Behind the plan to put Walz in the national spotlight

[MUSIC PLAYING] CATHY WURZER: And the governor is in Michigan today campaigning alongside Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential ticket continues barnstorming through swing states. It's been only two days since Harris chose Walz as her running mate. And it may seem like his rise to the Democratic ticket happened in the blink of an eye, but as a new story in the New York Times tells it, there's been a quiet subterranean effort started more than a year ago, where Walz and his aides built his national profile.

And they were successful thanks to a combination of careful strategy, luck, and Minnesota nice. It was becoming clear to Minnesota reporters that the two-term governor seemed to be aiming at something. Listen to what Walz said back in April on Twin Cities public television's Almanac program when asked about his future.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- Have you thought where you're going to be in 2026? Are you going to run for Senate, Governor again, cabinet post?

- I'm just trying to get through this week, with all the news that was out there.

- What do you got up your sleeve?

- Look, I'm working hard to elect more governors that I think are delivering on things, whether from education, from health care, reproductive rights. Right now, I'm focused on making sure Minnesota continues to be the best state in the country when we keep hearing things-- best roads, some of the safest roads. And we keep seeing some positive news, keep focusing on that. But I'm enjoying telling Minnesota's story.

[END PLAYBACK]

CATHY WURZER: Walz was and has been demure about his political plans until now. So to get a better understanding about his team's strategy, we wanted to talk to one of the New York Times reporters about the story out today. Reid Epstein wrote and reported the story with his colleagues, and he joins us right now to explain. Reid, thank you for taking the time.

REID EPSTEIN: It's great to talk to you.

CATHY WURZER: As I mentioned, Minnesota reporters started noticing something was going on. At the end of the 2023 legislative session, there was a campaign-style drone video that raised eyebrows of the governor and a celebratory budget bill signing that racked up about almost 3 million views on social media. His out-of-state travel schedule was increasing. He was doing more national interviews as a Biden surrogate. Per your sources, when did Walz and his team start this effort to raise his national profile?

REID EPSTEIN: Well, what we understand is that the Walz team, after the midterm elections, when the Democrats won a trifecta in the state government, they realized that after a first term that had been consumed by the COVID crisis, the George Floyd riots and divided government, that they would have a clear lane to enact a raft of progressive legislation that the party had been angling for for years.

I had a conversation with Tim Walz in December of 2022, where he effectively laid out what the plans were for the legislative session, and that he had hoped to enact, really, a muscular set of progressive policies. And what they were doing at the time was making sure they built an apparatus to not only sell that policy in Minnesota, but to make sure that Democrats, people in the press, donors, other officials in the party were aware of what he was doing in Minnesota in the rest of the country. And that is really what was under the radar until relatively recently with him.

CATHY WURZER: You wrote that his team had been trying for months to go viral, and not in an obnoxious, obvious way, and that he did. How were they trying to create these viral moments that eventually happened?

REID EPSTEIN: I mean, part of that is by amassing a set of allies to amplify the Tim Walz message. And so he went around to state parties and did chicken dinners in out of the way places. We wrote in our story, at a party dinner in Nebraska, he met with David Hogg, who's an online influencer. He was one of the students who attended the Parkland High School in Florida when there was a mass shooting there and has since become a pretty significant figure in both the gun control movement and in progressive spaces online. Was somebody who became a Walz ally a year ago.

And when Walz then wound up in the mix for the vice presidency, Hogg was one of the people who not only was promoting him online, but also had a direct line into the Kamala Harris vetters and people who were helping her choose a vice president. Hogg was one of the-- was just one of the people who had connections with Walz who was promoting him pretty aggressively.

CATHY WURZER: And there were some pretty influential leaders in Congress who were also talking him up to Vice President Harris.

REID EPSTEIN: That's right. I mean, there was a host of House members who had served with Walz, who are fond of him both online and off directly. I had House members who called me directly, unsolicited, to vouch for Walz. They were doing so with the Harris team as well. And it was as if he had a lifetime of chits that he had built up in politics that he cashed in all at once for this, some of which happened not even by his direction, but just people who had enjoyed working with him or enjoyed his company that wanted to help him in this moment.

CATHY WURZER: This is a story that underscores the governor's political ambitions. And there's nothing wrong with being ambitious. What spurred you and your three other colleagues to dig into the story?

REID EPSTEIN: Well, Walz, for a lot of people, came out of nowhere. In Minnesota, you've been familiar with him. But on the National stage, he is somebody who had been doing a lot of this work under the radar outside the view of the mainstream discussion of politics. In any of the time when there was discussion about President Biden perhaps not running again or stepping down, there was always a host of Governors and senators whose names were mentioned as possible Biden replacements.

Walz was never on that list. He was never even in the discussion. But he had been-- and he had been a pretty loyal Biden surrogate both as the Governor of Minnesota and as Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. But he had kept himself in the discussion enough that, when Biden stepped down and Harris was looking for a running mate, Walz was on the initial list of people that she wanted to hear from.

And even at that point, 2 and 1/2 weeks ago, he was not considered a favorite to win up against figures like Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona. That was more of the-- those people had more of a national profile that people around the Harris selection process thought that she would go with. But in the end, Walz both outperformed all of those people in his interviews and had a much bigger group of people vouching for him than anyone else did in the field.

CATHY WURZER: So I'm wondering, when you look at the image that is out there of Governor Walz right now, the persona that exists on the campaign trail and online, do you think it matches the one his aides were trying to put forward?

REID EPSTEIN: With anyone in politics, it's hard to tell how much of what you see on television is real to what they are behind the scenes. Everybody has something that they want to present to the world in a way that they want to be received. And it's pretty rare that that lines up 100% with the way people are in real life. With Walz, it seems pretty authentic-- at least he presents it very authentically.

One thing that struck my colleagues and I in the last couple of weeks when talking to people about Walz is that it's very difficult to find people who have had bad interactions with him or people who feel like he pushed them aside to reach his own political ambition. That certainly wasn't the case with other candidates for the vice presidential nomination.

Just about everybody else who was in the discussion had left some people with bitter feelings as they advanced. But with Walz, we did not hear people speak about him that way. Even Minnesota Republicans who had worked with him when he was Governor and there was divided government, they disagreed with him on policy, and they had stark disagreements with how he handled the George Floyd riots and the COVID crisis. But just about every one of them had positive personal interactions with him and consider themselves social friends with him still.

CATHY WURZER: Say, this is a little bit off your story, but I'm curious. With yesterday's renewed questions and criticisms of the Governor's military record, specifically from JD Vance, what do your sources say? You're in the thick of political reporting. Why so much attention on Walz from the Trump campaign? You'd think the campaign would go after Kamala Harris more than her running mate.

REID EPSTEIN: And some of that is about the disorganization of the Trump campaign. But a lot of it has to do with Walz being undefined for most of America at this point. Until just a couple of days ago, most people in the country did not know who Tim Walz was and hadn't heard of them. And so what the Trump campaign is trying to do is make people's first impression of him something negative and draw away from the Midwestern dad energy that the Harris campaign is aggressively trying to promote around him.

And if the Trump campaign and JD Vance can knock walls off center a little bit by muddying up his military record, they'll take-- and changing the conversation away from the positive story that Harris and Walz have presented in the last couple days-- that they'll take as a win. And Trump is doing a press conference later this afternoon in Florida, and I would expect to see him weigh into this debate himself.

CATHY WURZER: Reid, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

REID EPSTEIN: Thank you.

CATHY WURZER: We've been talking to New York Times political reporter Reid Epstein.