Tuesday was an exciting day for Democrats, with the news finally breaking that 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris had selected Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz is known for his strong progressive record and affable personality, but his wife of 30 years, longtime educator Gwen Walz, is arguably just as popular within their home state’s political circles. Now that the Walzes are facing off against J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha, to become the Second Family of the United States, catch up on everything you need to know about Gwen:
She hasn’t shied away from public service
Gwen—the first Minnesota first lady to hold an office in the Capitol—has been described as one of her husband’s closest advisors. In 2019, Walz told a Minnesota Public Radio reporter: “Tim said, ‘Well, maybe you want to just have a desk here and come and go out of my office,’ and I said, ‘Oh, no, you talk way too much. We have to be able to get some work done here!’ He completely agreed, so we have our own spaces.”
She’s got the educational bonafides to back up her policies
The Walzes first met while Gwen was teaching English in western Nebraska; together, they collaborated to create an annual summer trip to China for their students. Gwen went on to serve as an administrator and coordinator in Minnesota’s Mankato Area Public Schools for over two decades. “Gwen knows that a strong public education system, encompassing birth through senior citizens, is critical to empowering every Minnesotan to succeed,” reads the first lady of Minnesota’s official government bio.
She’s a passionate advocate for the educational rights of incarcerated Americans
One of the issues that Gwen values highest is correctional education, and accordingly, she’s been working with the Bard Prison Initiative for years to provide incarcerated people with access to college courses. “High standards and options for transformation are nonnegotiable,” Gwen said in 2019. The program’s executive director Max Kenner, in turn, described her as “someone who has really put in the time to come to really understand this issue in both a policy sense and a human sense.”
She’s a mom of two
The Walzes have been open about their experience using IVF to bring their two children, Hope and Gus—now 23 and 17—into the world. “It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope,” the Minnesota governor said this year of becoming a first-time parent in 2001 after seven years of trying to conceive, promising to “build up the battlements around protection [for IVF] as much as I can.”
She commands her husband’s respect (as she should!)
“My wife can plan and get anything done,” gushed Tim Walz in 2019. We love a wife guy, but let’s be real; we love his highly efficient and civic-minded spouse even more.
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Publish date : 2024-08-06 05:06:00
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