Vice President Kamala Harris tapped Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, enlisting him to build an electoral coalition of coastal progressives and Midwest moderates to block Donald Trump from the White House, CNN reported Tuesday.
His selection hews to the conventional wisdom of ticket-balancing, complementing Harris — who hails from California and is seeking to become the first Black woman president in US history — across demographic, cultural and political lines.
Walz, 60, is less known as a national figure but popular in his home state, especially among the 91% of Democratic voters who approve of his job performance — the third-highest of any state, according to a July Morning Consult poll.
Harris had little time to settle on a vice presidential pick after President Joe Biden’s exit from the race. In tapping Walz, she bypassed other potential candidates who offered the promise of delivering crucial swing states, including Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona.
Walz is now tasked with helping Harris solidify the Democratic coalition and bolster the ticket’s outreach to independents.
Polls show a tight race. A July Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey found Harris has wiped out Trump’s lead among voters in seven battleground states with the Democrat now ahead 48% to 47% — a statistical dead heat.
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Centrist democrat
A native of a rural Nebraska town, Walz joined the Army National Guard and rose to the rank of command sergeant major, serving during the early years of the global War on Terror. He worked as a teacher — on a Native American reservation and in China — before finally settling down in Minnesota and running for Congress.
He served six terms in the House, where he focused on military, veterans and agricultural issues — allowing him to neutralise Harris’ relative lack of experience in those areas and deliver a message that might resonate with voters outside the Democratic base. His voting record was slightly to the right of the typical House Democrat.
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One issue where he differed from Democrats was over gun rights, where his lifelong devotion to shooting sports and voting record earned him an endorsement from the National Rifle Association. But after a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Walz called the NRA “the biggest single obstacle to passing the most basic measures to prevent gun violence in America”. He says he supports universal background checks, “red flag” laws and an assault weapons ban.
Now serving his second term as governor, Walz presided over the upheaval that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. After initial criticism that he was slow to respond, Walz called up the National Guard and summoned two special sessions of the state legislature to pass police reform legislation.
As Harris weighed her choices, Walz was pushed by progressives and labour union leaders who touted his policies as governor, including offering free school lunches, expanding paid family and medical leave — a background Democrats hope will appeal to voters in an election in which the economy is a defining issue.
