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On a brisk October morning in toss-up Pennsylvania, a crowd of volunteers has gathered in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to listen to Gwen Walz tell it like it is. And here’s the truth, delivered atop an overturned apple crate, amid tables laden with iced cookies and insulated cartons of Dunkin’ coffee: “Kamala and Tim are underdogs in this race,” Walz tells the crowd with the plainspoken insistence of a PTA mom. “But I know that we can—and we will—win. You know why? Because we have you. You’re knocking doors and making calls and registering voters and winning votes—one neighbor at a time.” You know the stakes, she continues. She does too.
For months, Walz, as the wife of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, has been dispatched to this swingiest of swing states, familiarizing herself with local vernacular (she is proud to report that she has ordered a cheesesteak “wiz wit”) and the constituencies of its dozens of counties. At present, the national race is so close that pollsters have gamed out the chances of an actual tie. Most believe that to earn the 270 electoral votes she needs in November, Kamala Harris must prevail here. No wonder this is Walz’s second trip in the span of a week.
Walz speaks for a trim 13 minutes—just enough time to rail against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, whip out what she calls her “teacher glasses,” and lead voters in two call-and-response chants. The crowd applauds. A line forms for selfies. She is in and out in under an hour. The entire program is so seamless and rousing it’s hard to remember that she has been at this for just 10 weeks.
It is now political lore that Tim Walz let Kamala Harris go to voicemail when the vice president called to ask him to be her running mate. (“In fairness, it was an unknown number,” Gwen points out.) But at least he didn’t find out that he’d gotten the job from a push alert. When we sit down on a decked-out tour bus to chat, Walz, who has been a professional educator for two decades, tells me she was at a meeting of school superintendents when the news broke. “I’m like, ‘Okay, now, as we tell our students, let’s put away our phones,’” she remembers. With the room buzzing, she couldn’t help but add, “I’m just here to say there is nothing more important than the start of school!”
Within a few hours, she was back home and packing a suitcase to make her debut on the trail. She was given 45 minutes, which perhaps explains how she ended up wearing a linen-blend dress (not the most wrinkle-friendly material) to the first event that her husband and Harris headlined. After photos hit the newswires, a friend reached out in horror. “She said, ‘Gwen, I can’t believe you wore a linen blend,” Walz says. “And I’m like, ‘I hear you, but it was in the front of my closet.’”
Walz has been on the road “almost every day without exception” ever since, scrambling back to Minnesota only when she feels she needs to make sure “everybody has their homework done, and the dog has had his shots.” The Walzes’ daughter, Hope, is 23 and a social worker, but Gus, 18, is still in high school, and it is midterm season. She tells voters in Harrisburg that she had devoted much of her time before her husband was tapped for the ticket to voter outreach. When she realized she’d be spending the next several months traveling the country, she immediately reached out to the campaign apparatus to make sure someone would cover her call shifts in Minnesota.
When we meet, Walz is creaseless and dressed in a double-breasted dark blue pantsuit, paired with a blue-and-white gingham button-down and low-heel deep blue Calvin Klein pumps. Pinned to her lapel is a needlepoint Harris-Walz brooch that could not be more Midwestern if it invited me over for dinner and served me hot dish. Walz is pleased to tell me it’s new, a score from a local business she picked up earlier this week. What a bit of good fortune that it happened to be available in blue and white, completing her on-trend tonal look and matching the rest of this week’s travel wardrobe.
For as long as she has been a political spouse (linen-blend mishaps notwithstanding), Walz has chosen a color palette that makes packing easy and flexible. Her closet is organized to anticipate such capsule wardrobes, with dresses and suits hanging not just according to color, but sleeve length. Her husband takes a less—how shall she put it?—fastidious approach to fashion.
“He is military, so there is a military precision in what he wants together,” she says, “but I do not appreciate how he hangs things.” (A particular quibble: Tim—who was born in Nebraska and served for 24 years in the Army National Guard—seems to have an aversion to straightening shoulders.) “I think that’s the difference between Nebraska and Minnesota,” she adds, the good-natured dig sheathed in a wide smile.
Still, she knows better than to interfere. The Walzes have been married for three decades. She learned at the start not to bother attempting to upgrade his staples. He is so committed to not owning “one extraneous thing” that when Christmas rolls around, he makes a list of what he needs and Gwen selects from his choices. Years ago, she managed to surprise him with a dog DNA test kit so he could uncover the breed profile of their rescue mutt, Scout. It remains her most successful gift to date.
Walz was perhaps not destined for the position of political spouse. She grew up in a farming town in Minnesota, remained close to home for college, and met her husband when both were working as teachers in Alliance, Nebraska. On their first date he told her they would get married. They did, moving back to Minnesota and taking jobs at Mankato West High School, where she taught English and he taught social studies and coached football.
Walz has the no-nonsense affect, but she concedes it was a real thrill when Connie Britton joined her for a campaign event in Nebraska this month. Walz used to assign Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights to her students for independent reading. Britton starred in the onscreen adaptations as perhaps the most famous wife of a football coach of all time. She is now one of a dozen people Walz follows on her brand-new Instagram account.
