Tim Walz

Tim Walz’s political biography is the kind of tale found in Hollywood movies, unless, of course, producers had rejected the screenplay as too ridiculous. Key points in his story include:

• Served in the National Guard for 24 years
• Taught geography in rural Minnesota, where he helped coach a high school football team to its first state championship
• Became interested in politics in 2004 after a group of students he was chaperoning was denied access to a campaign event for Pres. George W. Bush
• Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat in 2006 to a seat that had previously been held by Republicans for more than a decade
• Chosen by Kamala Harris in 2024 to be the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party
• Abruptly ended his bid for a third term in 2026 amid a highly charged investigation into the state’s use of federal childcare funding

Early life

Timothy James Walz was born in West Point, Nebraska, on April 6, 1964, to Darlene Rose Walz (née Reiman) and James F. Walz. His father was a high school administrator, and the family, which included his three siblings, lived in rural Nebraska. Walz graduated from high school in 1982; his graduating class had just 25 students. His father died the next year of lung cancer, and Walz worked for several years in agriculture and factory jobs while also serving as a member of the National Guard. He eventually attended college at Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska, graduating in 1989. Following in his father’s footsteps as an educator, he spent a year teaching in China before returning to Nebraska to teach and coach.

Life in Minnesota

While teaching in Nebraska, Walz met a fellow teacher named Gwen Whipple. The two married in 1994 and in 1996 moved to Minnesota, Whipple’s home state. Walz began teaching geography and coaching football at Mankato West High School. In 1999 he helped coach the football team to its first state championship. The same year Walz was approached by a student who wanted to start a gay-straight alliance and asked him to be the faculty sponsor. He took on the role, telling Minneapolis’s Star Tribune in 2018, “It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married.”

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While teaching, coaching, and advising, Walz continued to serve in the National Guard, and he subsequently did tours that included stints in Europe and the Arctic Circle, as well as Arkansas and Texas. In 1995 Walz was stopped for driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone. He failed a sobriety test, was arrested, and ultimately pleaded guilty to reckless driving. He no longer drinks alcohol but is often seen chugging Diet Mountain Dew.

In 2004 Walz took a group of students on a field trip to a campaign event for Pres. George W. Bush in Mankato. But, as Walz tells the story, the group was denied access because one of the students had a sticker for Bush’s opponent in the 2004 presidential election, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. Angered by what he saw as a snub of students who wanted to learn about the political process, Walz volunteered for the Kerry campaign.

Although Kerry lost, Walz had caught the political bug. He wondered what the Democratic field for Minnesota’s 1st congressional district looked like, only to discover that no one wanted to run against Republican incumbent Gil Gutknecht, who had held the seat since 1995. He attended a political boot camp named for the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone that taught him about organizing and campaigning and, as Walz put it, “how to maintain your authenticity.” Helped by a wave of anti-Republican sentiment fueled by opposition to the Iraq War, Walz won the seat in an upset.

Life as a politician

Walz was reelected to Congress five times—including in 2016, when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who went on to win the presidency, won Walz’s district by double digits. Walz, a hunter and a gun owner in a largely rural district, developed a reputation for trying to work with Republicans in Congress and even received an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, until he renounced the group after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. He was also particularly active in working on legislation involving military families.

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In 2018 Walz ran and was elected to become Minnesota’s 41st governor. His first term as governor was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd. As protesters took to the streets to protest police brutality, the looting and violence were more than local police departments could handle. Minneapolis’s mayor asked Walz to send in the Minnesota National Guard. Walz issued an order to do so a day later, but he faced criticism from Republicans in the state for not acting sooner.

Despite the controversy, he was reelected in 2022, and, in the wake of Democratic outrage over the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Minnesota Legislature became controlled by Democrats for the first time since 2014. As governor he helped pass legislation that secured abortion rights, allowed undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses, provided free lunches to all public school students, legalized marijuana, and enacted gun control regulations. In 2023 he became chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

While well-known and respected in Democratic Party circles, Walz was largely seen as a dark horse candidate in the competition to become Vice Pres. Kamala Harris’s running mate. Other contenders for the position included Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. But Walz emerged as a straight-talking, energetic figure. He joked that he might cost the ticket votes in Wisconsin because, as a longtime Minnesota Vikings football fan, he could not pretend to root for the Green Bay Packers. In the wake of controversy that swelled around Republican Party presidential nominee Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, Walz told supporters at a Harris campaign event in late July, “These guys are just weird.” Within days, weird had become the Democratic watchword for the Republican ticket. A week later Harris announced Walz as her running mate. Harris and Walz were defeated by Trump and Vance in the presidential election of 2024 and Walz returned to Minnesota to finish his term as governor.

In June 2025 Minnesota was rocked by the assassinations of Democratic Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, as well as the attempted assassinations of Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. Walz led the state in mourning, saying of his friend Hortman: “She was a formidable public servant. A fixture and giant in Minnesota. She woke up every day determined to make this state a better place.”

2026: Ending a campaign, Renee Good, ICE

In January 2026 Walz sent political shock waves through Minnesota by announcing he was ending his bid for a third term as the state’s governor. The move came after a viral video alleging fraud at Minnesota childcare facilities led the federal government to freeze childcare payments to the state. In announcing his decision, Walz outlined the ways in which his administration had fought fraud in the system but said that Republican political attacks were making that fight more difficult. “We’ve got Republicans here in the legislature playing hide-and-seek with whistleblowers. We’ve got conspiracy theorist right-wing YouTubers breaking into day care centers and demanding access to our children.” He also condemned Trump’s attack on Minnesota’s Somali community.

Days after ending his reelection campaign, Walz was before cameras again to call for calm in the wake of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minnesota. The 37-year-old mother of three was shot and killed as she pulled away from ICE agents in a Minneapolis neighborhood. The Trump administration said the shooting was in self-defense and that Good was trying to attack the agents, but Walz—and bystander video from the scene—seemed to dispute that description of events. Walz described the shooting as “preventable” and “unnecessary” but urged residents to respond responsibly. (The shooting took place less than a mile from the killing of George Floyd.)

I want Minnesotans to hear this from me: The desire to get out in the protest and to speak up to this administration of how wrong this is, that is a patriotic duty at this point in time, but it needs to be done safely. I feel your anger, I am angry. They want a show, we can’t give it to them.

Less than two weeks after Good’s death, Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and other Democratic leaders were subpoenaed as part of a Justice Department investigation into whether the officials conspired to impede ICE’s work in the state.

Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche accused Walz and Frey of “encouraging violence against law enforcement” and referred to their actions as “terrorism.” Both men called for ICE to leave the state in the aftermath of Good’s death but also encouraged residents to protest peacefully. “Stay safe and stay peaceful today,” Walz posted on social media 10 days after Good’s death, even as he mobilized the National Guard to be ready to support local and state police.

In June 2026 a federal judge dismissed the subpoenas as punitive. Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of Minnesota wrote in part that “the dominant purpose of the challenged subpoenas is to coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration law and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so.”