The wait is over: Amid roaring cheers, the democratic US presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her newly chosen vice Tim Walz appeared together for the first time at a campaign event last Tuesday. Around 10,000 supporters welcomed the duo in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). In his new role, Walz quickly launched a verbal attack on the Republican opposition. The 60-year-old mocked Trump and accused him of hypocrisy. “He never sat at a kitchen table like the one I grew up at, where we wondered how we would pay the bills. He sat in his country club in Mar-a-Lago and thought about how to cut taxes for his rich friends.”
From Teacher to Vice Presidential Candidate
Walz, 60, owes his meteoric rise not least to a buzzword that he has successfully introduced in his campaign against Republican Donald Trump: weird. The term means “strange” or “odd” and is applied by Walz to both Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance. Walz was born in 1964 and grew up in a small town in the rural, Midwestern state of Nebraska. His father was a public school administrator and passed away from cancer when Walz was 19. At just 17 years old, he enlisted in the National Guard, where he was deployed to various locations during his 24 years of service, including the Arctic. In 1989, he earned a degree in social sciences from a college in Nebraska.
Walz’s Partnership with Harris
As a teacher, Walz worked in an Indigenous reservation in South Dakota and – through a program from Harvard University – in China. He met his wife Gwen in his home state of Nebraska. They married in 1994 and later moved to Gwen’s home state of Minnesota, where they both worked as teachers at the same high school and he also served as a football coach. It wasn’t until the middle of his career that Walz switched to politics: he was elected to the House of Representatives in Washington in 2006, and then became the governor of Minnesota in 2018. His political profile combines an approachable demeanor and clear language with leftist substantive positions.