Gwen Walz, the Coolheaded, Ultracompetent Political Spouse

In 2006, during his first campaign for Congress, Tim Walz was scheduled to speak at a fund-raising dinner in his hometown, Mankato, Minn. At the time, he was a political unknown in a tightly contested race against a six-term incumbent. The dinner was a chance to stump in front of his local district of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and to bolster his campaign coffers.

There was only one problem: Mr. Walz had laryngitis.

As guests loaded up plates with food, they were surprised to see someone else take the stage: Gwen Walz, Mr. Walz’s wife.

She was used to speaking in front of a crowd: Like her husband, Ms. Walz had been a public-school teacher for more than a decade. Those sitting in the audience were impressed by her confidence and clarity.

“There were other candidates who spoke, and she was the most articulate of the bunch,” said John Klaber, a North Mankato resident who was at the fund-raiser almost two decades ago. “We all looked around and said, ‘Why isn’t she running?’”

Most of the American public got its first good look at Gov. Tim Walz last week at a rally in Philadelphia alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, who had that day announced him as her running mate. At the end of his speech, the nation also got its first glimpse of the woman to whom he has been married for 30 years.

As Ms. Walz enters the national stage, critics on the right are already trying to portray her — as they have with her husband — as a left-wing radical who countenanced the civil unrest in her state after the death of George Floyd. But at home in Minnesota, where she has spent most of her life, friends and political observers describe her as the coolheaded and ultracompetent counterpart to a man known for an intuitive and charismatic political style.

“We have always worked as a partnership,” Ms. Walz, 58, told the self-improvement podcast “What If It Works” last month, later adding, “We are still one another’s closest advisers.”

Ms. Walz did not comment for this article.

The first gubernatorial spouse in Minnesota to keep an office in the state capital, Ms. Walz regularly advises her husband and has used her platform to advance policy initiatives, most significantly around offering college degree programs to inmates.

A Package Deal

“When you get Tim, you get Gwen,” said Mr. Klaber, who worked with Ms. Walz in the Mankato school district for more than a decade.

Raised in the tiny farming town of Ivanhoe, Minn., only a 15-minute drive from South Dakota’s eastern border, Ms. Walz is the daughter of schoolteachers, and the eldest of four sisters. Ms. Walz was a caretaker in the family, according to her youngest sister, Heidi Ohlmann.

“She’s always looking out for everyone,” Ms. Ohlmann said in an interview.

She described their hometown as a tightly knit “utopia,” where their parents were heavily involved in the local Lutheran church. (At 85, Ms. Walz’s mother is still the church organist.)

Ms. Walz stayed nearby for college: After getting degrees from Gustavus Adolphus College, a small liberal arts school in southern Minnesota, and Minnesota State University in Mankato, Ms. Walz moved to Alliance, Neb., to teach English.

There, she met Mr. Walz, who taught ninth-grade geography at the same school. On their first date, Mr. Walz took her to see “Falling Down,” the 1993 Michael Douglas movie about an aggrieved white man having a nervous breakdown in Los Angeles. In a 2019 profile in the Star Tribune, Ms. Walz said she rebuffed a kiss afterward, to which Mr. Walz responded, “That’s fine, but you should know I’m going to marry you.”

They were married the next year and soon moved back to Minnesota, taking jobs at Mankato West High School, where she taught English and he taught social studies.

The Walzes were perceived by students as a single unit, so much so that taking classes with both of them gained a nickname: Walz home-school.

Former students remember Ms. Walz as demanding but fair. According to several former students, Ms. Walz required her class to use color-coded notebooks to keep track of the coursework, which included classics like “Walden,” “Our Town” and “Beowulf.”

One former student, Nicole Griensewic, 41, remembered complaining to Ms. Walz that she graded much harder than Mr. Walz.

“‘I can’t be like the Easter Bunny, hopping around handing out A’s like my husband does,’” Ms. Griensewic recalled Ms. Walz as responding.

Megan Holleran edited the school’s newspaper, the West Side Story, and said that Ms. Walz, the faculty adviser, was an encouraging figure who respected the staff’s editorial independence.

Ms. Holleran recalled writing an editorial about what she argued were unthinking displays of nationalism in the months after Sept. 11, 2001 — part of a wide range of perspectives the paper published on the American response to the terrorist attacks.

“She didn’t dictate, she advised,” Ms. Holleran, 41, said. “And she really saw the potential in giving us those responsibilities.”

Students also remembered Ms. Walz for making L.G.B.T.Q. students and racial minorities feel welcome. (Mr. Walz was the faculty adviser and founder of the high school’s gay-straight alliance.)

