All eyes are on Tim Walz and his family after Vice President Kamala Harris announced the Minnesota governor as her running mate Aug. 6.
The dark-horse candidate and married dad of two, 60, will likely be joined on the campaign trail by his wife of three decades, Gwen Walz, a veteran educator and prison-reform advocate.
The would-be Second Lady, 58, was born in Glencoe, Minn., and grew up in the western part of the state with her three sisters, Gwen Walz’s official biography states.
Her parents, Val and Linn, were educators and small-business owners.
Gwen stayed in Minnesota for her education, attending Gustavus Adolphus College before going to Minnesota State University in Mankato, her bio says.
The First Lady of Minnesota met her future husband while she was teaching English in western Nebraska.
Tim and Gwen Walz married in 1994 and moved to Mankato in southern Minnesota, where they both worked at Mankato West High School.
They also opened Educational Travel Adventures, Inc., which organized yearly trips for students to China.
The couple accompanied the travel groups every summer until 2003, according to Gwen’s bio.
Gwen has spent most of her career in public education, including in stints in migrant and alternative schools.
She was also a coordinator and administrator for Mankato Area Public Schools, which is the same congressional district once represented by her husband from 2007 through 2019.
Gwen has rallied for education reform within the correctional system and worked for the Bard Prison Initiative in upstate New York.
She has called for the Bard model to be used in Minnesota, and she was involved with efforts to implement a new college curriculum in the state’s prisons.
In the midst of the couple’s professional achievements, Tim Walz has also opened up about his and Gwen’s seven-year struggle with fertility treatments including in-vitro fertilization.
“I said, ‘Not again,’ ” the governor once told the Star Tribune of the moment he anticpated another failed in-vitro attempt for the pair.
“She said, ‘No, I’m pregnant,’ ” Walz recalled — and Gwen ended up giving birth to their first child, Hope, in 2001.
“It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope,” he said of the now-23-year-old.
In June, Walz directly called out Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, JD Vance, for voting against the Right to IVF Act by resharing Harris’ post celebrating World IVF Day.
“Even if you’ve never gone through the hell of infertility, someone you know has,” Walz wrote. “When Gwen and I were having trouble getting pregnant, the anxiety and frustration blotted out the sun.
“JD Vance opposing the miracle of IVF is a direct attack on my family and so many others.”
Tim and Gwen Walz welcomed a son, Gus, in 2006. He is now in his later teens.
They raised their family in Mankato before moving to the governor’s residence in St. Paul when Tim assumed office in 2019.
Gwen was frequently spotted alongside her husband during both his gubernatorial bids and will no doubt also play a key supporting role on the campaign trail – though she has also insisted that the governor calls his own shots.
“I make no mistake about it, Tim is going to make the decisions,” Gwen told PBS Twin Cities in 2019, shortly after her husband took the governor’s office.
“And he did when he was in Congress. And I think we worked toward usually the same end, but we really trust one another.”