Many American voters heard the name Tim Walz for the first time on Tuesday. The 60-year-old governor of Minnesota was picked as Kamala Harris’s running mate, after weeks of speculation that she would choose the young and charismatic Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.
But Democratic insiders weren’t so surprised. Walz, a father of two, is a good servant of the party whose time had come. And, some sources told me, Shapiro may be too ambitious to accept second place.
When Walz first ran for elected office in 2006, not much was expected of the public high school teacher, who was born in Nebraska and taught in the bucolic town of Mankato, Minnesota (population 44,488) for years.
At the age of 42, the Democrat campaigned for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives against a six-term incumbent, Republican Rep. Gil Gutknecht. A veteran who went to college on the GI Bill, Walz promoted a platform of affordable healthcare, an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a promise of change in a district that had been under Republican control since 1994.
The message worked.
That year, Walz was one of about two dozen Democrats from the Midwest who won seats in the House. That string of victories gave the party the six seats they needed to clinch control of the lower chamber for the first time since 1994. It also led to Nancy Pelosi being named the first female Speaker of the House.
Eighteen years later, Pelosi still hasn’t forgotten the favor.
Last week, The Hill reported that the California Democrat was leaning in Walz’s favor. When asked who should be Harris’s running mate, a source familiar with her thinking said Pelosi “is always especially fond of former House colleagues.”
Once that comment went public, a flurry of support came out for Walz. Cheerleaders included Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Rep. Betty McCollum, member of the powerful Committee on Appropriations, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who said: “I want somebody who is totally committed to the agenda that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris fought for. . . . I like the things that he’s been able to do. I like that he’s from a rural town; I like that he’s got a military background.”
It helped that days earlier, Walz had scored major points for being the first person to call the Republican ticket “weird.” On Morning Joe, he said of the Trump-Vance ticket, “These guys are just weird.”
A meme was born.
With his plainspoken prairie sensibility and avuncular appearance, Walz convincingly sold himself as a center-right Democrat when he won his seat back in 2006. He also earned an A rating with the NRA a whopping six times for his staunch support for the Second Amendment. According to a Washington Post report on NRA donations to members of Congress, Walz has received more than $18,000 from the gun lobbying group.
But, by the time he ran for governor of Minnesota in 2017, he announced he’d donate that NRA money to charity in the wake of a mass shooting in Las Vegas that took the lives of 59 people that year. After changing his view on guns he never looked back, robustly embracing the progressivism of his party. His first executive order as governor in January 2019 was to establish a DEI council tasked with implementing anti-racist training and embedding equity and inclusion in statewide agencies. One year later, George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis sparked riots and the torching of a police precinct—damage that Walz’s administration estimated at $500 million. But, in the wake of the unrest, Walz used the language of the movement, saying “my administration will use every tool at our disposal to deconstruct generations of systemic racism in Minnesota.” And last year, he signed a bill that made Minnesota a sanctuary for child gender transition, granting legal protection to children who travel to the state for gender-affirming care, and giving access to puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, and reconstructive genital surgery.
Walz is also aligned with Harris on issues such as abortion, the border, and crime, but “he has a folksy enough presentation, sort of like Tim Kaine did for Hillary Clinton, that people might overlook his positions and policies,” Muhlenberg College political science professor Chris Borick told me. “He is seen as safe and trustworthy and folksy. It was likely very comfortable for her” to pick Walz as her running mate.
The story of choosing Walz is also, of course, the story of not choosing 51-year-old Governor Shapiro. Shapiro, a former Montgomery County commissioner and state attorney general, is a moderate who would have appealed to ordinary American voters.
But the fact that he’s Jewish and pro-Israel may have caused discomfort for Harris, as the Democrats’ left flank has increasingly protested the war in Gaza—going as far as to nickname Shapiro “Genocide Josh.”
Larry Ceisler, a friend of Shapiro for over 20 years, told me he hopes for his party’s sake that the governor’s religion was not a reason he wasn’t selected. “That would be a sad state of affairs,” he said.
But there’s another theory: Shapiro didn’t actually want the job. After Shapiro met with Harris on Sunday, according to Politico, he called her team and said he was “struggling with the decision to leave his current job as governor of Pennsylvania, in order to seek the vice presidency.”
That rings true with Borick, who says Shapiro is on a presidential path, and hitching himself to Harris could hurt that trajectory. “Despite his unquestionable attractiveness as a potential VP candidate, I always wondered how much he really wanted the job,” he told me. “Putting his political fate in the hands of the top of the ticket is quite risky. This is a very competitive race. Can Harris win? Sure. Can Harris lose? Absolutely.”
Many longtime Shapiro supporters in Pennsylvania, where I live, said they thought the job was the wrong fit for him to begin with. “Josh is nobody’s second, that isn’t his sweet spot,” said David Urban, a Republican operative in the Keystone State who has been friends with Shapiro for thirty years. “I think the Democrats picked the wrong person—Josh would have been a coalition builder.” But “the truth is it would have come at great cost to his future to run for president if he had taken the role.”
“This is better for him and he probably knows that, but this is also the day he becomes a national figure without the risk,” Urban added.
Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman also suggested that Shapiro’s self-interest could be a problem for Harris. According to Politico, Fetterman’s advisers recently told Harris’s team that the senator believes Shapiro is “excessively focused on his own personal ambitions.”
Borick agrees. “Now he can stay on as governor, bolster his record even more,” he said. “If Trump wins, he could say he was able to work with him despite disagreeing with him and my guess is he will certainly be right at the top of the potential Democratic candidate list in 2028.”
Salena Zito is a Pittsburgh-based politics reporter for the Washington Examiner. Follow her on X at @ZitoSalena, and read her piece “I Was Four Feet Away When I Heard the Bullets.”
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