Tim Walz

Tim Walz is the 41st governor of Minnesota, in office since January 7, 2019. Before that he represented Minnesota’s 1st congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives for six terms, and in 2024 he was the Democratic candidate for vice president of the United States.

Before Politics

Congress’s own directory records Walz as born in West Point, Nebraska, on April 6, 1964, and resident in Mankato, Minnesota. It lists a B.S. from Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska, his profession as high school teacher, and his military service as Command Sergeant Major in Minnesota’s 1st/34th Division of the Army National Guard from 1981 to 2005. It credits him with the 2002 Minnesota Ethics in Education award, 2003 Mankato Teacher of the Year, and 2003 Minnesota Teacher of Excellence. He married Gwen Whipple Walz in 1994; the directory names two children, Hope and Gus.

The directory is self-reported and it changed on one point: the 2009 and 2011 editions give his master’s degree as an M.S. from St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota, while the 2018 edition gives an M.S. from Minnesota State University–Mankato. This page reports both rather than picking one.

U.S. House, 2007–2019

Walz was elected to the 110th Congress on November 7, 2006, defeating six-term Republican incumbent Gil Gutknecht in Minnesota’s 1st district. The Clerk of the House’s certified compilation gives the result as Walz 141,556 to Gutknecht 126,486, out of 268,421 votes cast in the district.

He was reelected to each succeeding Congress through the 115th. His committee assignments in the 111th Congress were Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Veterans’ Affairs; by the 115th Congress he was ranking member of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and also sat on Agriculture. His last House race, in 2016, was decided by less than a percentage point against Jim Hagedorn. Walz did not seek reelection to the House in 2018; Hagedorn won the open seat.

Governor of Minnesota

Walz and Peggy Flanagan won the 2018 election for governor and lieutenant governor, and Walz took office on January 7, 2019 as Minnesota’s 41st governor. They were reelected on November 8, 2022 with 1,312,349 votes, 52.27 percent, against 1,119,941 votes, 44.61 percent, for Scott Jensen and Matt Birk — a margin of 7.66 points in a six-ticket field.

2024 Vice Presidential Candidacy

Walz was the vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket with Kamala Harris in the 2024 general election. The Federal Election Commission’s compilation of state-certified returns records the ticket as “Kamala D. Harris (D, DFL, DNL, WF) (Tim Walz for Vice President)”, with 75,017,613 popular votes to 77,302,580 for Donald Trump and JD Vance, out of 155,238,302 cast. The Office of the Federal Register’s tabulation records 226 electoral votes for Harris and Walz against 312 for Trump and Vance.

The 2026 Race

Walz announced on September 16, 2025 that he would seek a third term as governor. Roll Call reported that he made the announcement in a video, and that he had previously said he would not run for president in 2028 if he sought a third term. Lieutenant Governor Flanagan was by then running for the U.S. Senate rather than for reelection on his ticket.

On January 5, 2026 his office released a statement withdrawing from the race. In it Walz described an “organized group of criminals” that had exploited state programs, listed steps his administration had taken in response, and said that “the buck stops with me.” He stated his reason for leaving the race directly: “as I reflected on this moment with my family and my team over the holidays, I came to the conclusion that I can’t give a political campaign my all,” adding, “I didn’t run for this job so I could have this job. I ran for this job so I could do this job.” The statement also criticized Republican officials and President Trump by name over their handling of the fraud investigations.

Walz remains governor. His own statement refers to leaving office “next January,” which is January 2027, at the end of his second term. The Minnesota Legislative Reference Library’s register of governors still lists him as the sitting governor as of September 1, 2026.

What Is Not Established Here

The page as it stood was a one-paragraph stub with no citations, and nothing on it was wrong — but it was frozen at an earlier state. It did not record that Walz announced a third-term campaign in September 2025 and withdrew from it on January 5, 2026, which is the single most consequential fact about his current position.

Removed or not asserted for want of a source that met this project’s standard: vote totals for the 2018 gubernatorial election (the Minnesota Secretary of State’s results site serves a CAPTCHA to automated clients, and the University of Minnesota archive’s search interface would not return the 2018 gubernatorial race); the date on which Harris selected Walz as her running mate, and the circumstances of that selection; any account of his record as governor beyond the two policy areas he names in his own January 2026 statement; any characterization of the federal fraud investigations in Minnesota beyond what Walz himself said about them, since no charging document was consulted for this page; and any follower counts or platform presences, none of which were verified.

This page carries no image. No political characterization of Walz is asserted in the project’s voice; the criticisms of Republican officials quoted above are his, not this page’s.