The evolution of Tim Walz: from high school teacher to VP nominee

Tim Walz must be having the wildest month of his life.

After the Minnesota governor was announced as Kamala Harris’s pick for running mate, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and independent senator Joe Manchin both put out statements praising him, an indication of his appeal across Democratic constituencies.

“Dems in disconcerting levels of array,” Ocasio-Cortez joked on X.

In the week since his name catapulted from relative obscurity – Walz flew up the shortlist of second-in-command possibles in a matter of two weeks, buoyed by clips of his TV appearances and memes about his dadliness – camo caps with orange writing have flown off the campaign merch shelves, a nod to Walz’s dressed-down midwestern attire.

But beyond the appearances, his record in politics shows an evolution – a shift from a moderate Democrat winning over a Republican-leaning district to a governor who delivered a laundry list of progressive policy wins that has his critics fuming.

Is he a progressive darling? Is he a moderate in progressive clothing? A centrist? Is this a bait-and-switch?

Well, he’s Tim Walz.

When you talk to people who know Walz, they all call him real, genuine, authentic, an everyman. There’s no reason to believe he’s putting on an act.

But his way of selling policies is also calculated – a sign of a man who’s spent his life working to persuade people, from high school students tuned out in class to voters in a high-stakes presidential election. Beneath his “aw, shucks” demeanor is a skilled political operator.

He’s knowingly tapped into a sort of universalism, selling Democrats’ ideas with broad popular appeal, said Larry Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota.

“His thinking is very much around: how is it that we can present our policies and our political agenda as benefiting everyone?” Jacobs said.

The pre-politics life

Walz was born in the small town of West Point, Nebraska, in 1964, then lived in a couple of other small Nebraska towns, ultimately graduating in a class of 25 students from a high school in Butte. He enlisted in the army national guard at age 17, serving 24 years before retiring.

His father died when he was 19. He has said his family relied on social security survivor benefits to stay afloat. Walz subsequently moved around, taking some classes in Houston, Texas, then building tanning beds in Arkansas.

He ended up back in Nebraska at Chadron State College, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1989. He first taught abroad, in China, for a year after college, then returned to Nebraska to teach locally.

Walz met his wife, Gwen, also a teacher, and they moved to Mankato, Minnesota, a mid-size town south-west of Minneapolis. They now have two children, Hope and Gus, and have shared how they used in-vitro fertilization to bring them into the world.

He was a part of the football coaching staff that led the school to a state championship in 1999. His status as a coach played heavily in Harris’s introduction of him in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

And he was the faculty adviser for a new chapter of the school’s gay-straight alliance, at a time when LGBTQ+ issues were not embraced by his own political party, a nod to his progressive bona fides.

His start in politics

Walz has said an experience taking students to see a George W Bush rally, where his students were turned away because organizers believed they were Democrats, led him to seek public office.

He first ran for Congress in Minnesota’s Republican-leaning first congressional district in 2006, beating the Republican incumbent in an upset. One of his first radio ads highlights the hearing loss he experienced from using heavy artillery in the national guard and how the medical services he accessed helped him to hear his young daughter singing in the morning.

“I am running for Congress because I believe we as a country have a moral obligation to ensure that every father can hear his daughter sing – that every citizen receives the best care our medical community has to offer,” he says in the ad.

His record in Congress proved moderate. He often co-sponsored bills with Republicans and was one of the few Democrats to vote to hold the then attorney general Eric Holder in contempt of Congress in 2012.

A gun owner and hunter, Walz previously received endorsements and donations from the National Rifle Association and had an A rating from the group, which plummeted to an F rating after he gave the group’s donations to charity and signed gun control measures as governor. He has said mass shootings, like those in Las Vegas and at a high school in Parkland, Florida, showed him the need for greater restrictions.

Walz supported the Affordable Care Act and the Dream Act, and he voted in favor of repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” anti-gay policy.

“He’s got deep core convictions, but he’s driven by the facts and he’s driven by what he hears from the people that he’s representing,” said Josh Syrjamaki, who was Walz’s chief of staff in the district from 2007 until he became governor in 2019.

Syrjamaki recalled tense town hall meetings during the Tea Party days where Walz would get hammered by conservatives upset with his votes. He would listen to their appeals and try to find common ground.

