Why Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate

Compared with a bolder but more divisive alternative, the Minnesota governor was the easier choice.

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Mr Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic-Farmer-Labour Party (DFL), Minnesota's affiliate of the Democratic Party, tells a story about how the state's governor, Mr Tim Walz, got his start in politics.

In 2004, Mr Walz was a high school teacher in Mankato, a town of 45,000 people in the south of the state. In that year's presidential election, he decided to take his class to a George W.

Bush event. Unbeknown to him, his students had hatched a plan to tease the then president. "They all had (John) Kerry shirts on," says Mr Martin.

"They ripped their sweaters off and, well, they got kicked out of that rally by the Secret Service." Mr Walz, according to Mr Martin, "was really pissed" - not at his students, but at the Bush campaign. "He called me up... he wanted to get involved," says Mr Martin, who made him a local campaign organiser.

Two years later, Mr Walz stood for Congress in Minnesota's first district, a heavily rural area covering the south of Minnesota where only one other Democrat had won in the preceding century.

Mr Martin says that he remembers hearing of Mr Walz's candidacy and thinking: "There's no way in hell he's going to win." But Mr Walz got 53 per cent of the vote. Twelve years later, having held onto his district even as other rural Democrats shed theirs, he ran for governor. In 2022, he was re-elected, and his party won the state house and senate, giving Democrats a trifecta for the first time in eight years.

It is in part that electoral history that explains why Ms Kamala Harris, now officially the Democratic nominee for president, has picked Mr Walz to be her running mate. A few hours after announcing the pick, she appeared with him at a rally in Philadelphia, along with Mr Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, who lost out to Mr Walz.