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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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US Vice-President Kamala Harris and her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Aug 6.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
The Economist
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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.”
