U.S. Climate Politics Almanac: Meet Tim Walz

Ending weeks of speculation, Vice President Kamala Harris today chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate against the Republican ticket for U.S. president, convicted felon Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio).

Elected to his second term in 2022, Walz is an avuncular moderate with a classic politician’s background that includes 18 years in the Army and coaching Mankato West’s high school football team to a state championship. Backed by a vigorously progressive legislature, he emerged as a champion of the policies and politics of the Green New Deal.

In 2006, Walz won election to Congress. He caucused with the New Democrats and sought to cultivate a moderate image, though he maintained a socially liberal bent and was a staunch supporter of reproductive rights. Previewing the tepid support for fossil fuel infrastructure that he would maintain as governor, Walz voted to approve the Keystone XL pipeline through the neighboring Dakotas in 2015. Signaling the political changes in his district, Walz’s 2016 re-election over Jim Hagedorn was by a narrow margin. After Walz ran for governor in 2018, Hagedorn won the seat, which continues to be held by Republicans.

After the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL)¹ secured a trifecta in 2022, Walz signed an impressive number of progressive policies into law the next year, including a 100% clean energy law, a new transportation planning law, clean energy permitting reform, and the groundbreaking green bank known as the Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority. As we noted last year, state green banks are essential to the implementation of the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act climate policies.

In a New York Times piece covering all the major policy victories of the 2023 session, Walz described Minnesota as an “island of decency,” referring to the legislature’s choice to adopt civil rights protections even as surrounding Midwestern states pass cruel and costly culture war measures.

As the symbolic leader of this effort, Walz has obtained something of folk hero status amongst the online left, who praise the DFL for achieving more with its razor-thin legislative majorities than larger Democratic majorities in California and other big states.

When Walz won the 2018 DFL primary over then-House Majority Leader Erin Murphy, it marked the second consecutive time that a middle-aged white male emerged as the nominee over a party-endorsed legislator seeking to become the state’s first woman governor. A recent Minnesota Reformer piece about Murphy’s election as state senate majority leader described their 2018 contest as follows:

Walz has been overseeing a key piece of his party’s 2024 strategy as the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, and his emphasis on freedom and delivering concrete economic wins is well-honed to the national party. While the economic achievements of 2023 included several strikes against corporate concentration, there were limits to Walz and the Democrats’ willingness to contest entrenched corporate power. Posturing by the Mayo Clinic quashed bills to bring down health care costs, and a threat by Uber convinced the governor to veto a bill to increase wages for rideshare drivers.

That said, the progressive accomplishments from 2023 gave Walz the practice of embracing the political power of climate progress, as you can hear in a recent interview with Ezra Klein. Sounding like a full-throated Green New Dealer, he emphasized the threat of global warming to the international order, Minnesota's obligation to protect the world's fresh water supply, and the importance of deploying renewable energy projects.

1  The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is Minnesota’s proudly unique Democratic Party affiliate, formed in 1944 by the merger of the left-populist Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party with the state Democratic Party in 1944. The FLP had its zenith during the Great Depression, holding the Minnesota governorship from 1931-1939.