The governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, has gone through a vortex in these four months: from being an unknown at the national level to becoming a critic of the viral Donald Trump, and shortly after blurring with the passage of the campaign until he was relegated to a stereotypical role, that of the eternal sixty-year-old white who covers American politics.

Walz has been in politics for almost 20 years but until recently he was practically unknown, a simple man who appeared at the campaign events with a flannel shirt and hiking boots and who represents the familiar man of the rural Midwest.

The vice presidential candidate, accused by Trump of being a radical leftist, has been celebrated by US progressivism for approving aid for families with children, promoting affordable housing and guaranteeing the right to abortion, after the Supreme Court eliminated protections against termination of pregnancy at the federal level.

Kamala Harris’ unusual selection placed this governor and former congressman at the center of the campaign, who emphasized his past as a high school soccer teacher and coach, although his profile blurred over the days.

Walz appeared in an interview with Harris on CNN in August gravitating on Kamala Harris’ shoulder without contributing much and in the only debate against his Republican vice-presidential rival, Senator JD Vance, he appeared doubtful, not very assertive and his profile was moving from the center of attention.

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The career of ‘Coach Walz’

‘Coach Walz’ or ‘coach Walz’ has become the first name of this governor who combines several qualities difficult to find in a single politician: he is a former soldier, a simple man from the crucial Midwest, a teacher, a father who has gone viral for his father things and a politician favored by the most progressive factions of the Democratic Party.

At 60 years old, Walz lacks one thing: he is the first candidate of a Democratic presidential formula who has not studied Law since 1980 and who, on the contrary, has spent much of his professional life as a simple teacher, teaching geography, history or sport in a way that marked many of the students who went through his classes.

Walz was born in a rural community in Nebraska and enlisted in the National Guard as a plain soldier to be able to pay for his higher education, a path to the educational improvement used by the middle class in the United States.

The governor was a school teacher where he met his wife, Gwen Whipple, with whom he later moved to Minnesota to continue his work in a high school as a geography teacher and American football coach, he managed to get his team to win the 1999 state championship.

During his years as an educator, Walz taught in China and with his wife organized study trips for teenagers to the Asian country, a cultural exchange experience that could serve him if he ends up reaching the White House, despite the fact that this closeness was criticized by the Republicans.

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Harris’s campaign and Governor Walz

In 2006, he ran for a seat in Congress and managed to renew the trust of his constituents for 12 years, in which he was a member of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Agriculture and Veterans Affairs.

Walz would seem destined to win and in 2018 he was elected governor of Minnesota, a state that has voted Democratic in the last general elections, but whose rural population is mostly republican and conservative. In 2022, he was re-elected for another four years.

The governor is an unusual politician also because of his presence on social networks, in which, for example, he gives advice on the fuses of his vehicle and then continues: “I give you another pro advice: go out and vote.”

Walz, nicknamed by some as the ‘Father of America’, has been able to promote on his networks his profile as an affable father and joker and to be a member of the “boomer” generation he was able to find without a large communication team an effective message against Donald Trump and could be a key squire for Harris to attract more voters in the blue belt of Wisconsin and Michigan.

Harris chose him because in the selection meetings there was a special “chemistry” between them, according to sources from his team.

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Republicans have tried to discredit his profile by claiming that he left his position in the National Guard shortly before his unit was sent to Iraq (something that coincided with the beginning of his first campaign to be a congressman) or by exaggerating that he was in the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.