“They fostered an inclusive environment before that was really a thing, an inclusive culture before that was really a phrase,” said Angie Brunner, 41, a former student of Ms. Walz’s, who was one of the only Korean American students at Mankato West.

The Walzes discussed their students together and tried to help them thrive, including when the couple served as prom advisers. According to Sherri Blasing, the principal of Mankato West and a former neighbor of the Walzes, the couple strategized to make sure no one had to attend prom alone.

The Big Shift

In 2004, Ms. Walz stopped teaching to become the assessment coordinator for the Mankato school district, a job she held until 2018, when her husband was elected governor. And in 2006, Mr. Walz ran for Congress.

By now the parents of 3-year-old Hope — after seven years of fertility treatments — both Walzes were upset with the course of the war in Iraq.

“We just asked ourselves, like, What can we do?” Ms. Walz said on the podcast. The rational thing, she said, was for her husband to run for Congress. “We felt the way you stop the war is stop the money, and the way you stop the money is the United States Congress.”

But politics had been on Ms. Walz’s mind for some time.

In 2002, Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president and Minnesota senator, came out of retirement to replace Senator Paul D. Wellstone in a crucial Senate campaign after he died in a plane crash just days before the election.

Ms. Walz, at the time still teaching at the local high school, showed up at a campaign event for Mr. Mondale in Mankato.

“You had such an incredible influence on me, and women of my age, by your courageous and visionary decision in the 1984 election,” she told Mr. Mondale, according to a St. Paul Pioneer Press article from the time. She was referring to Mr. Mondale’s choice of a woman, Geraldine A. Ferraro, as vice president in his failed presidential bid.

Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, who ran Mr. Mondale’s 2002 campaign, met the Walzes during Mr. Walz’s 2006 congressional run. In an interview, she cast Ms. Walz’s approach to being Minnesota first lady as a reflection of her dedication to public service.

“There is an ethic in Minnesota of what it means to be a good citizen,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s not enough to keep your sidewalk shoveled and mow your grass.”

According to the 2019 Star Tribune profile, Ms. Walz sat in on a job interview for the state’s new corrections commissioner. She also went on the attack over legislation that Mr. Walz and Democratic lawmakers in the State House wanted to advance, once warning state legislators that they could face electoral consequences if they didn’t vote on gun reform measures.

Ms. Walz is not closely involved in Mr. Walz’s day-to-day political operation. And it’s common for political spouses to devote themselves to pet causes or policies. (Doug Emhoff, Ms. Harris’s husband and the second gentleman, keeps an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and has been involved in Biden administration policy on expanding access to legal aid.)

But Ms. Walz has gone deeper than most, spending her time as first lady pushing a policy agenda that she has been passionate about for years. In 2012, while working on an orientation program for congressional spouses, Ms. Walz was introduced to the Bard Prison Initiative. Founded in 1999, the initiative provides college education to prisoners in New York, leading to degrees from Bard College.

After Mr. Walz became governor in 2019, Ms. Walz went to work touring prisons in the state and later helped recruit the Bard Prison Initiative’s director of national programs to a special role within the state department of corrections, drastically expanding access to college courses within Minnesota’s prisons.

But her policy-forward approach to being the governor’s spouse hasn’t come without setbacks.

At a May 2019 forum at Twin Cities Public Television promoting a PBS documentary about the Bard Prison Initiative, the atmosphere turned tense after Ms. Walz and other panelists seemed unprepared to discuss the racial dynamics of the criminal justice system. The awkward discussion was made worse when the governor’s office subsequently asked the television station not to circulate a video of the forum. Twin Cities Public Television deleted the video but maintained that the action was not a result of pressure from the governor’s office. (A Walz staffer later told Minnesota Public Radio that the request to conceal the video had been an “overreaction.”)

In recent days, since her husband’s vice-presidential nomination, Ms. Walz has come in for criticism from the right for an interview she gave to a Twin Cities television station in which she discussed the protests that followed the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. She said that she had kept the windows of the governor’s mansion open during the civil unrest so that she could smell tires burning on the street — a way of understanding the tense atmosphere in the city.

“I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening,” she added.

Despite her political involvement, friends say Ms. Walz is at heart a Midwestern mom.

Famous for her scotcheroos — chocolate and butterscotch-laden Rice Krispies bars — Ms. Walz goes all out decorating the governor’s residence for Christmas. And she speaks with the long O’s and flat A’s of a lifetime spent almost entirely in Minnesota.

“There couldn’t be a better person to do this,” Richelle Norton, a former student of the Walzes, said of Mr. Walz’s joining the Democratic ticket. “Except for Gwen.”

Ernesto Londoño and Emily Cochrane contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.