Why Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running-mate

Ken martin, the chairman of the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party (dfl), Minnesota’s affiliate of the Democratic Party, tells a story about how the state’s governor, Tim Walz, got his start in politics. In 2004 Mr Walz was a high-school teacher in Mankato, a town of 45,000 people in the south of the state. In that year’s presidential election, he decided to take his class to a George W. Bush event. Unbeknown to him, his students had hatched a plan to tease the then president. “They all had [John] Kerry shirts on,” says Mr Martin. “They ripped their sweaters off and, well, they got kicked out of that rally by the Secret Service.” Mr Walz, according to Mr Martin, “was really pissed”—not at his students, but at the Bush campaign. “He called me up…he wanted to get involved,” says Mr Martin, who made him a local campaign organiser.

Two years later, Mr Walz stood for Congress in Minnesota’s first district, a heavily rural area covering the south of Minnesota where only one other Democrat had won in the preceding century. Mr Martin says that he remembers hearing of Mr Walz’s candidacy and thinking: “There’s no way in hell he’s going to win.” But Mr Walz got 53% of the vote. Twelve years later, having held onto his district even as other rural Democrats shed theirs, he ran for governor. In 2022 he was re-elected and his party won the state house and senate, giving Democrats a trifecta for the first time in eight years.

It is in part that electoral history that explains why Kamala Harris, now officially the Democratic nominee for president, has picked Mr Walz to be her running-mate. Today she will appear with him at a rally in Philadelphia, along with Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, who lost out to Mr Walz. Yet her choice also reflects a decision to minimise intra-party conflict. Mr Shapiro, initially one of the favourites for the ticket, stumbled because of criticism that mounted of his positions on the war in Gaza and of his support for school vouchers. By contrast Mr Walz’s stock has soared in the past few weeks, particularly with the left of the Democratic Party.

What Mr Walz does not bring, in a way that Mr Shapiro might have, is name recognition on the ticket in a swing state. The last time Minnesota voted for a Republican president was in 1972. Republicans would love to flip it—in July Donald Trump hosted a rally in St Cloud, in the centre of the state. But if Minnesota is in play (which current polling suggests it is not) then Ms Harris’s campaign is in bigger trouble than can be solved by a pick of vice-president.

Instead, the appeal of Mr Walz seems to be his personal political talent. In recent weeks he has become an energetic advocate for Ms Harris on television, and it was originally his critique of Republicans—“these guys are just weird”—that has become a general Democratic attack line. Mr Walz’s personal history also contrasts with Ms Harris’s Californian upbringing and rapid ascent into politics. He was born in rural Nebraska in 1964—six months before Ms Harris—and he likes to say that he attended a school where half of his classmates were his cousins. As well as his two decades as a teacher, he also served in the National Guard for 24 years, and retired as Command Sergeant Major in 2005. He is a committed hunter, and in his early years in Congress he was given an A rating by the National Rifle Association.

Despite his vibes, what Mr Walz also offers, and Mr Shapiro did not, is an unambiguously progressive record, at least as governor. (As a congressman, he was considered on the right of his party.) Since the dfl seized control of the state legislature, he has increased spending on public schools, introduced free school meals, created a system of paid family leave (due to start operating in 2026), legalised marijuana, expanded background checks for gun buyers and strengthened abortion rights. All of this he is deeply unapologetic for. “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” he told attendees on a fundraising call in late July, adding that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighbourliness.” Hence the love-bombing of teachers unions and other progressive groups.

On foreign policy—a key area for a potential vice-president—some of his views can be discerned from a speech he gave in 2007, when he criticised the Bush administration for its focus on security and its neglect of international diplomacy. “I would argue that one of the foundational principles of this country was the basic support of human rights and the ability to promote that worldwide,” he said, arguing that America needed to do more to “try and adjust behaviour in a non-military way”. Congress, he then argued, was “no longer listening to the rational centre”, which was why it had authorised the “destabilising” invasion of Iraq. As governor in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, he signed a law to divest state investments in Russia, but he has resisted calls from left-wingers to do the same with Israel.

He is not without baggage. In 2020 when Minneapolis was hit by riots after the murder of George Floyd, he waited a full day to respond to the call of Jacob Frey, the city’s Democratic mayor, to send in the National Guard. While he hesitated, a police station was set on fire by a mob. Mr Walz argued that the National Guard could not be deployed that quickly, but Republicans will not hesitate to pin the disorder on him. A more recent criticism stems from an enormous fraud perpetrated on the state department of education in the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic, in which money intended to feed children being taught remotely was instead stolen. The state’s independent legislative auditor has criticised Mr Walz’s administration for “denial or dismissiveness or excuses” in the face of allegations of mishandling money.

There are also a few quiet worries about his personal life. Mr Walz is a teetotaller (indeed, like J.D. Vance, Mr Trump’s pick for vice-president, he apparently loves Diet Mountain Dew, a sickly sweet soft drink). But he was not always so. In 1995, when he was still a teacher, he was arrested and charged with driving drunk, though he was eventually convicted of reckless driving.

Nonetheless, now he is Ms Harris’s pick, clips of Mr Walz being punchy on cable news seem likely to light up TikTok and other social media. Barely known outside Minnesota a month or so ago, he has become a leading light of the left of the Democratic Party. He is, in the minds of many, proof that Democrats can win without having to compromise on their core values. In reality, political science suggests that vice-presidential picks make only a tiny amount of difference in presidential elections, so the premise will be lightly tested either way. But Ms Harris had a choice: pick a swing-state governor who might upset the Democratic base, but has a proven record of winning, or pick the one likely to reassure them, and hope unity wins out. She went for the easier path.