Tim Walz
Timothy James Walz is an American politician, former educator, and Army National Guard veteran serving since 2019 as the 41st governor of Minnesota. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019, representing, and was the Democratic nominee for vice president in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Walz was born in West Point, Nebraska. After graduating from Butte High School in 1982, he joined the Army National Guard and worked in a factory. He later graduated from Chadron State College in Nebraska and then moved to Minnesota in 1996. Before running for Congress, he was a high school social studies teacher and football coach. He was first elected to the House in 2006, defeating six-term Republican incumbent Gil Gutknecht. Walz was reelected to the House five times and was the ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee from 2017 to 2019.
Walz was elected governor of Minnesota in 2018 and reelected in 2022. During his first term, he presided over the state response to protests and riots related to the murder of George Floyd, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. During his second term, he pushed for and signed a wide range of progressive legislation during the two-year period Democrats held a governing trifecta, including voting rights restoration for felons, driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, establishing Minnesota as a trans refuge, legalization of cannabis, tax modifications, free school meals, universal gun background checks, codifying abortion rights, and free college tuition for low-income families.
On August 6, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris announced Walz as her running mate in the 2024 election. Their ticket was defeated by Republican nominees Donald Trump and JD Vance. Walz initially sought a third term as governor in 2026, but withdrew his candidacy after investigations revealed extensive fraud in state-funded social services, raising criticism over failures in administrative oversight and prompting judicial authorities to conduct a review. On January 28, 2026, Walz said that after completing his term as governor, he will "never run for an elected office again".
Early life and education
Timothy James Walz was born on April 6, 1964, in West Point, Nebraska, at Memorial Hospital. His mother, Darlene Rose Reiman, was a homemaker and grew up on a farm. His father, James Frederick Walz, was a teacher and school superintendent who served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and had worked in the family's butcher shop as a child. Walz is of German, Swedish, Luxembourgish, and Irish descent; in 1867 his great-great-grandfather Sebastian Walz emigrated to the United States from Kuppenheim, Germany. One of his grandmothers was Swedish American, and one of his great-grandmothers was Irish American. He was raised Catholic.Walz and his three siblings grew up in Valentine, Nebraska, a small rural town in the north-central part of the state, in an area of farms and ranchland near the South Dakota border. In school, he played football and basketball and ran track. After school, he went hunting with his friends. While Walz was in high school, his father, who was the school superintendent and a chain smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer. After his father's diagnosis, his family moved to the rural farming community of Butte, Nebraska to be closer to his mother's relatives. During summers, Walz worked on the family farm. He graduated from Butte High School in 1982 in a class of 25 students and then went to Chadron, Nebraska for college.
Walz's father died in January 1984, leaving his mother and younger brother dependent on Social Security survivor benefits for support. He was devastated and drifted from Nebraska to Texas, where he took courses at the University of Houston in East Asian studies and served in the Texas Army National Guard. Then he went to Jonesboro, in northeast Arkansas, where he built tanning beds in a factory and was an instructor in the Arkansas Army National Guard.
Walz returned to Nebraska in 1987 to continue his education at Chadron State College; he participated in student government there and was an honor student. He graduated in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science degree in social science education. Walz received his master's degree from Minnesota State University, Mankato. In 2001, he wrote his master's thesis, "Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom", which focused on Holocaust and genocide education.
Early career
Teaching
After graduating from Chadron State College, Walz accepted a one-year teaching position with WorldTeach at Foshan No.1 High School in Guangdong, China. He went to teach in August 1989, following the Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent government crackdown in June of that year. Upon returning to the U.S., Walz became a teacher and coach in Alliance, a town of 10,000 in western Nebraska, and in 1993 was named an Outstanding Young Nebraskan by the Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce.While working as a teacher, Walz met his wife, Gwen Whipple, a fellow teacher, and in 1994 the two married. Two years later, they moved to Mankato, Minnesota, in Gwen's home state. Walz worked as a geography teacher and football coach at Mankato West High School. The football team had lost 27 straight games when he joined the coaching staff as a defensive coordinator. Three years later, in 1999, the team won its first state championship.
In 1999, Walz agreed to be the faculty advisor of Mankato West High School's first gay–straight alliance. He felt it was important that as a married, heterosexual football coach and soldier, he could show how different worlds can coexist. For nine years he and his wife ran Educational Travel Adventures, which organized summer educational trips to China for high-school students. Walz earned a master of science in experiential education from Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 2002, writing his master's thesis on Holocaust education. In March 2006, he took a leave of absence from teaching to run for Congress.
Military service
With his father's encouragement, Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard two days after he turned 17. His father had served during the Korean War and earned his education degree with the G.I. Bill; he wanted his son to have the same opportunity.Walz served in the National Guard for 24 years after enlisting in 1981. During his military career, he had postings in Arkansas, Texas, near the Arctic Circle in Norway; New Ulm, Minnesota, northwest of Mankato; Italy, and elsewhere. He trained in heavy artillery. During his service he worked in disaster response postings following floods and tornadoes and was deployed overseas. In 1989, he earned the title of Nebraska Citizen-Soldier of the Year.
After Walz completed the 20 years of service needed to retire from the Guard, he reenlisted instead of retiring, later citing the September 11 attacks as the reason for his reenlistment. He was able to retire as of August 2002. In August 2003, he deployed with the Minnesota National Guard to Vicenza, Italy, for nine months, to serve with the European Security Force as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Walz attained the rank of command sergeant major near the end of his service and briefly was the senior enlisted soldier of 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery Regiment. His decorations include the Army Commendation Medal, two Army Achievement Medals, two National Defense Service Medals, a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and an Army Reserve Components Achievement Medal with five oak leaf clusters.
On February 10, 2005, Walz filed official documents to run for the U.S. House of Representatives. In March, the National Guard announced a possible deployment of around 2,000 soldiers from across the Minnesota National Guard to Iraq sometime in the next two years. Walz said he would deploy if called upon. The National Guard finished processing his retirement paperwork in May, and Walz retired from military service on May 16. He later explained that he retired in order to focus on his campaign for Congress and did not want to violate the Hatch Act, which forbids some political activities by federal government employees. The Minnesota National Guard confirmed that Walz retired two months before his former unit was notified on July 14 of its potential deployment to Iraq. That unit received its mobilization order in August and deployed to Iraq in March 2006, ten months after Walz retired.
During his political career, Republicans, notably Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, and JD Vance, raised the timing of Walz's military retirement as a campaign issue. A National Guard colleague, Joe Eustice, recalled that at the time Walz retired, his unit's deployment was only a "rumor" and not yet confirmed, while his enlisted superior, Doug Julin, said that Walz bypassed his retirement approval, instead receiving retirement approval from two higher-ranked officers.
Though he was serving as a command sergeant major at the time of his retirement, Walz's final military rank for retirement benefit purposes is master sergeant, as he had not completed the required academic coursework to remain a command sergeant major before his retirement. The National Guard processed the adjustment of his rank in September 2005, but the effective date was made retroactive to the day before his military retirement in May 2005. A public affairs officer for the Minnesota National Guard in 2018 said it was "legitimate for Walz to say he served as a command sergeant major". A reference to Walz on his official campaign website as a "retired command sergeant major" was later updated to read he "once served at the command sergeant major rank".
Walz did not deploy to an active combat zone during his service. At a meeting about reducing gun violence in 2018, he argued for some kinds of reform, saying, "We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at." The use of the phrase "in war" on this one occasion was criticized by Vance. The Harris campaign responded that Walz "misspoke".