Tim Walz Is the Weird One, Because He’s Normal

Three ways Walz isn’t your typical running mate

Public school teacher. Soldier in the National Guard, and actually an enlisted man and not an officer. Not a lawyer. If anyone’s the weird candidate in 2024 — by Washington standards — it’s Tim Walz. And he’s no policy wonk either; he’s a practitioner. If anyone is even close to being a man of the people, to understanding education or seeing national security from the trenches, this is the guy.

Weeks ago, the plain spoken Walz popularized using the word “weird” to describe former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance. His use of the word quickly went viral, catapulting the Minnesota governor into the national spotlight and perhaps even the vice presidency. 

In contrast to Biden’s lofty rhetoric about democracy being on the ballot and his solemn admonitions about Trump’s existential threat to the republic, Walz took a more modest tone. He voiced something many people feel but which finds little expression in grandiose Washington: Trump’s culture war obsessions are “just weird” and out of step with what ordinary people care about. Per Walz’s July 23 interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

“They’re in our exam rooms, they’re telling us about what books to read. … You look at what they’re talking about, they went right to division. They did not give us a plan on healthcare. Donald Trump talked about infrastructure; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris built bridges, built roads. So I think this is getting back to the bread-and-butter, getting away from the division. We do not like what has happened, when you can’t even go to Thanksgiving dinner with your uncle because you end up in some weird fight that is unnecessary. These guys are just weird. They’re running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something, that’s what they go at. That’s not what people are interested in.”

Midwesterner and of the working-class, Walz went on to preview his differentness in the MSNBC interview:

“There is angst because robber barons like JD Vance and Donald Trump gutted the Midwest. They talk about private schools. Where in the heck are you going to find a private school in a town of 400? Those are public schools. Those are great teachers that are out there making a difference and gave us an opportunity to succeed. That angst that JD Vance talks about in “Hillbilly Elegy”— none of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale and none of them went on to be venture capitalists or whatever. It’s not who people really are.”

It is a devastating critique, and Walz’s own weirdness, as a national politician and now potentially the next vice president, is that he resembles the millions of ordinary Americans whom he is trying to persuade to vote for him.

Here are some of the most strikingly ordinary parts of his personal story.

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1. Public school teacher

Though Kamala Harris and Walz are almost exactly the same age, their career paths into national politics could hardly be more different. When Harris was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, Walz was teaching high school social studies and coaching the football team at Mankato West High School, a public school in Minnesota. Walz taught at Mankato for about a decade. 

Politicians’ pre-electoral backgrounds matter because they inform their understanding of the world outside of politics. On several levels, from education to America’s beloved sport, he’s lived the life of everyday people. 

Walz’s teaching experience obviously familiarized him with the endemic problem of child hunger, which studies show can manifest as behavioral problems and inattention at school. Nearly 60 percent of children from low-income areas report coming to school hungry, according to the nonprofit group No Kid Hungry.

Thus former schoolteacher Walz turned experience into pursuit of his signature achievement as governor: signing into law a universal free lunch program for all Minnesota students. How weird is that?

Gov. Walz hugs elementary school students after signing into law a bill that guarantees free school meals | Getty

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2. Enlisted man in the Army National Guard

The last national political leader to have served in the military, period, was Vice President Al Gore from the Clinton administration. Like JD Vance, Walz enlisted in the military, in his case the Army National Guard. But in contrast to Vance’s four years, almost a curated enlistment in public affairs, Walz was the quintessential citizen soldier, spending 24 years in the Minnesota Guard before retiring as a command sergeant major.

College men typically become officers, with ambitions to lead. But officers make up only about 18 percent of all military people, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. The rest are the true soldiers and Marines, airmen and women, and Navy seaman, fireman, airman, constructionman, or hospitalman. These are the people who do the actual jobs and who have their own language and their own ways to experience all of the ridiculousness of government service and cockeyed policies.

Walz spent his 24 years in the Army National Guard climbing the ranks from private to sergeant, before retiring at the rank of command sergeant major. This rank made him the highest-ranking enlisted member ever to serve in Congress at the time that he was elected in 2007.

“What’s coolest about this is he’s enlisted,” a retired Navy officer said to me of Walz. (I’m withholding his name for work reasons.) “A true blue collar man who knows what it’s like to work hard, be led, and lead.”

Some have dinged Walz for not seeing combat. But as my Navy officer friend pointed out to me, Walz was likely a reservist and that’s what the reserves are for — a reserve force in case of emergency.

“Inside baseball is that [Walz] only earned an army commendation medal while being that highly ranked shows he was just a straight reservist. But that’s totally fine with me. That’s what it exists for.”

A young Tim Walz in uniform at Ft. Benning, GA, 1981 | US Army

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3. He didn’t go to law school 

Walz is the first Democratic vice-presidential pick since 1964 who did not attend law school. 

Stop and think about that for a second. Every single previous Democratic VP pick for over half a century went to law school. Below is a list of each just to give you a sense of how long standing this bizarre tradition is.

• 2020: Kamala Harris

  • University of California, Hastings College of the Law

• 2016: Tim Kaine

  • Harvard Law School

• 2008 & 2012: Joe Biden

  • Syracuse University College of Law

• 2004: John Edwards

  • University of North Carolina School of Law

• 2000: Joe Lieberman

  • Yale Law School

• 1996 and 1992: Al Gore

  • Vanderbilt University Law School (did not complete)

• 1988: Lloyd Bentsen

  • University of Texas School of Law

• 1984: Geraldine Ferraro

  • Fordham University School of Law

• 1980 and 1976: Walter Mondale

  • University of Minnesota Law School

• 1972: Sargent Shriver

  • Yale Law School

• 1968: Edmund Muskie

  • Cornell Law School

• 1964: Hubert Humphrey

  • University of Minnesota Law School (did not complete)

And it’s not just Democratic running mates. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that 54 percent of U.S. senators and 37 percent of House members have law degrees, with elite law schools like Harvard and Georgetown topping the list. I’m going to take a wild guess here and speculate that life as a corporate lawyer or prosecutor provides a very different picture of the world than life as a high school teacher.

Here’s another hot take. My entire life I’ve watched hyper-educated candidates for president, people like John Kerry, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton, crash and burn running against people the commentariat insisted were too “dumb” to win, like George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Is it any surprise that elite-educated types have difficulty communicating with ordinary people? I don’t even blame them, because how could they do otherwise? You might as well ask a cat to learn Mongolian throat singing. 

It’s not Walz’s ideology that interests me, which actually seems fairly standard issue for a Democrat. It’s the fact that we finally have a candidate for the White House who actually resembles the country they want to lead.

— Edited by William M. Arkin