Who Is Kamala Harris' VP Pick, Tim Walz?

Vice-president Kamala Harris has made history in a number of ways, most recently by becoming the second woman and first woman of color to be the Democratic nominee for president. One of the first major decisions of any presidential nominee is to choose a running mate. Harris has chosen Minnesota governor Tim Walz to join her on the ticket.

Walz wasn't at the top of the list for Harris's VP pick in the days since President Joe Biden confirmed he wouldn't be running again and then endorsed Harris. However, it may very well have been his use of the word "weird" to describe Donald Trump and his somewhat left-field VP pick of Senator J.D. Vance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that helped elevate his national profile and get him the position. In that now-iconic interview, Walz also described Vance as someone who "know[s] nothing about small-town America." We can't speak to Vance's qualifications in that regard, but we know that Walz has experience with rural America. He's a moderate Democrat who served in Congress for 12 years, representing a mostly rural Minnesota district and beating a longtime Republican incumbent. He then became governor of Minnesota in 2018 and won reelection in 2022.

Tim Walz grew up in Nebraska and signed up for the Army National Guard to help put himself through college — he served for an impressive 24 years. After college, he ended up living in the small city of Mankato, Minnesota, where he taught high school geography. He also coached football and basketball. He once joked on X, formerly Twitter, about his time as a high school teacher, saying, "[I] supervised the lunchroom for 20 years. You do not leave that job with a full head of hair. Trust me."

It may be that Harris and her team chose Walz for his appeal to moderate Democrats, independents, and even potential Republicans. "When you look at Tim Walz, what you have is someone with a lived experience that is so comparable to so many of the people in rural America who are willing to maybe reconsider just blindly voting for the Republican Party candidate," Heidi Heitkamp, a former North Dakota governor, told The New York Times.