He remembers Walz having to defend his votes on issues such as the Affordable Care Act, which was“pretty unpopular in very conservative parts of the country”.

In a 2014 debate with his Republican challenger, Walz used a line he’s brought up now – that neighborliness is not socialism – and said party affiliation didn’t prevent him from working with someone or from calling someone out.

“When I disagree with them, I don’t disagree because they’re Republican or Democrat, I disagree when they’re wrong,” Walz said at the time.

He ran for governor in 2018. Walz won the Democratic primary and then the general election that year – he has never lost a race.

He did not receive the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party’s endorsement – that went to Erin Murphy, now the majority leader in the state senate, who ran on a “politics of joy” message that looks a lot like the joy Walz is harnessing on the campaign trail now. The idea is borrowed from another Minnesotan, former vice-president Hubert Humphrey.

Murphy said she started getting texts from people after Harris took over the ticket, saying the vice-president has the politics of joy, too. Walz, whom she has worked closely with, has the same “happy warrior” energy.

“He really does care about people. I don’t know how we do politics if we don’t care about people, but, you know, it shines through in him,” Murphy said.

A progressive wishlist

Walz’s first term as governor required working with a divided legislature, limiting what Democrats could do. But then, in 2022, Democrats won both chambers of the legislature and Walz won re-election, giving the party a trifecta.

Democrats took the ball and ran with it.

The 2023 legislative session made national headlines. Democrats in Minnesota put up posters listing their top priorities – protecting reproductive rights, paid family and medical leave, driver’s licenses for undocumented people, universal school meals, clean energy, childcare assistance, gun control measures, felony voting rights restoration, a ban on conversion therapy. They checked them all off, with Walz’s signature on each one.

The session was branded the “Minnesota miracle”.

“He has really got a record now as a governor that is kind of a progressive dream list,” said Amy Koch, a former Republican majority leader.

In the years before the 2023 session, progressive organizers worked to build support among voters for these kinds of policies, said JaNaé Bates, the co-director of Faith in Minnesota, an advocacy group. The group endorsed Murphy in the 2018 Democratic primary, but its work in that race “moved the Overton window for all of the candidates”.

“It took us 10 years to build the kind of mandate that was then shovel-ready once we got the trifecta in 2022,” Bates said.

Melissa Hortman, the speaker of the Minnesota house, said she, the senate majority leader and Walz had gotten together the Friday after the 2022 election and went through their to-do lists, which were “very aligned”.

“We were a team right from the get-go,” she said. “There was none of that kind of difficult stuff behind the scenes of like, who’s going to get credit? We just were a team. We went out there and did it together.”

Walz championed some items heavily from the start, like paid family leave. He also pushed for the child tax credit and clean energy mandate.

Universal school meals, in particular, have emerged as a battle line in this election. Walz has defended them in simple terms: kids need to eat so they can learn. Some Republicans, including those who wrote Project 2025, the rightwing manifesto for a potential second Trump term, refer to school meals as an entitlement program that should be curtailed.

Sydney Jordan, a state representative who sponsored the universal school meals bill in the house, said Walz initially got on board with a previous measure against school lunch debt shaming, which evolved into universal school meals. She wears a button that says “feed the kids”.

Democrats in the legislature say Walz’s guiding principle is to use policy to help as many people as possible. And if that falls into the progressive camp, so be it. Some of the policies, like paid family leave, are broadly popular, noted Jamie Long, a Democratic state representative.

“Governor Walz has a record that I think progressives can be proud of, but I think one of the reasons why he is such a good fit for the ticket is that he’s able to communicate the policies that we were able to achieve in Minnesota in a way that everyday people can understand, and in a way that I think speaks across political difference and doesn’t alienate folks,” Long said.

Walz might not call himself a progressive directly, but he wouldn’t bristle if you called him one, his colleagues say. And he staunchly defends every policy he has signed.

“You cannot call him anything else after what he just did,” Jacobs, the professor, said of the progressive label. The leading edge of his party is progressive, so he works with them and finds policies that can win enough votes to pass and then help sell the party to voters again at election time.

