Teacher, veteran and gridiron glory: Tim Walz’s All-American background propelled him to the biggest political stage

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been chosen to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in the race against former President Donald Trump and JD Vance.

The pick was praised by Democrats across the board, with former President Barack Obama calling him an “outstanding governor” and former speaker Nancy Pelosi saying that he’s a “heartland of America Democrat."

“As a governor, a coach, a teacher, and a veteran, he’s delivered for working families like his. It’s great to have him on the team,” Harris said on social media as she announced her pick.

Walz said on X on Tuesday that it was the “honor of a lifetime” to join the ticket.

“Vice President Harris is showing us the politics of what’s possible. It reminds me a bit of the first day of school,” he added.

Early polling reveals that most Americans haven’t heard of Tim Walz, with 71 percent of Americans saying in a recent NPR/PBS/Marist survey that they either haven’t heard of the governor or don’t have an opinion of him.

Here’s a rundown of Walz’s life and family background:

Childhood

Born in West Point, Nebraska, on April 6, 1964, Walz grew up in rural Valentine, Nebraska, alongside his three siblings. His father, a public school administrator, was diagnosed with lung cancer when Walz was in high school and the family moved to Butte, Nebraska, to be closer to his father’s relatives.

The family farmed in the summers between the school years. During his campaign for governor in 2018, Walz recalled to the Star Tribune that he and his friends would bring their guns to school so they could hunt turkeys after football practice.

A year after he graduated high school in 1982, his father died, a moment that shaped his views on access to healthcare, saying in a 2018 ad that the “last week” that his father was in the hospital cost his mother “a decade” of having to return to work to pay off the hospital debt.

Walz moved from Nebraska to Texas and then to Arkansas, where he worked in a tanning bed factory before returning to his native state to get a teaching degree at Chadron State College.

“An awful lot of who I am was built on being a Nebraskan,” he told the Omaha World-Herald in 2006 when he was elected to the US House.

“Everybody knew what you were doing, but it sure kept you honest," he added. "You could be sure your neighbor would call your parents.”

Family life

After graduating college in 1989, he set off for China to teach high school. The trip there was only his second flight, the first one having gone to Fort Benning in Georgia where he had basic training after joining the National Guard at 17.

He would go on to serve for 24 years, reaching the rank of command sergeant major. He still speaks some Mandarin. 

Walz spent a year in the country through a Harvard program as one of the first teachers sanctioned by the government. When he returned, he worked full-time for the Nebraska National Guard as well as teaching and coaching at Alliance High School and at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

While teaching in temporary classrooms, he met Gwen Whipple, a teacher from Minnesota. She refused to kiss him on their first date, but he was sure they would be married. As their honeymoon, they went to China along with 60 children.

They had a daughter in 2001 following fertility treatments at the Mayo Clinic and a son in 2006 shortly before Walz won his first election to Congress.

“My wife and I used Mayo Clinic reproductive services, and my daughter Hope was named Hope for a reason,” he told HuffPost in February when asked about IVF. “Because married for eight years, no children, wanting children. We got Hope because of this type of stuff.”

Hope has just graduated from a Montana college and their son Gus attends public high school in St Paul, Minnesota, according to the Star Tribune. 

Football coach

In Alliance, he was the assistant coach for the school’s football and basketball teams. A former coaching colleague from that time, Rocky Almond, told the Omaha World-Herald in 2006 that “when I think of Tim, I think of one word — energy.”

“I never went to the Democrats. They came to me,” Walz told the Star Tribune in 2018. He noted how he and his father went to college on the GI bill and how his stay-at-home mother received social security following his father’s early death. “We all benefit from programs like that.”

“A town that small had services like that and had a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be sitting where I’m at today. Those are real stories in small towns,” he told The New York Times earlier this month. “... For many of us, public schools were everything. That was our path. That’s the great American contribution.”

At the age of 31 in 1995, he was pulled over going 96 mph in a 55 mph zone after watching college football with friends. Failing a sobriety test, he pleaded guilty to reckless driving. He stopped drinking alcohol and instead now has the same drink of choice as his Republican opponent JD Vance – Diet Mountain Dew.

After Gwen decided she wanted to move back to Minnesota, they both found employment at Mankato West High School in the southern parts of the state. While teaching geography, Walz joined the football team coaching staff as the defensive coordinator, helping lead the team to a state championship.

“We brought a lot of that Nebraska football here to Minnesota,” he told the World-Herald.

In 1999, three years after President Bill Clinton signed a law prohibiting same-sex marriage, Walz helped set up a gay-straight alliance at the school as its faculty advisor.

“It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz told the Star Tribune in 2018.

Entering politics

During President George W Bush’s run for re-election in 2004, Walz attempted to bring some students to a Bush rally in Mankato, but the group was stopped from entering as one student had a sticker on his wallet promoting Bush’s Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, according to the World-Herald.

“It just seemed so wrong that there would be a gatekeeper, especially stopping young people from seeing the president in their hometown,” Walz told the Star Tribune.

Walz soon signed up to volunteer for Kerry and two years later, in the 2006 midterms, he won his first election to Congress, unseating a Republican who had held the southern, rural, Minnesota seat for 12 years. Becoming the highest-ranking enlisted member in congressional history, Walz managed to win five more elections in the seat, including in 2016 when former President Donald Trump won his district by 15 points.

“I tell folks that managing a high-school lunchroom for years trained me for the craziness that can overtake Washington, DC,” he said during his 2018 campaign. 

After winning the 2018 race for governor, Walz left Congress after 12 years in January 2019. He was re-elected as governor in 2022.