Reporters who’ve been covering Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for years say he’s pretty much what he appears to be: plain spoken and happy to answer questions.
“Tim Walz is just kind of a salt-of-the earth midwestern guy and he won’t put on airs,” said Bill Salisbury, a retired longtime state-capitol reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Walz, who presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris selected as her running mate on Tuesday, has been governor since 2019.
“He was not hostile toward us at all,” Salisbury said of Walz’s relations with the press corps. “He’ll take questions and he’ll think about the answers that he gives.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Rochelle Anne Olson wrote on Tuesday that “In debates, interviews and news conferences, he appears comfortable speaking extemporaneously and from the heart without notes.” But, she added, “he can also provide meandering responses that change direction and amount to word salad.”
Brian Bakst, the political editor of Minnesota Public radio, agreed. “He’s generally been pretty affable with us, pretty accessible,” Bakst said. “Sometimes you have to comb through some confusing sentences, but he doesn’t shy from questions.”
“I think he genuinely likes people, so that’s helpful,” said Patrick Coolican, editor in chief of the Minnesota Reformer. “He’s an old high school social studies teacher so he’s kind of nerdy about government and elections and the First Amendment and the role of the free press. That’s the underlying current.”
Coolican added: “He’s not one of these types who spent his whole life preparing for this moment. He had a whole life before politics. And I think it’s huge advantage, how you deal with people when you’re kind of grounded that way.”
None of that is to say that it’s all been smooth sailing between Walz and the state’s press corps.
“There’s some question as to how responsive they are to public records requests,” Coolican said of the Walz administration. For instance, while campaigning, Walz promised to release his daily schedule to the media. But soon after he took office, he reneged.
Walz recently talked to reporters about getting and sending texts late into the night, but when an Axios reporter filed a public records request, she was told the texts didn’t exist.
And Coolican recalled that Walz’s aides were upset after an interview Walz had with the Reformer just prior to his 2022 reelection. The Reformer reported that Walz gave conflicting answers about when he first heard suspicions about what turned out to be one of the nation’s largest pandemic-era frauds, which involved funds administered by the state’s education department.
“They were upset with the way we treated the story,” Coolican said. “He hasn’t given us an interview since.”
Will Walz charm the national press corps? Up until Tuesday, at least, the answer appeared to be yes. Even the Washington Post Style section, which is almost without exception snarky about liberals, published a glowing profile last week.
And on Tuesday, Katie Rogers at the New York Times wrote fairly positively about what appealed to Harris about Walz’s record. Almost all of the Times’s “19 Facts About Tim Walz, Harris’s Pick for Vice President” were delightful.
The Associated Press published a story headlined “How Tim Walz became beloved by young voters with a message that the GOP is ‘weird’”.
But there were signs that the coverage was already turning darker, as if the Trump campaign were handing out assignments.
The New York Times Mitch Smith wrote critically about Walz’s hesitation to send in Minnesota National Guard troops to quell protests in Minneapolis after a city police officer was filmed murdering George Floyd in May 2020. Walz’s actions “are sure to be examined more closely by voters and his Republican rivals in the weeks ahead,” Smith wrote portentously.
Also in the Times, Ken Bensinger wrote that Walz’s 1995 arrest for drunk driving – after which he quit drinking is “not resolved in the court of public opinion” and “is bubbling up once again.”
How the press covers Walz matters a lot, since he is largely unknown to most Americans. Walz “has faced less scrutiny on the national stage” than others Harris was considering, Washington Post reporters Tyler Pager, Amy B Wang and Sabrina Rodriguez wrote on Tuesday.
It’s unclear how many of the Republican attacks on Walz reporters will take seriously. In the Times, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman reported that “the Trump campaign immediately sought to frame Mr. Walz as a radical.” But they mocked Trump’s “typically overheated rhetoric” in warning that “Tim Walz will unleash hell on earth!”
Pager, Wang and Rodriguez reported that Walz ”has faced criticism from Republicans that his policies as governor were too liberal, including legalizing recreational marijuana for adults, protecting abortion rights, expanding LGBTQ protections, implementing tuition-free college for low-income Minnesotans and providing free breakfast and lunch for schoolchildren in the state.”
“But,” the reporters noted, “many of those initiatives are broadly popular.”
UPDATE: I just saw this! Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate once helped WWL anchor get her vehicle out of Minnesota ditch