Last Week, 9 in 10 Americans Had No Opinion of Walz. That’s About to Change.

Shortly before 9 am ET, “multiple sources” told CNN and others that Kamala Harris had chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. A few minutes later, the campaign confirmed the choice.

Walz doesn’t come from a truly swing state, as did other reputed short list candidates, such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. But he does come from the Midwest, and he doesn’t have the political baggage around Israel and Gaza that Shapiro brings to the table, or the statements in favor of the border wall and increased border militarization that Kelly has made, which have angered some of the Democratic Party’s base. Nor has Walz managed to alienate key trade unions, as Kelly has done with his opposition to pro-union legislation such as the PRO Act.

The Minnesotan presents a sort of stealth charisma. He has a storied ability, honed in the social science high school classrooms in which he taught before entering politics, to reach out to Midwestern voters without coming across as part of the coastal elites whom so many voters in the heartlands look at with suspicion; and, perhaps most importantly, he has climbed the political ladder over the past couple decades without alienating core constituencies, either on the left or the right of the party. He sounds relentlessly gentle, but underneath the soothing words he knows how to pack a political punch and has, in recent weeks, shown himself to be an effective surrogate out on the campaign trail and in television studios.

Appearing as a guest on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show a few weeks ago, Governor Walz came up with the “Republicans are weird” angle that rapidly became a viral meme. Despite its disconnection from a more forceful defense of specific political principles, the critique struck a chord without being too aggressive, seemingly speaking to the burgeoning fear many Americans have that the Donald Trump cult and its culture war focus have sent U.S. politics down some very strange and extreme roads in recent years. Since those “weird” comments, Walz’s political stock has risen seemingly by the hour.

First elected to Congress in a hotly contested swing district in 2006, Walz established a reputation as a political moderate, willing to stick his neck out on populist economic issues but at the same time connecting with rural Midwesterners who too often felt ignored by politicians on the national stage.

He was a small town Minnesotan, born in Nebraska, who had served in the Army National Guard, loved hunting, and who for the first several years of his congressional tenure, received an “A” grade — and coveted political endorsements — from the National Rifle Association (NRA) for his support for gun rights. Then, in the wake of a series of high-profile mass shootings, Walz began pivoting toward supporting gun reforms (background checks, red flag laws, and so on) embraced by a majority of Americans — and the NRA began backpedaling its support for him. These days, he wears the NRA’s opposition to his ongoing political career as a badge of honor and says he has donated to charity the equivalent amount to that the NRA donated over the years to his political campaigns.

Once he became Minnesota’s governor, Walz built up a solid record of achievements around core policy areas dear to many progressives’ hearts. He supported expanded paid sick and family leave for workers, free school meals and LGBTQ rights. The legislature legalized recreational marijuana, and it banned noncompete agreements for workers. He signed into law a bill providing for the automatic reenfranchisement of people with felony convictions once they complete their criminal sentences. And after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the governor made a strong push to have abortion rights codified into state law — Minnesota ultimately became the first state in the wake of the ruling to do so.

Amid the Black Lives Matter uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in Minnesota, Waltz drew criticism from leftists for calling in hundreds of members of the National Guard to quell the protests. At the same time, however, he was simultaneously slammed by centrist Democrats and Republicans for how long he delayed deploying the National Guard after the mayor of Minneapolis requested it.

Despite these critiques, Walz’s durable popularity helped propel the state Democrats to an across-the-board victory in 2022, allowing them to take control of both legislative houses as well as the governor’s office and to turbocharge their progressive agenda. In some ways, the state is now seen as a laboratory for what is possible when Democrats control both state houses and the governor’s office.

These achievements are, surely, all part of the calculus that went into Harris’s selection of Walz over the other short-listed VP hopefuls.

Shapiro would, in all likelihood, have ensured a Harris victory in Pennsylvania; but his past statements on the Middle East, and his vocal support in recent months for Israel would have risked further alienating the party’s activist base that Harris has spent the past several weeks attempting to reinitiate ties with. It’s at least possible that the boost she would have received in Pennsylvania would have been partially countered by slumping support in Michigan, where Arab American voters had already shown their political power by organizing a huge “uncommitted” vote against Biden during the primaries there earlier this year.

Kelly would have likely helped the Democratic ticket close the gap with Trump in Arizona, a swing state where Trump’s lead appears to have at least temporarily held up since Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, even as the race tightened in other states. But it’s unclear who Gov. Katie Hobbs would have appointed to replace Kelly in the Senate; and, with Democratic Senate hopeful Ruben Gallego already locked in a tight race with Kari Lake to replace outgoing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, there were no other obvious candidates who could replace Kelly and then go on to win election in their own right in 2026. Given how tight the Senate margins are likely to be in coming years, taking Kelly out of the Senate would have made the numbers game that much more unfavorable to the Democrats.

And so, the Minnesota governor gradually rose to the top of the list of veep choices, buoyed by a burst of grassroots enthusiasm and also by a dearth of negative opinions, on the national stage, against him.

There are less than three months until the election, and in those months Walz will both have to develop his national profile at a rapid trot, and also serve as an effective attack dog against J.D. Vance and Trump. AP polling last week showed that, despite his chairing the Democratic Governors’ Association, 9 out of 10 Americans didn’t feel they knew enough about Walz to have an opinion on him one way or the other. That will, over the coming days, certainly change. From now on, the Minnesota governor will be under a relentless spotlight on the campaign trail. How he deals with the attention will, in part, determine the outcome of one of the most important elections in U.S. history.