Tim Walz is surely the only major-party Vice-Presidential nominee whose candidacy was propelled into being by a single word: “weird.” “These are weird people on the other side,” he said of Republicans, two days after Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race. The Minnesota governor had been using the word for months, but, with a new candidate and a new calculus, it caught fire. Out of nowhere, it seemed that the former high-school teacher and football coach might have solved a riddle that had bedevilled the Democrats for nearly a decade. They’ve been huffing and puffing about broken laws, endless lies, a skein of felonies, a mean streak, and the prospect of a Donald Trump White House variously draconian or dysfunctional—all very real. But then came Walz, in his Plains deadpan, tweeting, as Trump went on about Hannibal Lecter, “Say it with me: Weird.”
Democrats and friendly commentators picked it up. Harris told supporters that Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, were saying things about her that were “just plain weird.” Her campaign team started using it, and, soon, so did Pete Buttigieg and Chuck Schumer. And, of course, it got under Trump’s skin. Echoing his 2016 debate remark to Hillary Clinton, “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet,” Trump said, predictably, “Well, they’re the weird ones. Nobody has ever called me weird. I’m a lot of things, but weird I’m not.” But it was Walz who had captured the Democratic Zeitgeist, and rode it right onto a ticket that has an even shot at winning the White House in November.
Walz—who boasts of his rural roots in a party that skews urban, suburban, and highly educated—has a reputation for being affable and approachable, always likely to talk with his legislative opponents, even as he has pushed a strikingly progressive agenda, from guaranteed abortion rights to universal free meals for schoolchildren. In keeping with the more assertive tone of the Harris campaign operation, he has shown that he can land a punch, too, as when he joined the White Dudes for Harris fund-raising video call last week. “How often in a hundred days do you get to change the trajectory of the world?” he asked. “And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterward and know that a Black woman kicked his ass, sent him on the road?”
Walz likes to say that he has led soldiers, taught students, and coached state football champions. (Aged sixty, and looking far older than Harris, though they are nearly the same age, he has joked that supervising a school lunchroom for twenty years cost him his head of hair.) Raised in a small Nebraska town where there were twenty-four students in his graduating class, he did a series of odd jobs after high school, from building grain silos to processing mortgage loans. He enlisted in the Army National Guard at age seventeen, and served for twenty-four years, though he never saw combat. He taught briefly on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, and later enrolled at Chadron State College, in Nebraska, before spending a year teaching English in China. He landed a job a few years later as a social-studies teacher at Mankato West High, about seventy-five miles south of Minneapolis. His wife, Gwen, was an English teacher, and later a school-system administrator.
In 2006, Walz challenged a six-term Republican member of Congress in one of the state’s most conservative districts, casting himself as “an everyday person.” It was a good year for Democrats, who ran against George W. Bush and the increasingly unpopular Iraq War, and won control of the House for the first time in more than a decade. “Our troops deserve a plan to win the peace,” Walz said in a campaign ad. A central piece of his moderate, Everyman pitch was his love of hunting. A gun owner, he often defended greater access to firearms and boasted about his A rating from the National Rifle Association, repeatedly winning the organization’s endorsement. But his thinking changed, starting with the Sandy Hook massacre, in 2012, he told MinnPost. During his first campaign for governor, in 2018, after a gunman fired more than a thousand bullets in eleven minutes at a music festival in Las Vegas, killing nearly sixty people, Walz said that there is “absolutely no reason” to have a gun in school, to own a silencer, or to avoid universal background checks. After the Parkland, Florida, high-school shooting, in 2018, he went further. He denounced the N.R.A. and made a donation, to a military community support organization, of some eighteen thousand dollars—an amount equivalent to the N.R.A.’s contributions to his campaigns. The N.R.A. downgraded him to an F.
In his reëlection campaign, in 2022, he put out a polished two-minute ad that used football imagery—a ball, a sideline, a referee, players—and called it halftime in Minnesota. Speaking the voice-over himself, he painted an image of the state that could hardly have been more different from the dystopian portrait of America drawn by Trump in his vision of “American carnage.” Walz celebrated immigrant farmers, lumberjacks, miners, refugees, and “people who’ve been here all along, the Anishinaabe and the Dakota.” After drawing criticism for being slow to deploy the National Guard to quell violence that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis—Walz said that the authorities had failed to properly communicate—he declared in the ad, “We’ve proven that, when we come together as one Minnesota, we can do anything. I’ve seen it.” He won by nearly two hundred thousand votes.
It was during his second term, beginning in 2023, that Walz cemented his move to the left. To adopt a progressive wish list, he capitalized on the success of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which had won control of the state legislature the previous year. Among the victories were voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, legalization of marijuana, driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, required paid family and medical leave, a transition to a carbon-free electrical grid by 2040, and a billion dollars for affordable housing. The legislature gave individuals a “fundamental right” to make their own decisions on reproductive health, a bill that was especially meaningful to Walz, whose two children were conceived through in-vitro fertilization. Barack Obama cheered from afar, tweeting last year, “If you need a reminder that elections have consequences, check out what’s happening in Minnesota.”
Walz’s efforts are not unique. They are largely in line with the achievements of J. B. Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer, two other Midwestern governors equipped with Democratic legislative majorities who were also mentioned as potential Harris running mates. But, as the field narrowed, a raft of Party leaders, including Nancy Pelosi and prominent progressives such as Pramila Jayapal and Bernie Sanders, spoke up for Walz, who had a remarkable two weeks. He brings small-town bona fides and a pledge to challenge Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” whom he eagerly derides. “None of my hillbilly relatives went to Yale, and none of them went on to be venture capitalists,” he said recently. Sarah Smarsh, a Kansas writer who focussed on working-class poverty in her book “Heartland,” tweeted that Walz “represents the course-correction on class, rural & regional messaging that Dems have needed for decades.” She added, “I’ve never felt seen or represented in the White House in my lifetime & that would change with VP Walz.” ♦
