The FRONTLINE Interviews
Briana Bierschbach
The Minnesota Star Tribune
Briana Bierschbach is a state government and politics reporter at The Minnesota Star Tribune.
The following interview was conducted by Gabrielle Schonder for FRONTLINE on August 16, 2024. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Walz’s Early Life
Tell me a bit about Tim Walz's background.Where does he come from?And help walk us through his origin story.
Tim Walz is interesting as far as political figures go.I don't think he has a typical background, at least not in recent years that I've been covering politics.But he comes from, going way back, he comes originally from Nebraska. A small town.He likes to tell the story a lot about how he went to a high school class, graduating 24, 12 of the four cousins, had a hard time finding a prom date, which is really what this area of the country is like.And he spent the first half of his life in Nebraska, signing up for the National Guard when he was 17.
He's been talking a lot about the drive with his dad, who had also enlisted, going to the office and signing up.And this was really a path for him to try and get to college on the GI Bill.So that was part of it, but he stayed in the National Guard, obviously, for two dozen years, which is a significant amount of time.
His father was a school administrator, and his mother at the time was actually a stay-at-home mom when he was young. And she was also involved in local Democratic politics, I think, in Nebraska.So that could be the earliest stages of political sort of connections to him, but really, it sounds like they weren't a super political family.They were very much a small-town family.
One of the things he talks about a lot in terms of sort of fomenting a lot of his views on things like health care access is when his father died.His father had lung cancer; he was a lifelong smoker.And toward the end, he was in the hospital basically for several weeks, and it was really expensive.And after he died, his mother was really saddled with medical debt for quite a long time and had to start—went from a stay-at-home mom to someone who had multiple jobs, really, to support the family.So that was a really important part.
OK, so let's start back at the beginning about how does his father's health at the very end of his life inform some of his political views on health care.
Walz would have been 19 around this time, and his father was a lifelong smoker, which he's talked about, and he got lung cancer.And toward the end, he spent several weeks in the hospital, and it was really hard on the family.I know this was a period of his life that caused him to sort of reflect a lot on not just sort of his family and his home situation and what he wanted to do with his life, but also would later in life in politics affect his view on health care and access to health care, because his mom ended up getting saddled with over a decade's worth of medical bills for those last two weeks he stayed in the hospital.It was really expensive, and it was really hard on him, and I think that shaped part of what he thought about in terms of how much it should cost for families who are going through something similar, sitting in the hospital for weeks on end, using a lot of expensive medical technology.
Mankato, Minnesota
He's a football coach in a small southern town in Minnesota, but he's also the faculty head of the Gay-Straight Alliance.Who is Tim Walz at this period?
You know, he's the teacher—I think we all knew one of those teachers in our school, someone who was pretty broadly popular, who I think a lot of the students would come to after class to just talk to about anything going on in their lives or problems they're having in school.And he was also the teacher who I think inspired people to both get interested in the subject he was teaching, but also other subjects.So it's a very familiar almost trope of a teacher, but they're the ones that a lot of people walk away from school and have really positive memories from.
He seems like an unlikely liberal around this period.Is that how you view it?
Mankato is an interesting place.It's sort of a slightly bigger town in a much more broadly conservative, rural part of the state, so there's certainly people who are liberals that live in that region.But his background wouldn't suggest he would be a Democrat, right?He grew up in small-town Nebraska, served in the Army National Guard, was a hunter, fisher, was a proud marksman.A lot of that sounds like what you would think of as a modern-day Republican.
But I think his values were really brought up by his family situation and being a teacher and being one of many teachers within their family.I think that also all helped form him as more of a Democrat or a liberal.
He wins his congressional seat five times in a pretty conservative area.What is his secret for success?
I think it's something that you're seeing now to a certain extent, which is this idea that he is that prairie populism, that every man.He dresses like a normal person.If you see him in old pictures or videos, he's often wearing jeans, tennis shoes, a baseball cap, the camo hat, which is popular in the campaign now.It's something I've seen him wear many times.I've seen him at press conferences in a T-shirt or on the debate stage in a T-shirt.So I think that's part of it.I also think he did a really good job of focusing on specific issues in a tough district.
He really honed in on agriculture, veterans’ issues and local projects that were important to his district, and that kept him focused in on what that part of the state needed and helped him survive in what has increasingly become a tough political area for Democrats.
