Vice President Kamala Harris has picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate on Tuesday, according to three people familiar with the decision.
In choosing Walz, she is turning to a Midwestern governor, military veteran and union supporter who helped enact an ambitious Democratic agenda for his state, including sweeping protections for abortion rights and generous aid to families.
The selection caps the Democrat’s short but swift ascent from a relative unknown to a leading driver of the party’s attacks on Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda.
Harris had not formally called Walz to offer him the position, a source familiar with process told CNN.
The Democratic Party US presidential nominee is set to introduce her new running mate at a rally on Tuesday evening in Philadelphia.
Harris, the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to lead a major party ticket, initially considered nearly a dozen candidates before zeroing in on a handful of serious contenders, all of whom were white men.
In landing on Walz, she sided with a low-key partner who has proven himself as a champion for Democratic causes.
He had been an outspoken defender of Joe Biden following his disastrous debate performance as calls for the president to end his reelection bid escalated.
When Biden did drop out, Walz endorsed Harris the next day and has since emerged as a reliable, energetic and cutting advocate for the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Walz has been a strong public advocate for Harris in her campaign against Trump and Vance, labelling the Republicans “just weird” in an interview last month. Democrats have seized on the message and amplified it since then.
During a fundraiser for Harris on Monday in Minneapolis, Walz said: “It wasn’t a slur to call these guys weird. It was an observation.”
Walz, who grew up in the small town of West Point, Nebraska, was a social studies teacher, football coach and union member at Mankato West High School in Minnesota before he got into politics.
Walz also has a personal story befitting the zeitgeist – a family history, as he discussed last month, of infertility troubles, with his wife of three decades, Gwen, which allows him to speak with some authority against opponents or sceptics of in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.
“My oldest daughter’s name is Hope. That’s because my wife and I spent seven years trying to get pregnant, needed fertility treatments, things like IVF – things (MAGA Republicans) would ban,” Walz told Harris supporters.
“These guys are the anti-freedoms.”
To draw a bright, cheeky line under his own childhood experience, Walz – not for the last time – recounted that he “grew up in a small town: 400 people, 24 kids in the class, 12 cousins”.
He won the first of six terms in Congress in 2006 from a mostly rural southern Minnesota district, and used the office to champion veterans issues.
Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard, rising to command sergeant major, one of the highest enlisted ranks in the military.
He ran for governor in 2018 on the theme of “One Minnesota” and won by more than 11 points.
As governor, Walz had to find ways to work in his first term with a legislature that was split between a Democratic-controlled House and a Republican-led Senate.
Walz won re-election in 2022 by nearly 8 points over his GOP challenger, Dr Scott Jensen, a physician and vaccine skeptic.
Not only did Walz win, Democrats kept control of the House and flipped the Senate to win the “trifecta” of full control of both chambers and the governor’s office for the first time in eight years.
A big reason was the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which held that the Constitution doesn’t include a right to abortion. That hurt Minnesota Republicans, especially among suburban women.
Harris’ campaign planned to make the announcement via video message before the rally, though the exact timing remained unclear, according to a person involved in the planning who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail discussions occurring behind closed doors.
Doing so would be similar to how then-candidate Joe Biden revealed Harris as his vice presidential choice during the pandemic-marred presidential race of 2020.
It will mark be another major milestone in the barely two weeks since the vice president moved to take over the top of the Democratic ticket heading into November’s election.
She has been scrambling to build out a campaign since then, and to breathe new life into the Democratic race against Republican Donald Trump.
Harris hopes to shore up her campaign’s standing across the upper Midwest, a critical region in presidential politics that often serves as a buffer for Democrats seeking the White House.
The party remains haunted by Republican Donald Trump’s wins in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016. Trump lost those states in 2020 but has zeroed in on them as he aims to return to the presidency this year and is expanding his focus to Minnesota.
Walz has served often as a Biden-Harris surrogate, and has made increasingly frequent appearances on national television. They’ve included an interview on Fox News that irritated Trump so much that he posted on Truth Social, “They make me fight battles I shouldn’t have to fight”.
Republicans still criticise Walz for his response to the sometimes violent unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, which included the torching of a police station.
Walz is also co-chair of the rules committee for the Democratic National Convention. And he led a White House meeting of Democratic governors with Biden following the president’s disastrous performance in his debate with Trump.
Putting Walz on the ticket could help Democrats hold the state’s 10 electoral votes and bolster the party more broadly in the Midwest. No Republican has won a statewide race in Minnesota since Tim Pawlenty was re-elected governor in 2006, but GOP candidates for attorney general and state auditor came close in 2022.
Minnesota has produced two vice presidents, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale.
– Reported with Associated Press and CNN.
