In classically humble Midwestern fashion, few Minnesotans actually seemed to believe their governor Tim Walz would scooch right by Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro to become Kamala Harris’s VP pick. Many were just happy for him to be in the mix at all before waking up on Tuesday morning to discover that—ope!—he’d won the veepstakes.
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There’s something bittersweet about your governor moving up in the world only two years into their second term. It’s a similar feeling to when the local band you’ve loved for years gets a deal with a major label and explodes—and you have to share that magic with everyone else. But after seeing Governor Walz work his particular magic during the four years I’ve lived in Minneapolis—along with the recent two-week speed run around the talking-heads circuit that turned him into America’s Uncle—I’m bursting with local pride and hope.
For residents with deeper roots, it’s not just that someone representing Minnesota may be headed to the White House; it’s that Walz is someone who is a bone-deep Midwesterner.
Walz grew up working on the family farm in West Point, Nebraska, before settling down in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1996. More to the point of his hot-dish cook-off-winning folksiness, Walz is not a lifelong career politician. He worked a blue-collar manufacturing job right out of high school before joining the National Guard. Eventually, he taught at a public high school and coached football for 20 years—and no one has ever looked more like a former high school football coach!—before getting elected congressman of a traditionally Republican district in 2006. He is the first politician on a Democratic ticket in the past 44 years to not possess a law degree.
If all that weren’t Minnesotan enough, though, Walz went on to use his powers as governor to honor Prince, renaming a stretch of highway after him last year.
Walz became my governor when I moved to Minneapolis in 2020, less than two years after he took office. It was a very strange time to explore these new surroundings. The city had been battered both by COVID and the uprising that followed George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police. Many storefronts on Hennepin Avenue were still boarded up at the time, and local businesses were dropping like flies. Attempting to heal the community while navigating the pandemic proved a tricky balancing act for a first-term governor. Walz ultimately handled this crisis with grace, even if his initial response in the summer of 2020 was imperfect. (Critics say he should’ve deployed the National Guard sooner.)
On the first anniversary of Floyd’s murder, the governor asked Minnesotans for 9 minutes and 29 seconds of silence—the length of time Floyd remained under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin—to honor Floyd’s legacy and acknowledge that the fight against systemic racism is a state priority. He proved as much in the year that followed, engaging the community in an ongoing dialogue to address the root causes of the unrest in 2020. As a result, Minneapolis has put in place minor but crucial reforms to how police are trained to interact with citizens.
Walz really proved his political mettle, though, after getting reelected in the 2022 midterms. That election created a supermajority, with a Democratic governor presiding over both the House and the Senate for the first time in eight years. Walz wasted not one moment in spending that political capital. Rather than worry about the optics of pushing progressive policies, he quickly built on the hard work of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor legislature, and signed into law a flurry of bills that the Washington Post dubbed the Minnesota Miracle.
To list all of Walz’s wins in the 2023-2024 legislative session would take too long, but it’ll suffice to say that, collectively, they look like a Bernie Sanders fantasy. Some of the highlights include: a bill providing free breakfast and lunch to Minnesota students, resulting in history’s cutest political photo op; committing to a 100% carbon-free electricity standard by 2040; tax rebates of up to $1,300 for working-class families; automatic voter registration for all and restored voting rights for former felons, something one of the two presidential candidates might come to appreciate on a personal level; red-flag laws and universal background checks for gun purchases; 12 weeks paid family leave and paid sick leave; legalized recreational cannabis, which created a new revenue stream of THC beverages that have dramatically helped the state’s brewing industry; new laws for abortion rights and trans rights, and historic investments to lower childcare costs. (To reiterate, this is an incomplete list of Walz’s accomplishments since 2023.)
These kinds of policies are easy for Republican politicians and pundits to attack as abstractions. Walz is proving, however, that they are much harder to attack when they have been enshrined into law and produced positive results that are popular with constituents. It’s hard to paint Minnesota as a failed socialist state when, as of March 2024, S&P Global reported better economic conditions than previously expected for Minnesota’s GDP growth. Some of Walz’s policies have also created jobs, which partly explains why more than 3 million Minnesotans were working last October, the highest total ever recorded in the state. And when those GOP politicians inevitably do attack Walz’s policies, the former NRA member can respond in the same way he did as a House Rep. to persuade Republican constituents to reelect him five times.
My only current complaint about life in Walz’s Minneapolis is that it’s hard to drive anywhere lately due to an overabundance of road construction. All that road work, though, comes from Walz directing some of the state’s $17.6 billion budget surplus toward infrastructure projects.
Thanks a lot, Vice Presidential Nominee Walz! (Sincerely.)