The epitome of Midwestern values, Tim Walz could be the Democrats’ trump card

Democratic presidential candidate US Vice President Kamala Harris (R) holds a campaign rally with her new running mate Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (L) at the Liacouras Center at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 06 August 2024. Earlier, Harris announced Walz as her running mate for the 2024 presidential election and this is their first campaign event together. EPA-EFE/DAVID MUSE

By J Brooks Spector

7 Aug 2024

Minnesota governor Tim Walz – a protean Midwestern everyman – as the Democratic Party’s choice as vice-presidential candidate has now burst onto the nation’s political scene with power and impact. Trump’s team has been caught off guard again.

Many years ago during the winter of 1975, in between my transfer from Indonesia to South Africa for the US foreign service, I was back in the US on a cross-country journey visiting old friends and relatives in places as distant as Las Vegas, Nevada, the Grand Canyon, Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

I was hoping for a sense of what people were talking about, what they were worried about, and what was cheering them up in the months leading up to the country’s bicentennial anniversary — and the final punctuation mark at the end of the Watergate madness.

In Minneapolis-St Paul, I was without a car, so I used the city’s well-functioning public transit system to get around. On the buses, total strangers would sit next to me and begin chatting as if we were longtime neighbours. One grandmotherly type cheerfully interrogated me as to where I was from, what I was doing in her wonderful city, where I was going, and then pulled out a collection of pictures of her many grandchildren to show them off in all their glory.

My bus seat companion was not unique. The same happened repeatedly. In a coffee shop I ducked into to get out of the falling temperatures and snow, the waitress – the term waitron hadn’t yet been invented – entertained me for hours about her future career choices, her plans to study photography, and her boyfriend and their relationship’s ups and downs.

Such examples were versions of an America seemingly at odds with those snooty, aloof, over-trendy people on the East and West coasts, boastful Texans, or suspicious back-country hillbillies. For anyone familiar with Garrison Keillor’s gentle radio comedy, The Prairie Home Companion, and its tagline, “Lake Wobegon, where all the women are tall, all the men are handsome, and all the children are above average”, the Midwest is the epitome of the earnestness in a classic Frank Capra film like Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

Democratic presidential candidate US Vice President Kamala Harris holds a campaign rally with her new running mate Democratic vice presidential candidate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz at the Liacouras Center at Temple University in Philadelphia on 6 August 2024. Earlier, Harris announced Walz as her running mate for the 2024 presidential election and this is their first campaign event together. (EPA-EFE/DAVID MUSE)

Kamala Harris picked Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate after one-on-one interviews with a half-dozen potential nominees – any one of which would have made political, electoral and competency sense. Harris has now quite deliberately embraced those Midwestern values embodied by Walz that can serve to counterbalance the portrait of her being sketched by the Trump/Vance team.

In this sense, Walz can be portrayed as a normal but successful man of the people, a white-bread mensch. In fact, she has chosen a savvy politician as her running mate, a man who embraces the values of prairie populism as well as the implementer of tangible social welfare policies for the average man, woman and child. These should stand in contrast to those angry identitarian ideas or proposed fiscal benefits to the rich emanating from Donald Trump’s camp, or so Democrats hope.

Walz’s career trajectory has a made-for-the-cinema quality about it. Born and raised in a small town in rural Nebraska, he joined the Army National Guard, gradually rising in rank to command sergeant major. (That made him the highest-ranking enlisted soldier ever to serve in Congress.) After university, he became a high school social studies and geography teacher.

Adroitly balancing traditional behaviours and the country’s social changes, he became the high school football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, taking his team from a previous 0-27 record to state champions in their division.

But he also became the faculty sponsor for the gay/straight alliance, a student group. About that effort, he explained that the group’s adviser “really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married”. Demonstrating some self-deprecating humour, he has joked that he went bald from supervising the school’s cafeteria. Along his life’s journey, he moved beyond his small-town world, teaching in China from 1989 to 1990, before moving from Nebraska to Minnesota to continue teaching.

Walz has explained that he decided to run for Congress in 2005 after some of his students had been asked to leave a rally for President George W Bush just because one of them was bearing a sticker for then Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

He won his first race for Congress and served for a total of six terms there before being elected to the governorship in 2018. In his second term his party had a slender majority in the state’s legislature and they could move forward with protections for abortion rights, support for gender-affirming care, and legalisation of the recreational use of marijuana.

He signed gun safety legislation (he is a gun owner and occasional hunter), protections for voting rights, and pushed for action to combat climate change and to promote renewable energy.

The state’s strong tax revenue base, together with spending cuts, generated a $17.6-billion surplus, and his administration channelled those funds into investments in education, free breakfast and lunch programmes for all schoolchildren, tuition-free education at the state’s public colleges for students whose families earn less than $80,000 a year, as well as paid family and medical leave and health insurance coverage, regardless of immigration status.

Almost immediately after Harris’s choice was announced, the Trump campaign sent out what seems to have been a nearly unhinged appeal for contributions, in random all-caps and multicolour glory. We repeat it for readers in all its gothic horror:

“Tim Walz would be the worst VP in history! Even worse than Dangerously Liberal and Crooked Kamala Harris – HE’S THAT BAD. He’ll unleash HELL ON EARTH and open our borders to the worst criminals imaginable. He’ll rubber stamp Kamala’s GREEN NEW SCAM and light TRILLIONS of dollars on fire. But the real killer: he’s already pulled in MILLIONS in dirty cash to buy the White House! I’m organising a HISTORIC response right here and now – but it won’t mean a thing without you. So before their hate-America campaign gets off the ground, I’m calling on EVERY SINGLE PATRIOT reading this message to chip in and declare: I’M VOTING TRUMP. Crooked Kamala already cashed HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS in checks from her accomplices. But because of your actions today, we’ll seize back our momentum and keep it going strong all the way back to the White House! So please, if you’re able, chip in before the day is over and STAND WITH TRUMP. YOU AND I WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

The Republicans clearly don’t quite know what to make of Tim Walz, at least not yet, although they are obviously gearing up to attack Walz on his apparently sluggish action in dealing with the rioting in Minneapolis-St Paul in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd.

In state economic policy actions, Walz’s administration has expanded support for technology production and infrastructure funding – an effort that gained national notice last year when, per CNBC rankings, his state had bumped Texas out of the top five states for business support. (That rating looked at 86 indicators in 10 categories, including the workforce, infrastructure, health and business friendliness.)

For the national political race, Walz seems to check many boxes. On 28 July, Sunday, when CNN’s Jake Tapper listed some of Walz’s policies and asked the then potential candidate if they had made him vulnerable to Republican criticism of him as a “big government liberal”, Walz joked he was, indeed, just such a “monster”.

Tim Walz Kamala Harris Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris with running mate Tim Walz during a rally at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 6 August 2024. (Photo: EPA-EFE / David Muse)

He went on to expand on that, saying, “kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own healthcare decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness… The fact of the matter is,” where Democratic policies are implemented, “quality of life is higher, the economies are better… educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we’re working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”

We should add he has already coined one of the leading memes for the ongoing campaign, labelling both Trump and JD Vance as “weird”, a charge that seems to have stuck for many.

From his Midwest governorship, he is now undertaking a big jump with just three months to introduce himself successfully to a nation in which he is only lightly known beyond his home state. But, together with his party’s presidential candidate, Walz seems to have injected some real enthusiasm and energy into their ticket.

In their first joint appearance in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, the crowd seemed almost rapturously enthusiastic about their candidates and their hopes for victory. The next three months will tell how well it goes for them. DM

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