when Republican Richard Nixon carried the state. Trump lost the state by less than two percentage points in 2016 and by more than seven percentage points in 2020.
Who is Walz’s family?
The governor’s wife, Gwen, is a Minnesota native, according to her official biography. She met Walz when the two were teaching in Nebraska.
Gwen Walz served for more than two decades as an administrator and coordinator for public schools and has been an advocate for education in prisons.
The governor and his wife have two children, Hope and Gus, and he’s spoken publicly about how they were born with the help of in vitro fertilization.
Trump and fellow Republicans were put on the defensive after Alabama’s Supreme Court recognized frozen human embryos as children, a decision that shuttered many IVF clinics in the state until passage of a law shielding providers from prosecution.
--With assistance from Gregory Korte.
(Updates with details on Walz family starting in 19th paragraph)
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