US Vice President Kamala Harris has picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate — two weeks after mounting a breakneck campaign for President. The 60-year-old brings a rural Midwestern perspective to the Democratic campaign and might help Harris secure the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and neighboring Wisconsin. Meanwhile the Opposition camp led by Donald Trump wasted no time in branding Walz as a ‘dangerously liberal extremist’.
“I am proud to announce that I’ve asked Tim Walz to be my running mate. As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his. It’s great to have him on the team,” the VP wrote on X.
The selection was announced via a text message to supporters on Tuesday morning. The Harris campaign has since updated its website to include Walz and insisted that it was ‘ready to win’ with him.
Who is Tim Walz?
The second-term Minnesota governor has been a champion of liberal goals and served 24 years in domestic and overseas deployments with the US military. Walz has represented southern Minnesota in the US House of Representatives for a dozen years and previously taught high school in both China and America.
A relative political unknown for Americans until recently, he had grabbed eyeballs recently after criticising Trump and running mate JD Vance as “weird” — an unusual moniker that appears to have gotten deeply under Trump’s skin.
He had presided over the upheaval that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and also came under scrutiny for expanding vaccinations across his state amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Walz grew up in a small Nebraska town and enlisted in the Army National Guard when he was just 17. He retired in 2005 as a command sergeant major with a field artillery battalion — one of the military’s highest enlisted ranks. Walz taught in China around the time of the 1989 Tiananmen square unrest before moving to Minnesota with his wife in the mid-1990s. Walz was also a social studies teacher, football coach and union member at Mankato West High School in Minnesota before he got into politics.
Over the years Walz has helped enact an ambitious Democratic agenda for his state — including sweeping protections for abortion rights and generous aid to families. His background, Democrats hope, will appeal to voters in an election in which the economy is a defining issue.
(With inputs from agencies)