He takes hard votes during his period in Congress, in some regards, votes that are a bit more progressive than perhaps his district.Again, how does how does that work?How is he able to do that?
That's a great question.Some votes or even some positions he had been open about at that time, including being in support of gay marriage, was really not common for Democrats even, especially not a Democrat running and serving in a largely rural district.I think there's something about Minnesotans, though, and I've seen this with politicians other than Walz, who—they like it when you're up front and you sort of explain why you feel the way you feel about an issue.And Minnesota's had a very interesting evolution on issues like gay marriage and on its own, but I do think being up front and talking to people about it and communicating a lot can help people say, “OK, I don't agree with you on that, but I agree with you on some of this other stuff, and you had a conversation with me about it.” So I think that helped him be up front on some progressive issues, even in a district where they might not have broadly supported it.
Walz as Minnesota Governor
You begin covering Walz in 2018 when he's preparing to run for governor.Was he considered a moderate at the time, a progressive?Where is he politically?
I think he was definitely seen as a moderate in that race.What's interesting is he sought the endorsement, actually, from the Democratic Party against a candidate who was a state legislator here who was seen as the more progressive candidate and ran against him on issues like his past positions on guns and in support from and for the NRA.So he was definitely seen as this southern Minnesota candidate who came from a rural part of the state who had these positions that some of the more activist base of the party were unsure about, and he actually lost the Democratic Party's endorsement and went on to win in a primary election, which is the statewide vote.But he was definitely perceived at that time as the moderate of the options from Democrats.
You sat down with him to talk about his position on guns.Can you tell me about that?
He's had a really interesting evolution on guns, and I think he's talked about this a lot more recently, but as early as when he was running for governor in 2018, when he was in Congress, his constituency really supported the Second Amendment.There were a lot of hunters and fishermen and -women in his district, and he was one of them himself.So he felt that the Second Amendment needed to be protected, but the world sort of changed.
And he had kids, young kids, who were in high school.And as all these different mass shootings kept happening in schools, I think that really started to spark a change on the issue, or at least a more nuanced position than just protecting Second Amendment rights.He started to think of it as protecting Second Amendment rights and bringing in gun owners who wanted to change that to not just extend automatically to any guns.You wanted to maybe take automatic assault rifles and weapons out of the hands of people who could walk into a classroom.His family is a big, important part of his change on this.His daughter, Hope, has told him after the Parkland [Fla.] shooting, “You're the only politician I know, you're the only person I know who can do something about this.” So he's talked about how that changed his positioning as well.But more recently, I would say, in his last few years, he's really embraced that he now has an F rating from the NRA.It's even more of a moment of pride for him to say, “Not only did I used to have an A rating, and I have an F rating now, I'm going to sign all these progressive gun bills into law” So it's something he's embraced even more, I think, in the last few years.
Let me flip around to his handling of COVID.You write that he took sweeping executive actions to slow the virus, including issuing a stay-at-home order, mask mandates, shuttering businesses and schools.Talk to me a little bit about that time period here.
It's kind of weird to step back into that moment when it first started happening.We first got our first death reports in the state, and governors, not just Walz but governors across the country, were really trying to figure out what do you do in this situation?We hadn't had a pandemic like this, a global pandemic in a century.So I think a lot of it, what I heard and reported at the time, was he really sat down with a group of advisers, not just his Cabinet officials but people from around the state, business leaders, former governors, and took in a ton of information and sought a lot of guidance from people about how to handle it, especially in those early days, because it is hard when you're a former schoolteacher to shut down schools.It is hard when you're thinking about reelection and your future to shut down businesses.You know that people are going to remember that.And it really did change his political perception in the state after the pandemic was over, but from what I reported early on is he took a lot of input from people and had to make decisions quickly.
And it ultimately followed a playbook a lot of governors, particularly some other Midwestern governors, took at that time.But over time, the pandemic response in Minnesota and elsewhere became incredibly polarized.Republicans in the state felt cut out by the process.Walz was using executive orders to take these actions on his own, and they felt that he wasn't necessarily consulting with them enough or doing enough to consider the possible long-term implications of shutting down businesses.
And also, there were a lot of deaths in nursing homes in Minnesota that people were raising the alarm about.So it was an interesting period.And there was a lot of political animosity that came out of it in the later part of the pandemic response.Republicans actually ousted a few of his commissioners over this feeling that he wasn't listening to them or being responsive to people.They thought that the Twin Cities had different needs than maybe some businesses in parts of greater Minnesota that were seeing less cases.