But Republican lawmakers have felt shut out of the process. Lisa Demuth, the minority leader in the state house, said she liked Walz’s idea of “One Minnesota”, of unity, that he ran on in 2018. The slogan appears on a specialty license plate on his classic International Scout vehicle.

“There was really no appetite of the Democrats to have to work with Republicans at all,” she said. There are only a handful of bipartisan bills from recent sessions, including one for nursing home support.

“They had the votes. They had partisan priorities, they had full control of the entire state. And they were very clear in saying, ‘We’re going to push through what our priorities have been, and we’re going to get them done.’”

Battle lines drawn

Republicans have quickly tried to paint Walz as radical after Harris’s announcement.

“She picked a radical left man that is, he has positions that are not even possible to believe that they exist,” the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, said in a press conference this week. “He is going for things that nobody has even heard of. Heavy into the transgender world. Heavy into lots of different worlds.”

Memes have spread calling Walz “Tampon Tim”, a reference to a law he signed that requires schools to carry menstrual products in their restrooms, which some have criticized because boys’ bathrooms may have period products in them as well. He also signed a trans haven law that protects access to gender-affirming care in the state.

Others have attacked his military record, saying he retired from the service rather than go to Iraq with his national guard unit and that he was inflating his rank, given he did not complete training to be called a command sergeant major at retirement. These claims came up during his gubernatorial runs but are getting increased scrutiny on the national stage. Walz retired before his unit received orders to go to Iraq, though after an indication that the unit might be called up.

And photos of Minneapolis burning after riots followed the murder of George Floyd by police have resurfaced. A report from state senate Republicans criticized Walz and Minneapolis’s mayor for being too slow to respond.

Republicans have also scoffed at the idea that Walz could appeal to rural voters with his lengthy list of progressive policies. He didn’t win his old district in his run for governor.

“I think he doubles down on the criticisms of Harris by the Trump campaign,” Jacobs said. “If you’re arguing that Harris is super liberal, you’ve just got an enormous example of that in Walz.”

Demuth pointed to a comment Walz made in 2017 about electoral maps that show broad swathes of red, which Walz said were made up “mostly of cows and rocks”.

“We are not rocks and cows,” the Republican lawmaker said. “He has not paid attention to greater Minnesota or the rural areas of Minnesota unless it’s been a good campaign strategy for him.”

Vice-presidential picks themselves don’t typically sway many voters, though they can signal how a president would govern and can win some people at the margins. In a very close election, that can matter.

But the pick is a sign that Democrats might try to win voters in places they haven’t in recent years. Some mentioned Walz’s appeal in places like the iron range, the iron-ore mining area in northern Minnesota that was once solid blue and is now trending more red, and hope that can translate to other parts of the Rust belt that Democrats need to win the presidency.

They also think he’ll appeal in the suburbs, where his plainspoken nature will sound familiar to voters in key states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

He looks the part of a suburban or rural midwestern dad, the kind of guy the word “avuncular” was made for. And it’s not a costume – the camo hat, jeans, T-shirt and comfortable shoes are his actual clothes.

“He only wears a suit if he absolutely has to,” Long said. “That’s not an act, that’s just him being Tim and not being willing to craft his image around what people think a governor ought to look like. He’s just who he’s always been.”

But curbing the Democratic losses in some of these areas won’t be easy.

Terry Gjersvik, a farmer who lives in Walz’s old congressional district and ran for office as a Democrat in the rural area in 2018, found Walz “indefatigable” on the campaign trail, bouncing from conversation to conversation with voters. Gjersvik lost his race, as many Democrats in rural areas now do.

“In the rural areas, when you’re a Democrat, you stop the bleeding, especially on the statewide races,” he said.

One Minnesota farmer told the Star Tribune that an electric vehicle law “burns my butt”. Another voter in a St Paul suburb has a sign in his yard that says “MY GOVERNOR IS AN IDIOT”, the New York Times reported. The 2024 election will also test how voters feel about the Minnesota trifecta’s work, with control of the legislature up for grabs.

Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party, said Walz’s “mind your own damn business” retort and his populist policies will endear him throughout the midwest.

“We have a saying out here, and Tim Walz uses this, and he also embodies it, that if it doesn’t bother the cattle, it doesn’t bother me,” she said.