That the two are on texting terms is just one of the surreal realities of Walz’s current existence. She likes to joke that until her husband ran for Congress in 2006, the last time he was elected was to be homecoming king. When he announced his bid for Congress, well-meaning friends suggested that perhaps a local race would be a better fit. But both Walzes were adamant in their opposition to the war in Iraq, then raging, and they reasoned that the US House of Representatives—not some school board—had the power to limit appropriations to end it. After six terms in the House, Walz ran for governor of Minnesota and won in 2018. When he did, Gwen kept an office in the capital—the better to work on her own legislative priorities, including prison reform and education for incarcerated people.
At the moment, those interests have necessarily taken a backseat to reproductive rights and women’s health. In this race, with abortion proving to be a top issue—and a winning one for Harris, who polls up to 20 points ahead of Trump where reproductive access is concerned—both Walzes have opened up about their struggle to have children. It took seven years and fertility treatments for them to have Hope. Gus arrived five years later. Walz is still getting used to the fact that millions of people now know the intimate details of her medical records, and she has not made total peace with it. “I’m angry that I have to talk about it,” she says. “I didn’t for almost 20 years.”
It wasn’t until a decision from the Alabama Supreme Court ruled several months ago that frozen embryos created during in vitro fertilization should be considered children, forcing clinics in the state to halt IVF services, that the Walzes decided to speak frankly about their ordeal. “It was super emotional,” Walz says. “People who had known us really well were like, ‘We never knew this about you.’ Even our families did not know a lot of the details. It was very hard, and it is very hard.” (The Walzes found success with intrauterine insemination, or IUI, but both maintain that conservatives are imperiling the entire slate of fertility treatments with their anti-choice agenda.) Walz tells me that her own children didn’t understand the full extent of what their parents endured until she started discussing it publicly at events. “Hope is now 23. Gus just turned 18. I think it’s a conversation that you would have, but not in the way that we’ve told it,” she says.
Now when she talks about what she went through on the trail, she inevitably encounters people who look at her with what seems to her to be much more than compassion. “I can see the people who must either have struggled or know someone who did,” she says. “If I talk about it, people wait afterwards, and a lot of times, it’s tearful.”
“We are in a situation where we are either going to make our own choices as women, which begins with our bodies, or we’re not,” she continues. “If you’re a woman, and you would like to have a say in your own life, then it is clear where your vote has to be.”
Walz is focused on the election, but her life after it will be remade if Harris wins. She is grateful to have gotten advice from Doug Emhoff and Jill Biden, who both served in the role that would be hers should Walz become vice president. Emhoff has also made himself available to Hope and Gus, which Walz appreciates. (“I’m like, ‘Gus, don’t you dare text that man 24/7.”) She and Biden—two English teachers—have known each other since Walz arrived in Washington almost two decades ago. “She is the most amazing person,” Walz tells me. And of course, Biden is also someone who has insisted that she could continue to work—no matter the office her husband occupied. I wonder whether Walz has a similar plan. “Do you think someone will hire me?” she quips. But when pressed, she sounds determined: “I have to find a classroom somewhere.”
Perhaps not right away, though. Like another recent political spouse, she may wait a few months before moving to DC. “I’m scheduled to teach at Augsburg [University in Minnesota] this spring, and Gus has to finish his senior year,” she tells me. First let them get through November, “and then we’ll see.”
Less than two weeks after Harris named Tim Walz as her vice presidential pick, the Walzes flew to the Democratic National Convention. Staff had prepped them, but Gwen hadn’t had time to fully absorb what it would be like: banners raised, tens of thousands of people screaming. “This is the experience of a lifetime, and what am I focused on? Does everybody have clean underwear? Do shoes match suits?” she says.
When she took her seat that first night, she watched Hillary Clinton wear suffragette white to deliver her prime-time address. TV cameras had a lens trained on Walz all week, and while Clinton was speaking, several reporters noticed that Walz looked overcome. She was. The night that Clinton lost her own bid for the White House in 2016 was one of the most heartbreaking that Walz can remember. She had never cried in front of her children, but she sobbed as she tucked Gus in. When aides asked Hope and Gus if there were speakers they particularly wanted to meet at the convention, Gus named Clinton—the woman whose courage had meant so much to his mother.
“I have read her books, I have admired her work, I have watched her challenges, and I think we stand on her shoulders,” Walz tells me. “Her coming to that convention and her approach that, ‘I am ready to go, and I am excited’”—it struck Walz as moving and generous. Clinton came to celebrate and champion the candidate who was now attempting to do what she had been unable to, without a trace of bitterness.
After I leave her, Walz will roll through Pittsburgh. She will be in Georgia within 24 hours. She will repack her suitcase. She will choose a new color palette. She will think of Clinton. “It was like, ‘We are pushing forward,’” Walz says. “And I thought, ‘Let me be like that.’”