Another COVID controversy that you wrote about was under a state agency that had spent about $250 million in food assistance for meals that were never delivered.Can you tell me a little bit about this incident and Governor Walz's response?
Yeah, Feeding Our Future was a nonprofit that was taking in federal, largely federal, pandemic dollars to give meals to kids who needed them at this very critical time.And the state Department of Education also had a role in approving and clearing nonprofits, essentially, that could get some of these federal dollars.And the Walz administration did ultimately flag that something seemed off about this nonprofit.As reports would come out later, there were a lot of sites that were way too small, maybe like an apartment building or a room in an apartment or a storefront somewhere that didn't seem to have anyone in it, and they were claiming to have been giving out thousands and thousands of meals every day.
So while the Department of Education did ultimately flag that something seemed off and an investigation was started by federal prosecutors, a lot of people said they didn't do enough quickly enough, that there should have been more red flags, it should have been flagged sooner before it spiraled into something that was what turned into be the largest pandemic fraud in the country during that time.
Did people associate Governor Walz with that?
He's faced a lot of criticism for it.I think he did actually get a new commissioner in the Department of Education.Some have said that was likely due to what had happened with Feeding Our Future and needing to have a fresh start there.But he faced a lot of tough questions, and a lot of Republicans certainly have directly tied him to that saying, “You're the governor.The buck stops with you.This is your administration.”
Were any of the critiques of how COVID was handled legitimate, and how has he responded to them?
That's a good question.I think he has been defensive at times.There was a time when early on the Feeding Our Future scandal was starting to come out and the details of that, and he had been frustrated with a judge, actually, who didn't necessarily move forward with something that the Department of Education had asked them to do, which was trying to stop them from getting this money.And he was defensive.He misspoke.People really like to draw lines between the executive branch and the judicial branch.
We hear another critique of his is the slow decision-making around his response to the George Floyd protests.Can you set the scene, give us the back story to the murder and the protests and riots afterwards?
Yeah, the George Floyd murder happened right as the pandemic was really happening as well and getting going in the state and in the country and in the world.So we were already in this mode of sort of daily briefings from the governor and his staff about their response to the pandemic.And suddenly you wake up, and this Black man who was at a convenience store is seen on video, George Floyd, with his head under the knee of an officer, Derek Chauvin, for what feels like an eternity, … and you see him die.And I think that sparked protests immediately in the state, kind of in this surreal moment of under the context of the pandemic already.
And in that first night of protests, things escalated pretty much right away.It was peaceful, and then there was fear that protesters were getting too near some police cars at one point.Police started using nonlethal munitions such as tear gas and rubber-bullet-like-type projectiles, and things just continued to escalate from there.And I think as more people saw the video, as more people felt a reaction to what happened, more people wanted to get out and protest.
But there were also riots.Riots broke out.Big swaths of the city were destroyed, and Walz is, as governor, the head of the National Guard.So the conversation became, "Can Minneapolis handle this on its own with their police force and their firefighters, or does the National Guard need to be called in?"And the criticism for Walz has come with, "Did he call in the National Guard soon enough?"There has been some back-and-forth that the mayor of Minneapolis didn't do proper protocols to request the assistance of the Guard, and they felt like their hands were tied, but the mayor has said they did request the assistance.It's a lot of blame game if you look back at that time.And after-action reports that dug into this said they didn't communicate well, including Walz, including the mayor, and that things could have been possibly addressed quicker than they were because the city ultimately sustained $500 million in damage, and it took many years to recover from that, and there's some areas that haven't fully recovered yet.
And in this campaign, that moment has been raised a lot by critics on the right.
Well, critics are saying he didn't respond quick enough.They're using a line that Republicans have said for a number of years here as well, that he froze.As someone who was in some of the control rooms and some of the operational rooms where they were trying to respond, certainly there were people who were constantly talking and communicating and trying to figure out the best response.There's also questions about how quickly do you bring in the National Guard.This is a really big military presence coming into the streets of a community.
And I think those things were being taken into consideration as well.But, you know, you're going to hear it.And I think for people who weren't here, they'll have to judge how they feel about this time period based off of what they read about that, and hopefully they do go back and read our coverage about all the different factors and considerations that lawmakers on all levels were considering at that time.
