Vice President Kamala Harris has made her choice: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will be her running mate on the Democratic ticket in the 2024 presidential elections.
Walz, a 60-year-old white Lutheran, is a former member of the House of Representatives and a second-term governor. He is also a former high school teacher and football coach who is a military veteran and a gun owner — a background that should play well to Republicans who are unhappy with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Walz called the former Republican president a “robber baron real estate guy” during an interview with MSNBC last month and more recently referred to him as a “bully” at a separate event. He referred to Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, as “weird people” who he said “want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room.”
Under Walz, Minnesota legalized recreational marijuana for adults, protected abortion rights, expanded protections for LGBTQ citizens, and implemented tuition-free college for state residents with low incomes. This week he signed a bill into law allowing residents to obtain a driver’s license in the state regardless of their immigration status.
But Walz is not well known on the national stage — but he has three months left to change that.
Walz ordered state flags to be flown at half-mast following the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, and had mild criticism for those who failed to condemn the massacre of 1,200 people and abduction of 255 others as hostages, dragged into Gaza.
“If you did not find moral clarity on Saturday morning, and you find yourself waiting to think about what you needed to say, you need to reevaluate where you’re at,” Walz said at the time during a vigil held at Congregation Beth El in Minneapolis.
But this past March, Walz supported calls for a permanent “working” ceasefire.
He visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 2009 during a diplomatic tour of the region. At that time he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and told reporters he believed Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is an obstacle to peace.
One year later, however, Walz declared, “Israel is our truest and closest ally in the region, with a commitment to values of personal freedoms and liberties, surrounded by a pretty tough neighborhood.”
But the Democratic vice presidential nominee is careful to play both sides of the street in his public remarks and has done the same in his Congressional voting history.
In Congress, he voted in favor of aid to Israel — but also supported the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
In 2019, he said in a proclamation marking the first year anniversary of the massacre at Pennsylvania’s Tree of Life synagogue — the deadliest attack on Jews in the United States — “We are committed to confronting hate and bias crimes, and recognize that antisemitism represents a unique and millennia-old enduring hatred of Jewish people.”
This year he has faced protests by BDS supporters over his state’s pension funds investments in Israel bonds, and has condemned antisemitic attacks on Jewish students by pro-Hamas demonstrators.
“I think when Jewish students are telling us they feel unsafe in that, we need to believe them, and I do believe them,” he told PBS in a local interview. He has also called for strengthening Holocaust education and ethnic studies in his state’s school system.
Walz was one of three final candidates under consideration by Harris this past weekend; the others were the popular Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who is unapologetically Jewish (though he’s questioned his own Zionism), and Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona.
As to why Harris did not select Shapiro with the solid electoral support of his state behind him, that has already been subject to much speculation. The first theory is that it is because he’s Jewish, and Harris didn’t want to alienate her Muslim and Progressive voters. A second theory is that Shapiro is very close to the Obamas, and perhaps too close for Kamala’s taste.
Harris has Jamaican and South Asian (India) ancestry, and is married to Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish.
