By Brad Ryan in Washington DC
(ABC-Australia) Kamala Harris passed over senior Democrats from crucial battleground states to tap Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
A process that usually requires months of careful vetting, Harris had just a few weeks to choose her vice-presidential nominee.
Walz, 60, is not exactly a national figure in US politics.
But he caught everyone’s attention two weeks ago when he levelled a devastating, but simple, insult against Republican nominee Donald Trump – one that has since become a key campaign message for Democrats.
Now he has just 90 days to convince American voters to put him and Harris in the White House.
So who is Tim Walz? Here are nine fast facts about the governor.
He’s a Nebraska native who worked on the family farm
Though Walz is the governor of the northern US state of Minnesota, he hails from Nebraska, further south.
He grew up in the tiny town of Butte, which had a population of just a few hundred, and spent summers working on the family farm.
At 17, he joined the military, following in his veteran father’s footsteps.
He then spent 24 years in the Army National Guard – the main combat reserve of the US Army.
Helped by “GI Bill” benefits, which cover higher education costs for American service members, he studied to become a teacher.
He taught social studies in high school before entering politics. While teaching in his native Nebraska, he met his wife, a fellow teacher from Minnesota.
Soon after, they moved to Mankato, a Minnesota city of about 45,000 people, to be closer to her family.
It’s something of an unusual resume for a Democratic VP pick. The Washington Post reports he’s the first one who didn’t go to law school since 1964.
But Democrats hope his rural and military background will help them win over moderate, middle-ground voters.
They’ve already produced a campaign ad highlighting his country credentials.
One of his first teaching stints was in China
After graduating with a degree in social science education, Walz moved to China in 1989 – the year of its brutal Tiananmen Square massacre.
According to a congressional biography, he was part of the “first government-sanctioned groups of American educators to teach in China through a program at Harvard University”.
In a 2016 interview with an agriculture publication, he said he’d been to China about 30 times.
“I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship,” he said in the interview. “I totally disagree, and I think we need to stand firm on, what they’re doing in the South China Sea, but there’s many areas of cooperation that we can work on.”
An edited clip of that clip is now being shared on social media by some of Trump’s supporters, but without mention of the year it was shot, and cut to remove his comment on the South China Sea.
As a high school football coach, he championed gay rights
While working as a teacher in Mankato in the 90s, Walz was a coach for the school’s American football team. He helped to lead it to its first state championship.
At the same time, he became the faculty adviser for the school’s new gay-straight alliance.
“The fact that he took on that role while also being the football coach was so important,” the school’s first openly gay student told the Washington Post last week.
“He set an example not just for LGTBQ students but for football players in the locker room at a time when gay people were not well understood.”
He defied the odds to win a conservative-leaning Congressional district
Before he was elected Minnesota governor, Walz was a member of the national Congress, representing the state’s first congressional district.
He defeated the Republican incumbent, who had held the district for 12 years, in 2007. But when he quit Congress to become governor in 2019, the Republicans won it back.
It’s a mostly rural district with a mostly Republican history, and Walz’s success in winning it – and holding onto it for so long – is seen as evidence of his appeal to more conservative country voters.
He’s a gun owner and pheasant hunter once favoured by the NRA
Walz has sought to portray himself as both pro-gun and pro-gun control.
In an interview with CNN last week, for example, he compared his shooting credentials with those of his now-opponent in the VP race.
“JD Vance’s schtick is talking about guns,” he said. “I guarantee you he can’t shoot pheasants like I can.”
The powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), one of America’s most influential lobby groups, endorsed him while he was in Congress. In 2016, he featured in the top 20 politicians for gun owners in popular shooters’ magazine Guns & Ammo.
But he fell out of favour with the gun lobby while campaigning to be Minnesota governor in 2018. After a mass shooting at a Florida school that year, he came out in support of a ban on assault weapons.
More recently, he’s signed gun control measures into state law. They include compulsory background checks for gun owners, and “red flag laws” that allow authorities to seize guns from people deemed to be a threat to themselves or others.
“As a veteran, gun owner, hunter and dad, I know basic gun safety isn’t a threat to the Second Amendment – it’s about keeping our kids safe,” he said last year.
He was criticised over his handling of the George Floyd protests
The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020 led to protests in Minneapolis, the largest city in Minnesota. Some turned into violent riots.
According to a state senate report, more than 1,500 businesses and buildings were vandalised and burned, causing $US500 million ($766 million) in property damage.
As governor, Walz has been criticised for not acting sooner to bring rioting in the city centre under control. Critics say his decision to wait several days before activating the Minnesota National Guard was a grave error.
The report, published by the Republican-controlled state senate, said Walz and the local mayor “failed to realise the seriousness of the riots and the danger to Minnesotans if rioters were not confronted and stopped”.
It also says they “failed to act in a timely manner to confront rioters with necessary force due to an ill-conceived philosophical belief that such an action would exacerbate the rioting”.
After Harris chose Walz as her VP running mate, his Republican opponent JD Vance said:
“They make an interesting tag team, because of course Tim Walz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and then the few who got caught, Kamala Harris helped bail them out of jail.” (Harris tweeted a link to the ‘Minnesota Freedom Fund’ to raise money for protesters in Minnesota at the time.)
Walz told a recent press conference: “Decisions were made in a situation, that is what it is, and I said we believed we tried to do the best that we can in each of those.”
He came up with what quickly became the Democrats’ favourite insult
Walz is not a household name outside of Minnesota.
But he won some fame when he began describing some Republicans as “weird” during recent media interviews.
“These guys are just weird,” he told MSNBC. “They’re running for He-Man Woman-Haters Club or something.”
It was seen as a shift from the Democrats’ usual attack lines, which tend to focus on Trump as a convicted criminal and a threat to democracy.
But it’s been widely shared on social media, and it has since stuck. In the past couple of weeks, many Democrats have been hammering the “weirdness” of their Republican opponents.
And Walz is sticking with it too. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell,” he told his first campaign rally with Harris.
Republicans call him a ‘radical leftist’ and ‘West Coast wannabe’
In announcing Walz as her pick, Harris pointed to his record on hot-button issues like gun control and abortion rights.
The Trump campaign is pointing to his progressive record too.
“It’s no surprise that San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coast wannabe Tim Walz as her running-mate,” the campaign said.
“Walz has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of the Golden State.
“From proposing his own carbon-free agenda to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide.”
Trump himself later posted to social media: “This is the most Radical Left duo in American history. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again.”
He beat out VP contenders from more crucial battlegrounds
Harris reportedly started with a shortlist of about a dozen potential running mates.
In recent days, it appeared to have narrowed to three.
The other two were from critical swing states: senator Mark Kelly from Arizona, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Both are popular locally and could have given Harris an edge in their respective states, which are likely to come down to the wire.
But Harris chose Walz, despite the fact Minnesota is already a relatively reliably Democratic-voting state in national elections.
Citing “three people familiar with the vice-president’s thinking”, the New York Times reports that Walz “leapfrogged better-known contenders in part because Ms Harris viewed him as an Everyman figure from Minnesota whose Midwestern-dad-vibe balanced out her Bay Area background”.
Harris and Walz are now embarking on a tour of the swing states, starting in Pennsylvania, where they’ve appeared together at their first rally.
“Thank you, Madam Vice-President, for the trust you put in me,” Walz said to Harris on stage. “But maybe more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.”
A Minnesota governor and former high school teacher is tipped to give the Democratic presidential campaign a Midwestern appeal.
Posted Yesterday at 8:50am