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go through Brad Ryan In Washington, D.C.
(ABC-Australia) Kamala Harris has leapt over veteran Democrats in a key battleground state to choose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
The process typically requires months of careful vetting, but Harris has only a few weeks to choose her vice presidential pick.
Waltz, 60, is not a national figure in American politics.
But two weeks ago, he caught everyone’s attention with a devastating but simple insult to Republican nominee Donald Trump — and it has become a key message of the Democratic campaign.
Now he has just 90 days to convince American voters to elect him and Harris to the White House.
So who is Tim Waltz? Here are nine quick facts about the governor.
He was a Nebraska native who worked on the family farm
Although Walz is the governor of the northern U.S. state of Minnesota, he is from the more southern state of Nebraska.
He grew up in Butte, a small town of just a few hundred people, and spent his summers working on his family’s farm.
At 17, he joined the Army, following in the footsteps of his veteran father.
He then served for 24 years in the U.S. Army National Guard, the U.S. Army’s primary combat reserve.
With help from the GI Bill, which subsidizes higher education costs for U.S. military personnel, he studied to become a teacher.
Before entering politics, he taught high school sociology and while teaching in his native Nebraska, he met his wife, also a teacher in Minnesota.
Soon after, they moved to Mankato, a city of about 45,000 people in Minnesota, to be closer to her family.
It’s an unusual resume for a Democratic vice presidential candidate. The Washington Post reported He is the first person since 1964 to do so without having attended law school.
But Democrats hope his rural and military background will help them win over moderate centrist voters.
They have already produced a campaign ad highlighting his national credentials.
One of his earliest teaching experiences was in China
After graduating with a degree in social science education, Waltz moved to China in 1989—the year of the brutal Tiananmen Massacre.
According to a congressional biography, he was part of the “first group of American educators approved by the government to teach in China through a Harvard University program.”
In one Interviewed by agricultural publication in 2016He said he had been to China about 30 times.
“I don’t think China has to have an adversarial relationship with the United States,” he said in the interview. “I totally disagree, and I think we need to stand firm against what they’re doing in the South China Sea, but there are many areas where we can cooperate.”
The clip of this clip is being edited Share on social media Some of Trump’s supporters praised the video, but it did not mention the year it was filmed and edited out his comments about the South China Sea.
As a high school football coach, he advocated for gay rights
While a teacher in Mankato in the 1990s, Waltz coached the school’s football team, helping the team win its first state championship.
At the same time, he became the faculty advisor for the school’s newly formed Gay-Lesbian Alliance.
“It’s very important that he takes on this role while coaching football,” said the school’s first openly gay student. told the Washington Post last week.
“He set a role model not only for LGTBQ students, but also for football players in the locker room at a time when homosexuality was not well understood.”
He unexpectedly won a conservative congressional district
Before being elected Governor of Minnesota, Walz was a member of Congress representing the state’s 1st Congressional District.
He defeated the Republican incumbent who had held the district for 12 years in 2007. But when he quit Congress in 2019 to become governor, the GOP took the district back.
It’s a largely rural district that’s historically Republican-dominated, and Walz’s success in winning it and holding it for so long was seen as evidence of his appeal to more conservative rural voters.
He is a gun owner and pheasant hunter who has been favored by the National Rifle Association
Walz has tried to portray himself as pro-gun and pro-gun control.
In an interview with CNN last week, for example, he compared his shooting credentials to his current opponent in the vice presidential race.
“J.D. Vance’s specialty is talking about guns,” he said. “I guarantee you, he can’t shoot a pheasant like me.”
The powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most influential lobbying groups in the United States, endorsed him during his time as a member of Congress. In 2016, he was on the The 20 politicians with the highest gun ownership rates In the popular shooting magazine Guns & Ammo.
But during his 2018 campaign for Minnesota governor, he lost the support of the gun lobby. Mass shooting at Florida school That year, he publicly supported a ban on assault weapons.