I want to ask you about: When you win the election,there's more than a $17 billion surplus, and a flurry of progressive legislation has passed around this time.Can you tell me about some of the legislation?It's now being deemed as—and it is—quite progressive.Tell me a little bit about what passes.
Yeah, it was kind of a moment that few lawmakers get, right?Suddenly he went from having divided government that he had been working with for four years to having narrowly but complete control of government from the legislative side and his office aside for Democrats.And not only did they have that, but political disagreements from the session before had left $9 billion on the table to spend, and that had grown to this massive, historic $17 billion-plus surplus.
So not only did they come in with this new-found power, but they have this immense amount of money to potentially set this agenda in place.And no one was really quite sure how much Democrats would get done.They had very narrow coalitions and very narrow majorities in both chambers, and they had Democrats from all over the state who might have different views on certain issues.But they stunned everyone and sort of managed to say, “Hey, this is a moment that we have right now.We may not have it again, given the way the world is and how polarized things are, so we're just going to take it.” And they really checked off.They actually got together some of the top legislative leaders before the session started and said, “What do we all want to do?” And they wrote an actual list of progressive priorities that included legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion rights, free school lunches, restoring voting rights for formerly incarcerated people with felony convictions because they couldn't vote in the state.So they wrote this list down, and by the end, they had checked almost everything off in what was a whirlwind of a session.And Gov.Walz was the person who signed all those bills, right?So he was a player in that behind the scenes in negotiating with the legislature on what they'd look like, but then also very publicly in the moments when they would celebrate and sign it.So it was a moment that's been being compared to this period of Minnesota lawmaking in the 1970s called the Minnesota Miracle, where they changed a ton of laws around how we publicly finance schools and passed a number of progressive priorities then, too.And it's been called the Minnesota Miracle 2.0 from Democrats.Republicans felt like it was a session of excessive overreach, wasteful spending.They felt cut out and not consulted with by Democrats on enough issues as well, so there's really sort of two stories of that session depending on where you sit on the political spectrum.
And is Gov.Walz in this moment being pulled towards the extreme wing of progressive politics?
That's a great question.I think on some issues, he was already there.On guns, he had been talking for years about how he thought the state needed to pass stricter gun control measures, particularly universal background checks, red flag protection orders, which they both managed to do during that session.But on others, he wasn't quite there yet.One of the things that was being discussed at that time was pay raises for Uber and Lyft drivers in the state, and Democrats passed a bill and kind of handed it to him at the end of session, and he vetoed it.It's his only veto in his time as governor so far.And it was from a bill sent to him by, in theory, his political allies.
So I think in some ways, he was already there.In other issues, he wasn't there yet.And you could see that sort of publicly play out.But I think he very gleefully signed abortion protections.He had already been very much in favor of legalizing marijuana and had been talking about that for a few years.And so I think in a lot of ways, they were aligned on their priorities.
Are the bills popular with the electorate?Do they swing too far left for his constituency?
That's a great question.We haven't polled on the popularity of some of these individual proposals.We do poll on the perception of the legislature or popularity of the legislature, and it's found narrowly some people like this agenda.Legislative bodies tend to also just be generally unpopular with the public.I think Congress experiences this as well.So I can't say for sure where the public stands.We haven't had—this will be our first election since this big agenda passed, and really Republicans are making it an issue.In this campaign they're saying they overstepped; they could have cut your taxes more with a big surplus than they did.So I think that'll be our first test of how popular this agenda is with Minnesotans.
There's been a lot of criticism [of the legislative session during Walz’s term as governor] also of having a sort of a radical platform, certainly when we talk about maybe some of the social issues.How realistic is that?
A radical platform in terms of?
I'm thinking about gender-affirming care.
What's interesting about that is it was not surprising to see how much Walz really stepped out and got out in front of the issue of becoming a trans refuge.But he actually issued an executive order in the state before he even signed a bill to make Minnesota a refuge for transgender individuals and families, so he recognized early on that this was an issue he was going to be public facing.He didn't waffle on this.He really didn't question whether the state should protect people who are coming here for gender-affirming care.He issued an executive order.He had a press conference about it and was very happy to sign that bill, even though it is a hot-button cultural and social issue nationally.
Is he also thinking about national politics when he weighs in on these?
