Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, CNN and The Associated Press reported Tuesday.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Harris campaign or Walz on the pick.
Given Minnesota’s status as a reliably, albeit narrowly, Democratic state, the selection of Walz does not immediately put a battleground state in play for Democrats.
But the plainspoken, second-term state chief executive has emerged recently as a prominent attack dog against former President Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), Trump’s running mate.
Lighting into the Republican Party’s efforts to restrict abortion rights and certain books in public libraries, Walz has helped blow up Democrats’ “weird” moniker for the GOP. “These are weird people on the other side,” he said on MSNBC in July.
Walz, a former public school teacher and veteran of the U.S. Army National Guard, previously represented southern Minnesota in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019.
He has highlighted his upbringing in a small town in Nebraska to go on offense against Vance, arguing that the GOP vice presidential pick fails to appreciate the small-town truism, “Mind your own damn business.”
Walz made his career in Mankato, a small, Democratic city amid a sea of rural, conservative agricultural communities in southern Minnesota.
Since his reelection in 2022, Walz leveraged a narrow legislative majority to pass a bevy of major progressive reforms, including a Medicaid buy-in, paid family and medical leave, a phase-out of fossil fuels, and free school lunches for all.
But Walz’s southern Minnesota roots have failed to arrest Democrats’ steady slide at the polls in the rural areas known as Greater Minnesota. The Republican incumbent carried Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District — Walz’s former House seat — by more than 11 percentage points in 2022.