high school football coach to VP candidate

About two decades ago, Kamala Harris emerged as a legal practitioner after clinching her maiden election to serve as the first Black as well as a South Asian woman to act as the district attorney of San Francisco in 2003 after basing her campaign on criminal justice reform policies including the abolition of the death penalty. 
 
Halfway across the country, in Mankato, Minn. , a high school teacher named Tim Walz had a lower-profile but no less fraught daily mandate: supervising his social studies classes, being the football team’s coach and sometimes being a disciplinarian of the lunch hour. 
 
The encounter of Harris and Walz would then happen more than two decades after they had crossed the paths, the news on Tuesday that the former had chosen Walz the current governor of Minnesota to be her running mate. 
 
The much-anticipated decision creates a ticket with two candidates from strikingly different backgrounds: Harris, 59, is Black and Indian American and entered the legal profession as an attorney and prosecutor at a time of Gavin Newsom in deep-blue California. At the same time, Walz, 60, is a veteran and hunter, who has lived most of his life in Nebraska and Minnesota contrasting the young president and signifying thus, that he’s the first Democratic vice-presidential nominee since 1964 who was not a lawyer. 
 
Walz’s foray into politics came later in life: Brought up in farm country in Nebraska, after his schooling he joined the Army National Guard and remained in service for a quarter of a century. Having lost his father to lung cancer when Walz was 19 — Walz has said played a big role in his approach to health care — he decided to study at Chadron State College for Nebraska and earned a teaching degree in 1989. 
 
Walz started teaching after college and met his future spouse, Gwen, he then transferred to Minnesota, the wife’s home state, in 1996. He would remain for nearly a dozen years at Mankato West High School as a teacher and a football coach, and then he ventured into politics – he said he claimed his ambition because he and some students were refused entry into a 2004 George W. Bush campaign stand because the organisers discovered that they were Democrats. 
 
Incumbent Pat Walz won the election for the seat of the 1st Congressional District of Minnesota in 2006; he conquered the Republican seat in a rural area of the state. 
 
In Congress Walz also sought the middle, the second least liberal, and voted pro gun — receiving an A rating from the National Rifle Association. That year he applauded then President George W. Bush for his intent to increase the number of the Army National Guard forces but at the same time condemned Bush’s ambiguous war strategy in Iraq and actively came against his decision to deploy more US troops to the country. 
 
During the debate in 2007 Walz said, “As the mission in Iraq has gone from weapons of mass destruction to a democratic government to just holding the country together to where it is today, to now just to stabilize enough that the Iraqis can stand up on their own, the president has been wrong on this plan and … I have deep concerns in that because the devil is in the details. ” “Telling us what the end may look like is one thing but getting us those — we need some accountability for that. ” 
 
Walz would continue to be re-elected five more times to that position before deciding to leave the House to vie for the governor’s seat. In the previous years’ governor elections, Walz triumphed over his Republican rival by over 10 percentage point difference. 
 
By then, however, Walz has otherwise evolved to the left on a number of matters Constitution, including guns. Following the Valentine’s Day mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida , Walz said that the then 17-year-old Hope prompted him to do more on gun control. In both his campaign for governor in 2018 and in debate and interviews as he ran for governor that year, Walz said he had in turn, donated all the money he had ever taken from the NRA to charity and, publicly supported background checks and the end to “constitutional carry” or reciprocity between states on concealed-carry firearm permits. 
 
“I know basic gun safety is not a threat to my rights,” Walz said last month explaining how he changed his mind on the issue to focus on the safety of children. “I formerly had an A rating from the NRA Now I get straight F’s And I sleep just fine 
 
As for Hope, she is 23 years now, and she continued to appear in many videos shared by Walz on social media. “In a MSNBC interview about Harris’s rise this year,” Walz said his daughter told him it was ’a brat summer’ and he didn’t know ‘what that meant’ ‘but I’m sure it’s a good thing. ’ It is a reference to pop Charli XCX album that Democrats use to tout Harris to young voters. 
 
As of 2022, Walz comfortably retired for his second term together with democrats emerging victorious for the state Senate hence the democrats controlling the trifecta in St Paul resulting to passage of liberal measures. Crookedly under the governorship of Walz, Democrats have codified the right to abortion, let undocumented immigrants apply for a driver’s license, extended background checks in transfers for firearms, completely legalized and provided protections for people seeking or giving gender-affirming health care. 
 
Walz also committed an executive order that relaxes college degree requisite for 75 percent of the state job in Minnesota; this policy received support from both democrats and Republicans and various other states also following the same. Again, the democrats have also been proposing means to provide free school meals to learners, and free college tuition for students originating from low-income families in Minnesota. 
 
Asked in a July 28 interview with CNN if such policies would be fodder for conservative attacks, Walz responded sarcastically: “What a monster This is okay, kids are eating and they are ‘full’ so they can now go learn, women are deciding their own destinies when it comes to health care. ” 

He later added: “So, if that is where they wish to place me then I will wear the [liberal] label gladly. ” 
 
The vice-presidential search would have been much harder if Walz had not appeared on TV almost daily since President Biden announced that he was not going to run again; for these appearances endeared him to Harris as he often spoke in blunt language and vowed to challenge former president Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, (Republican Ohio). In interviews, Walz depicted Trump and Vance as anti-democracy figures but the simplification of them as “weird” became a mobilizing slogan in the campaign very fast for the Democrats, which emotionally resonated with some Republican voters. 
 
Who is calling for this? Who is calling for higher insulin prices? Who called for the elimination of birth control? … Who is drinking in a bar Racine, Wisconsin, saying, We have to ban “Animal Farm”? ” Walz told MSNBC last month, later adding: “Yes they are weird, not directly, but proving it every day, that’s what it is, an observation. ” 
 
Some years back, Walz was just a small-state Midwestern governor who could barely register onto the national news radar, let alone to the minds of most voters; now, however, he must introduce himself to the whole country with roughly three months left till the November election. The first rally with Walz will an in Harris will take place in Philadelphia on Tuesday, which is part of a four-state, four-day campaign trip. 
 
However, Walz said that for him, a decision will be made at the end of August when such an action will be associated with the “feeling of enthusiasm” people have during the first school days. 
 
‘Football coach: We’re back on offense,’ Walz said, mining the positive attitude of the Democrats. “Vice President Harris is coming in with the power, ensuring that she will be there to defend the democracy and ensure people are enthusiastic, to defend reproductive freedoms, work for the middle class, and remind people there is hope — so go register, feel the enthusiasm, participate. "