2024-08-07 05:44:47
Walz wasn’t even well known outside of Minnesota — at least not until this week, when he appeared on a series of talk shows emphatically endorsing Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Harris and dismissing Republican Donald Trump’s agenda as divisive and extreme.
“These guys are just weird,” Walz said Saturday of the Republican slate. He spoke to a crowd of Harris campaigners in St. Paul, Minn., but the “weird” line of attack he’s been using for months has gone viral. Even Curry herself used the words “just weird” over the weekend to describe the ways in which Republicans chose to criticize her.
Meanwhile, “weird” isn’t the word most people would choose to describe Walz himself. According to The New York Times, this may be one of the reasons why he became Harris’ partner in the US presidential election.
D. Trump’s antidote
T. Walz is known as a stable and down-to-earth person. His supporters say he could also appeal to moderate voters and put down deep roots in the rural Midwest, a potential challenge to Trump running mate JDVance.
60-year-old T. Walz grew up in a small town in Nebraska. He attended public schools and graduated from Chadron State College in Nebraska. He taught at a public school in Mankato, south of Minneapolis, where Walz and his wife, also a teacher, raised two children. Outside the classroom, he coached the high school football team and served 24 years in the Army National Guard, where he attained the rank of master sergeant.
in 2006 Walz began his political career by defeating a longtime Republican congressman in a largely rural district, a rarity in recent years.
“Here’s a guy who can actually fish, here’s a guy who can actually hunt, here’s a guy who served our country in the National Guard,” said Heidi Heitkamp, a former senator and fellow Democrat who ran in 2018. lost her seat representing nearby North Dakota, a rural and conservative state.
As Harris’ running mate, Walz can help Democrats shore up support in swing states by attracting working-class, white, rural voters who have drifted away from the party, Heitkamp said.
“When we look at Tim Walz, we see a man whose life experience is very similar to that of many people in rural America who might want to reconsider casting a blind vote for the Republican nominee,” she said.
Transformed the state
However, as governor of Minnesota, T. Walz shifted the state sharply to the left with his political moves.
Walz won a second term in 2022 when Democrats took over the state Senate. It sealed the victory that put Democrats in control of the state Capitol, and Walz presided over the state’s most productive legislative session in decades.
Democrats enshrined abortion rights in state law, legalized recreational marijuana, funded free school meals statewide, mandated employers to provide paid medical and family leave, expanded background checks on gun purchases and set a 2040 goal. switch to a carbon-free electricity grid.
T. Walz, who currently chairs the Democratic Governors Association, did not regret all the changes. “Right now, Minnesota is showing the country that you don’t win elections to make political capital,” he wrote after the 2023 campaign ended. for the legislative session. “We win elections to burn political capital and improve life.”
However, Walz’s choice is not directly related to the state he represents. While presidential elections in Minnesota have been close at times, the state’s voters have not elected a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon was elected there in 1972. Still, the Trump campaign has signaled it hopes to compete in Minnesota, and Trump and JDVance held a rally in St. Cloud over the weekend.
While Minnesota is not a political battleground, some supporters say Walz’s run could resonate with other voters in the upper Midwest, including Wisconsin and Michigan.
Criticism of the past
But Minnesota Republican Party Chairman David Hann said Walz’s inclusion on Harris’ slate shows that Democrats are struggling even in traditionally blue states like Minnesota.
Polls gave Republicans hope that Minnesota could swing to their party in November, before President Joe Biden gave up his chance to run for re-election. But last week, a poll conducted by Fox News showed that the people of Minnesota support K. Harris by six percentage points more than D. Trump.
Even before the choice of K. Harris became clear, D. Hann said that if T. Walz was chosen as a candidate for vice president, he would become an obstacle (for the Democrats themselves). According to D. Hann, T. Walz is responsible for failing to prevent the chaos and damage that followed the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in 2020. In the riots that followed the killing, a nearly ten kilometer stretch of the city suffered extraordinary damage, including the burning of a police station.
Three days after Floyd’s murder, when looting, arson and demonstrations spread across Minneapolis, Walz deployed hundreds of National Guard troops. Critics said the governor should have acted earlier to quell the growing unrest. The Walz administration said the city of Minneapolis did not provide detailed information needed to deploy the Guard sooner.
As governor, Hann and other critics said Walz presided over the “most partisan administration” in recent memory, passing a slew of liberal legislation that Republicans called extreme and fiscally irresponsible. “There’s a lot of dissatisfaction nationally and certainly in the state with the Democrats who have been in charge for the last two years,” Hann said.
Unite the divided parties?
But Walz’s supporters say his approach is far from divisive. Minnesota Democratic Representative Angie Craig, in a competitive district, called Walz “an antidote to this division that we see in our nation today.”
She said he is the rare politician who feels as comfortable attending an agribusiness festival as he does a gay rights group celebration.
Statewide, Walz’s approval ratings have plummeted following the unrest that followed Floyd’s murder. However, in 2022 he easily won re-election, and recent polls show a majority of Minnesotans approve of his performance.
As a member of Congress from 2007 to 2019, Walz had a reputation as a hard-working man who found common ground with Republicans, particularly on initiatives to help veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Representative Betty McCollum, a Democrat who is currently Minnesota’s longest-serving member of Congress, said Walz’s negotiating style and Capitol experience would help the Harris administration pass difficult legislation.
“He won’t turn away,” she said. “He’s going to ask if there’s something they need, what they’re missing, or what the legislation is missing, and if there’s any way to get to ‘yes.'”
T. Walz has said that he spoke with K. Harris on the day that J. Biden announced his withdrawal from the election. Like other potential candidates, T. Walz has not publicly detailed whether he would like to join the list of candidates. Close friends have privately described him as eager to get elected and start campaigning.
For example “The New York Times” inf.
2024-08-07 05:44:47