Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, choosing a progressive policy champion and a plain speaker from America's heartland to help win over rural, white voters, said people familiar with the matter, multiple reports say.
Walz, a 60-year-old US Army National Guard veteran and former teacher, was elected to a Republican-leaning district in the US House of Representatives in 2006 and served 12 years before being elected governor of Minnesota in 2018.
As governor, Walz has pushed a progressive agenda that includes free school meals, goals for tackling climate change, tax cuts for the middle class and expanded paid leave for Minnesota workers.
The Harris campaign hopes Walz's extensive National Guard career, coupled with a successful run as a high school football coach, and his Dad joke videos will attract such voters who are not yet dedicated to a second Trump term in the White House.
Harris, 59, has revived the Democratic Party's hopes of an election victory since becoming its candidate after President Joe Biden, 81, ended his failing reelection bid under party pressure on July 21.
Harris and Walz will face Trump and his running mate JD Vance, also a military veteran from the Midwest, in a November 5 election.
Stumping for Harris, sometimes in a camouflage baseball hat and T-shirt, Walz has attacked Trump and Vance as "weird," a catchy insult that has been picked up by the Harris campaign, social media and Democratic activists.
Walz has also attacked the claims by Trump and Vance of having middle-class credentials.
That approach has struck a chord with the young voters Harris needs to reengage. David Hogg, the co-founder of the gun safety group March for Our Lives, described him as a "great communicator."
The Unicorn
Walz is "somewhat of a unicorn," said Ryan Dawkins, a political science professor at Minnesota's Carleton College – a man born in a small town in rural Nebraska capable of conveying Harris' message to core Democratic voters, and those that the party has failed to reach in recent years.
In the 2016 election, Trump won 59 percent of rural voters; in 2020 that number rose to 65 percent even though Trump lost the election, according to Pew Research.
In the 2022 governor's race, Walz won with 52.27 percent to his Republican opponent's 44.61 percent, although swaths of rural Minnesota voted for the opponent.
He was a staunch defender of government support for farmers and military veterans, as well as gun-owner rights that won praise from the National Rifle Association, according to The Almanac of American Politics.
Walz's shift from a centrist representing a single rural district in Congress to a more progressive politician as governor may have been in response to the demands of voters in major cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul. But it leaves him open to Republican attacks, Dawkins said in a telephone interview.
"He runs the risk of reinforcing some of the worst fears people have of Kamala Harris being a San Francisco liberal," Dawkins s aid.
As the state's top executive, Walz mandated the use of face coverings during the COVID-19 pandemic and signed a law making marital rape illegal. He presided over several years of budget surpluses in Minnesota on the road to his 2022 reelection.
During that campaign, Walz touted the backing of several influential labour unions, including the state AFL-CIO, firefighters, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), teachers and others.
His tenure was marked by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murder. Walz assigned the state's attorney general to lead the prosecution in the case, saying people "don't believe justice can be served."
