How Tim Walz’s Time in the House Paved the Way for His Rise
In 2014, Rep. Tim Walz was traveling through his conservative, rural district, holding rallies in southern Minnesota, when a constituent confronted him with a tough question about his support for the Affordable Care Act.
President Barack Obama’s signature legislation would have saved families thousands of dollars in health insurance premiums, but it still proved costly for some, the voter said. “What happened?” the man asked.
Some Democrats in politically vulnerable seats, like Mr. Walz’s, who had supported the bill tried to reverse their votes, only to be punished by voters later that year.
Not Mr. Walz.
Instead, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who shared the podium with Mr. Walz, recalled in an interview that he stood by his decision. “He wasn’t trying to hide from the vote,” she said. “He leaned into it.”
Mr Walz acknowledged that there was still work to be done in the health care area, but defended the law to the crowd. “Don’t pretend that there was some safe haven before this happened, where everything was fine,” he said.
He won his House seat repeatedly despite being a consistent target of Republicans, embracing a mix of progressive, pro-union and culturally conservative positions. And he cultivated a reputation as a friendly, outspoken Democrat who could connect with rural voters — political instincts that led Vice President Kamala Harris to select him as her running mate.
“He’s a regular guy who everybody identified with as their type of person,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and former House Speaker. “What you see is what you get.”
The seat Walz won in 2006 was so conservative at the time that few party insiders in Washington thought he could win it.
“He had no money, no money at all,” said Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota, who worked on the House Democrats’ canvassing team that cycle under their campaign manager, Rahm Emanuel. “He had built a grassroots campaign that I just knew was going to be dynamite. So I went back and said to Rahm Emanuel, ‘This guy is going to win. He’s great.’ And Rahm looked at me like I was crazy.”
During that campaign, Mr. Walz emphasized both his military service in the Army National Guard and his dedication to improving the health care system in a stark radio ad in which he said he had suffered inner ear damage from years of artillery fire. Because he had good health insurance, Mr. Walz said, he had recently been able to undergo surgery and hear an important sound for the first time: his 4-year-old daughter, Hope, singing to herself.
“Hope wakes up every morning singing, but I had never heard that sound until that day,” Mr. Walz said. “I am running for Congress because I believe that we as a country have a moral obligation to ensure that every father can hear his daughter sing — that every citizen receives the best care that our medical community has to offer.”
Once in the House, Mr. Walz decided to focus on veterans issues, eventually becoming the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
On that panel, Mr. Walz played a key role in delivering a series of bipartisan veterans bills that President Donald J. Trump would claim as early legislative achievements. At a time when the rest of Congress was mired in bitter partisan gridlock, the committee advanced changes to make it easier for the sprawling Veterans Affairs Department to lay off employees, despite union oppositionA GI Bill was also passed, giving veterans more access to college after 9/11. This bill passed Congress by a lopsided majority.
“What I tried to do and I think Tim tried to do was put all the other agendas aside and make it about veterans,” said former Representative Phil Roe, a Republican from Tennessee who served opposite Mr. Walz as chairman of the committee.
The harmony did not last long. Mr. Walz clashed aggressively with a group of conservative Trump appointees who he said sought to undermine the Department’s veterans health care program by giving veterans more flexibility to see private doctors while cutting internal programs.
“This is a situation where you starve the animal to the point where it can’t function anymore,” he told The New York Times in 2017.
In 2018, even as most of his party came on board, Mr. Walz still opposed a major overhaul of the veterans’ health care system. He said that while the legislation was well-intentioned, a lack of adequate funding would force the VA to “cannibalize itself.” But Mr. Roe said in an interview that Mr. Walz began to feel other political pressures as he tried to make progress in his home state.
Still, his work on the committee allowed him to develop close ties with then-chairwoman Nancy Pelosi, who would later become one of his most vocal backers as Harris’ campaign considered vice presidential candidates.
When it was announced last month that Ms. Harris was considering Mr. Walz as her running mate, a group of lawmakers who had served with him in the House reached out to campaign leaders to endorse him.
“After he was on ‘Morning Joe,'” Ms. McCollum said, “I had members on the floor — they said, ‘Tim was on fire! That’s the Tim we know. That’s what we need on the campaign trail.'”
Representative Joe Courtney of Connecticut, a Democrat who arrived in the House the same year as Mr. Walz and worked with him on veterans affairs, said he had reached out to Cedric Richmond, the former Democratic congressman from Louisiana who served on Ms. Harris’s vetting committee.
“He made no commitments at that point because it was clearly still under active consideration,” Mr Courtney said. “That said, there was immediate acknowledgement from Cedric in a very warm way about ‘We loved him’, without any prompting.”
Nicolaas Fandos contributed to the reporting.
