After weeks of speculation, Kamala Harris has finally chosen her Vice-Presidential candidate, and it’s a guy most Americans hadn’t heard of until the last fortnight: Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and the reason why Democrats have started calling their opponents “weird”. The overall feeling seems to be that he seems to be a good choice, and he must be doing something right if so many Republicans are denouncing him as unacceptably radical.

I hadn’t heard of him until a week ago either, but having listened to a couple of interviews and reading some old articles about him, I am now a qualified expert. Here’s everything you need to know about Tim Walz.

HE’S KIND OF CUTE 

Call me a lib, accuse me of being seduced by the politics of personality, but I would like Tim Walz to take me to a butter-carving competition in rural Minnesota. All else aside, he is affable and easygoing, with the air of a kindly grandfather in a 90s children’s film who, just when the stakes are down, makes a rousing speech about the importance of following your heart. This alone makes him a solid candidate: next to his brand of folksy, mid-Western charm, JD Vance is going to look even more strange and mean-spirited.

HE HAS DONE SOME GOOD THINGS 

During his time as Minnesota governor, Walz has introduced a number of progressive policies in his home state, introducing universal free school meals, increasing paid time off work, legalising cannabis, taxing private healthcare companies to fund Medicaid and banning conversion therapy, and restoring voter rights for former felons. He has defended both reproductive rights and gender-affirming care, as well as establishing Minnesota as a “trans refuge” state, providing legal protections for any trans person who moves or travels there to access care. Walz might not be a radical firebrand, but his record is solid.

What also makes Walz a good match for JD Vance is that his politics are “pro-family” in a material way which goes beyond rhetoric. While Vance insults “childless cat ladies” and complains about the declining birth rate, Walz can point to a record of actually making it easier and cheaper to start a family. Most importantly, he seems to understand that if the Democrats want to beat Trump, they will have to offer people meaningful improvements to their lives.

HE’S NOT JOSH SHAPIRO 

One of the biggest things Walz has going for him is that he’s not the other guy. After Pete Buttigieg and Mark Kelly were ruled out, the selection was a toss-up between Waltz and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Even by the standards of mainstream Democrats, Shapiro is a hardline supporter of Israel: he recently compared anti-war supporters to the KKK, supported a bill which would punish universities that boycotted or divested funds from Israel, and once claimed to have volunteered for the Israeli Army (a claim he has now retracted.) Tim Walz’s record on the issue is also terrible, as is the case with the vast majority of Democrats, but he doesn’t exhibit the same lifelong commitment to anti-Palestinian racism. This is why so many progressives in the US are now breathing a sigh of relief: as bad as the Democrats are and likely will continue to be on Palestine, it could have been worse.

BUT HE’S STILL A DEMOCRAT 

While there’s plenty to recommend Walz as a Vice-Presidential candidate, he is far from perfect. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests which followed the murder of George Floyd, Walz described the unrest as being the work of outside agitators (a classic trope which has been used throughout to delegitimise protests), decried them as a “mockery of pretending” to be about racial injustice, and eventually called in the National Guard. While he oversaw the introduction of some police reforms, further efforts came to nothing and Minnesota continues to have a higher-than-average rate of police violence. All of which is a reminder that, no matter how ‘nice’ a given politician happens to be, you should never get too excited about the Democratic party.