He recently signed gun control measures into state law, including mandatory background checks for gun owners and “red flag” laws that allow authorities to seize guns from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.
“As a veteran, gun owner, hunter and father, I know that basic gun safety is not a threat to the Second Amendment — it’s about keeping our children safe,” he said last year.
He has been criticized for his handling of the George Floyd protests
this George Floyd killed by police in 2020 This sparked protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota’s largest city, some of which turned into violent riots.
More than 1,500 businesses and buildings were damaged and burned, causing $500 million (A$766 million) in property damage, according to a state senate report.
As governor, Walz was criticized for not controlling the unrest in the city sooner, and critics called his decision to wait days before mobilizing the Minnesota National Guard a grave mistake.
The report, released by the Republican-controlled state Senate, said Walz and local mayors “failed to appreciate the severity of the rioting and the dangers to the people of Minnesota if the rioters were not confronted and stopped.”
The report also said they “failed to act promptly to confront the rioters with the necessary force because they mistakenly believed such action would escalate the rioting.”
After Harris chose Waltz as her vice presidential running mate, his Republican opponent, JD Vance, said:
“They make an interesting tag team because of course Tim Walz allowed thugs to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and then Kamala Harris helped bail those who were caught out.” (Harris tweeted a link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which raised money for protesters in Minnesota at the time.)
“Decisions are made in specific circumstances, that’s just the way it is, and I said we believe we did the best we could in each and every situation,” Walz said at a recent news conference.
He uttered something that quickly became a favorite insult for Democrats.
Waltz is not a household name outside of Minnesota.
But he has earned some notoriety recently when he began describing some Republicans as “weirdos” in recent media interviews.
“These people are so weird,” he told MSNBC. “They’re running for ‘Macho Man Hates Woman Club’ or something like that.”
This is seen as a shift in the Democratic Party’s usual line of attack, which generally regards Trump as a convicted criminal and a threat to democracy.
But the message was widely shared on social media and has remained so ever since. Many Democrats have spent the past few weeks slamming their Republican opponents for being “weird.”
Walz insisted as well. “These guys are horrible, yeah, just plain weird,” he said at his first campaign rally with Harris.
Republicans call him a “radical leftist” and a “West Coast copycat”
In announcing her selection of Walz, Harris pointed to Walz’s record on hot-button issues like gun control and abortion rights.
The Trump campaign is also emphasizing his progressive record.
“It’s no surprise that San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris wants West Coaster Tim Waltz as her running mate,” the campaign said.
“Waltz’s tenure as governor has been focused on reshaping Minnesota into the ‘Golden State.’
“From advancing his own carbon-free agenda to proposing stricter emissions standards for gas-powered vehicles to supporting policies that allow felons to vote, Walz is passionate about spreading California’s dangerous liberal agenda far and wide.”
Trump himself later posted on social media: “This is the most radical left-wing duo in American history. There has never been anything like this, and there will never be again.”
He defeated the vice presidential candidate from a more crucial battleground
Harris reportedly began by shortlisting about a dozen potential running mates.
In recent days, that number appears to have shrunk to three.
Two other candidates are from key swing states: Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Both are popular locally and could give Harris an edge in their respective states, where the election is likely to be decided in the final moments.
Harris chose Walz even though Minnesota is already a relatively reliably Democratic voting state in national elections.
Citing “three people familiar with the vice president’s thinking,” The New York Times reported Waltz “surpassed his better-known rivals in part because Ms. Harris saw him as an everyman from Minnesota whose Midwestern fatherly qualities complemented her Bay Area background.”
Harris and Waltz are currently embarking on a swing state tour, starting in Pennsylvania, where they appeared at a rally together for the first time.
“Madame Vice President, thank you for your confidence in me,” Waltz told Harris on stage. “But perhaps more importantly, thank you for giving me joy again.”
The Minnesota governor and former high school teacher is expected to add Midwestern appeal to the Democratic presidential campaign.
Posted yesterday at 8:50 AM
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