Who is Tim Walz? Minnesota’s governor and Kamala Harris’ running mate, explained

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee prepares to take on former Donald Trump in November.

If elected, Walz, 60, will become the third vice president from the North Star State, behind Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey.

Walz was born in West Point, Neb., in 1964 to a stay-at-home mom and a school administrator. He joined the National Guard at 17 and hopped around the South and Midwest until he went back to his home state and earned a teaching degree at Chadron State College.

Walz was one of the first U.S.-sanctioned educators to teach English in China in 1989. That was the same year as the Tiananmen Square massacre. After a year, he returned home to teach about an hour away from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

That’s where he met his wife, Gwen, and the two eventually began teaching at Mankato West High School.

It was there that Walz worked as a geography teacher and football coach. He volunteered to advise the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance in 1997, one year after then-President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred federal recognition of same-sex marriages.

Walz was elected to the U.S. House in 2006, unseating Republican Gil Gutknecht. His congressional bid was inspired in part by a field trip he planned to a George W. Bush rally in 2004 in Mankato. One of the students had brought materials to support Democratic nominee John Kerry. The group was barred from attending.

“It just seemed so wrong that there would be a gatekeeper, especially stopping young people from seeing the president in their hometown,” Walz said.

As a congressman, Walz earned a reputation as a folksy everyman who could work across the aisle.

Walz earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, and Guns and Ammo Magazine listed him as one of its top 20 politicians for gun rights. In 2018, the groups decried Walz’s embrace of a proposed assault weapons ban as he mounted his bid for governor.

Minnesota’s congressional delegation typically competes in a hot dish cookoff, and in 2014 Walz won the top prize. His tater tot hot dish recipe uses ground turkey, sage, baby bella mushrooms and, controversially, peas.

Walz faced off against former state Rep. Jeff Johnson, who previously challenged Gov. Mark Dayton in 2014. Johnson lost to Walz by a slimmer margin than he did Dayton, 6 percentage points instead of 10.

Walz was in the middle of his first term when the pandemic began. Soon after, a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd and thrust the city into chaos — riots leveled some businesses along Lake Street and after-action assessments concluded there was miscommunication among government officials, including the executive branch.

The Walz family spent seven years undergoing fertility treatments at the Mayo Clinic before they eventually had a daughter.

“It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope,” he said.

The governor’s journey into parenthood has made him somewhat of a foil for Republican attempts to ban such treatments in some states, specifically in Alabama, where the Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children.

Walz presided over one year of unified Democratic control of the Legislature.

In January 2023, Walz signed a bill enshrining abortion rights in the state. “The message that we’re sending to Minnesota today is very clear: Your rights are protected in this state,” the governor said at the time. “You have the right to make your own decisions about your health, your family and your life.”

A couple of months later in 2023, Walz signed a bill requiring the state’s schools to provide free breakfast and lunch for every student. Walz told a reporter he himself did not eat lunch on the day of the bill signing.

An amendment to a 2023 campus safety law means that school resource officers can now place students in the prone position in narrow circumstances.

Minnesota Republicans have labeled Walz as a far-left extremist who went from being a moderate to serving as a rubberstamp for Democratic priorities in St. Paul. Nationally, he’s already come under fire for his handling of the riots that tore through Minneapolis and the $250 million fraud case involving the Feeding Our Future nonprofit.

U.S. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said Walz “embodies the same disastrous economic, open-borders, and soft-on-crime policies” that Harris and President Joe Biden pushed over the last three years.

Walz has also come under fire for signing a bill that spent the state’s $17 million surplus and raising taxes during the 2023 session.

Walz doesn’t drink alcohol. He was pulled over for going 96 mph in a 55 mph zone in 1995 and failed a sobriety test, an event he considers a wake-up call.

“You have obligations to people,” Gwen Walz recalled telling him. “You can’t make dumb choices.”

Walz’s beverage of choice is now Diet Mountain Dew. A spokesperson says he cut back on his six-a-day habit earlier this year. He now drinks three.

Staff writers Briana Bierschbach, Ryan Faircloth and Rochelle Olson contributed to this story.