That's a great question.I think you can tell during the 2023 legislative session that Walz was starting to think about his national profile.In Minnesota, we don't have any term limits on being governor, but traditionally people don't run for a third consecutive term.So in his mind, I have to imagine he's starting to wonder about what's next for him.And so you see him step out a little bit more.He really made Ron DeSantis, when he was running for president, a foil.He had press conferences about how Minnesota's not going to ban books that he said Florida had banned.So you really saw him start to sort of flirt with this idea that he was the anti-DeSantis, which at the time, DeSantis was a very prominent Republican national figure.So that was the start of it.I think really things started cooking more after session when they managed to pass this agenda.Walz and legislative leaders saw this as a model that they could talk about around the country, and so you started to see not only Walz, but leaders go on national television and start to talk about how other states could do this, how Minnesota did it.There was a very ceremonial bill signing at the end of session that famously, at least in Minnesota, featured a very loud drone that flew over and through the Capitol as Walz and legislative leaders walked down the steps to sort of have this signing.And there was a marching band there.You have a marching band and lots of people who were supporters of this agenda, they're cheering it on.So it's the scene where you can see not only do they understand the significance of this moment, but they're there videotaping it with a drone and using that video and posting it on social media.So you have to think someone who's ready to make a video like that is maybe thinking how a video like that could be potentially used one day.So I think that was the beginning of it.And it's really kind of just snowballed from there.He became chair of the DGA, the Democratic Governors Association, later that year, and he was starting to appear more on the campaign trail for Biden before he dropped out.
Walz on the National Stage
He starts using the word “weird,” and he's making more of these cable news appearances during this time period we're talking about.What is he doing?
It's really interesting, because he actually started using “weird” before even he was appearing to audition for the role of number two.So I had kind of heard it a few times already in his surrogate moments for Biden.But what he was trying to do is to say, almost to turn—Republicans had been doing this for a while where they're kind of—they managed to be like, “What is this?You know, the Democrats have all these radical ideas that you don't like.” They could sort of message this to voters, like, “This is nuts.We don't like this.” And Walz was, I think, trying to find a counter to that to say, “Well, isn't actually all this other stuff kind of weird when you think about it?” I think he's maybe faced some critiques for that, like, “Are you saying all Republicans are weird?” I think he's really clarified: “I mean the Republican Party, the ticket, their ideas are weird.” And it really gave a voice to something that Democrats weren't using at the time.They were sticking with this much more sort of high-minded argument about an existential threat to democracy.
Vance and Walz are both from the Midwest.And I wonder if you can just give us your perspective on sort of what visions those two men have and how they differ, even though they're coming from the same region.
Walz has tried to make this contrast a lot, too.You know, Vance wrote this bestseller, right, Hillbilly Elegy.It described what was a very difficult childhood for him, growing up with a mother who suffered from addiction.They lived in poverty, lived with his grandparents.And that is a version of small-town life that Walz just didn't necessarily experience.He had no doubt his struggles, facing the death of his father at a young age, and they weren't wealthy.They had kind of an average life.But he is seeking to contrast what was Vance's maybe more of a struggle or a darker vision of small-town life with his own experience, so he's trying to say being from a small town or being from these parts of the state or from parts of the country are really about being nice to your neighbors, minding your own business, keeping to yourself.And Vance is trying to say things can be better.I think he's starting to talk a little bit about policies in which they can be better.And I've heard it both ways.I've heard some people say that Vance's story is dark and sad and others who say it's inspirational because he became a successful lawyer and ran for the U.S.Senate, is now going to be on the vice presidential ticket.So some people see that as like humble beginnings, struggling beginnings to rise to the top, while others seem to resonate more with Walz's version of small-town America—the coach, the Friday night lights, the sort of “Mind your own business, but be kind to one another” view of small-town life.
There seems to be this battle of authenticity.Who's more authentic?
It depends on who's listening to the message, right?I wonder, you know, I've chatted with people about who they think will be the most authentic messenger.Some people have said Walz really stuck around and stayed in Mankato; he was a teacher for 20 years; he still wears the camo hat.And, you know, while he lives in St.Paul now, he travels around the state and goes to farms, and that it's not as hard of a reach for him to go back to those roots because it's still part of his life, and that Vance, when he was at a young age, he also used the GI Bill to go to college, eventually went to Yale and lived in San Francisco and worked for venture capitalists.So some people have said it's harder for him to sort of touch into those roots because his life changed quicker and he left some of that behind.So I think it's who's listening to the message on which one they think is selling it the best.
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