Kamala Harris didn’t have a whole lot of time to get to know Tim Walz before asking him to join her on the Democrats’ 2024 presidential ticket. The pair met for an in-person interview over the weekend, but Harris also had at least one recent experience with the Minnesota governor to draw on as she mulled her choice.
In March, Walz was at Harris’ side during one of the most important moments in her tenure as vice president: a tour of St. Paul’s Planned Parenthood health center — the first visit a sitting VP has ever made to a clinic that provides abortion care.
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, Harris emerged as the Biden administration’s strongest messenger on reproductive rights — in stark contrast to the Catholic president who opposed abortion for much of his career, and struggled to even utter the word itself. In that role, Harris toured the country, raising awareness about the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision, and speaking to women and health care providers in states where abortion access had dried up or disappeared entirely.
“I have heard stories of — and have met with women who had miscarriages in toilets,” Harris said in March. “Women who were being denied emergency care because the health care providers there, at an emergency room, were afraid that because of the laws in their state, that they could be criminalized, sent to prison for providing health care.”
But she was in St. Paul that day with a different agenda, she said: to demonstrate the positive case for what reproductive policy could look like in America.
“I’m here at this health care clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like, which is to understand it is only right and fair that people have access to the health care they need and that they have access to health care in an environment where they are treated with dignity and respect,” Harris said.
Walz, the person responsible for that work, was standing behind her. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision ended federal protections for abortion rights, Walz became the first governor in the country to sign new legislation enshrining the right to abortion into law.
“The message that we’re sending to Minnesota today is very clear: Your rights are protected in this state,” Walz said in January 2023. “You have the right to make your own decisions about your health, your family and your life.”
Last year, Walz also signed legislation that expanded health insurance coverage for abortion, increased funding for reproductive health organizations, and eliminated a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, parental consent rules and other barriers to care.
In June of this year, when Iowa passed a six-week ban on abortion, Walz reminded Iowans of his state’s commitment to maintaining access. “To our neighbors in Iowa: Minnesota is and will remain a safe haven for reproductive freedom,” he wrote on X.
Walz has long been a champion for reproductive rights since he ran for office the very first time in 2006 — in a rural congressional district that had elected precisely one other Democrat since 1892. On a candidate questionnaire he filled out that year, Walz indicated his belief that abortion “should always be legal.”
His opponent in that first Congressional race, a six-term incumbent, had voted for a law banning many abortions later in pregnancy. Walz said at the time he opposed that bill “because we know when you start to criminalize it, that has nothing to do with reduction of abortions.”
Walz won that race, and went on to serve six terms in the House, earning 100 percent voting scores from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, before launching a campaign for Minnesota governor. Campaigning in that race, Walz declared proudly: “My record is so pro-choice Nancy Pelosi asked if I should tone it down. I stand with Planned Parenthood!”
Introducing Walz to supporters in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Harris cited Walz’s work as champion for reproductive freedom, and declared a commitment to protecting that freedom would be central to the Harris-Walz campaign.
“Tim and I have a message for Trump and others who want to turn back the clock on our fundamental freedoms: We’re not going back,” she said, igniting a chant that reverberated around the stadium. “We’re not going back.”
Walz used the opportunity, as he was introduced to the world that night, to talk about his family’s experience with in vitro fertilization — another type of reproductive care that Republicans have been targeting.
“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make, even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves. There’s a golden rule: mind your own damn business… that includes IVF,” Walz said.
He went on to speak about the years of agonizing fertility treatments. “I remember praying every night for a call for good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone rang, and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked,” Walz said. “It wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope.”
Aug. 9, 9 a.m.: This post has been updated to include a video from Walz’s 2018 campaign for governor.
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.