Before Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was tapped to be Vice President Harris’s running mate, the 60-year-old Midwestern Democrat was a high school teacher and football coach. Walz’s time as an educator was formative not just to his political career but also his personal life: While teaching in rural Nebraska, Walz met his wife, Gwen.
Praising his wife of 30 years, Walz has said of Gwen: “My wife can plan and get anything done.”
Here’s what to know about Gwen Walz:
She shared a classroom with her future husband
Tim Walz came to Minnesota thanks to his wife, who is a native of the North Star State.
The pair met in Tim’s home state of Nebraska when they were fellow teachers at Alliance High School — Gwen taught English, while Tim taught social studies.
“Tim and I even shared a classroom, with a divider right down the middle,” Gwen told Minnesota Public Radio in 2019. “In Minnesota, we taught at the same school.”
A 2019 article by the Minneapolis Star Tribune described Gwen overhearing how engaged her future husband’s students sounded with his lessons. The couple’s first date was to see the 1993 Michael Douglas dark dramedy “Falling Down,” followed by a meal at Hardee’s, according to the Star-Tribune.
The couple married in June 1994 and spent their honeymoon in China — on an educational trip they had arranged for students.
Gwen, a graduate of the Lutheran-affiliated Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., and Minnesota State University at Mankato, persuaded her husband to move to her home state two years after they married. The couple both taught at Mankato West High School, where Tim also coached football. Gwen later became an administrator with Mankato Area Public Schools until 2019, when Tim became governor.
She is an advocate for education and prison reform
As a teacher, Gwen has worked in public, alternative and migrant schools, according to her biography from the Minnesota Governor’s Office. Her education advocacy has often dovetailed with her work on prison reform.
As first lady of Minnesota, Gwen supported restoring the voting rights of convicted felons who have completed their prison terms and expanding educational opportunities for people who are incarcerated. Among the prison education groups Gwen backed as first lady is the Bard Prison Initiative, which provides a college education to prisoners in New York’s penitentiary system.
Gwen has said her interest in prison reform comes from her belief in education as a “transformational piece” for individuals, according to Minnesota Public Radio.
“She has worked across the country to bring educational opportunities to incarcerated women and men, or as Gwen notes: students,” her Minnesota Governor’s Office bio reads. “Gwen understands that corrections must be an inclusive component of our education system, and by expanding opportunity, our state can dramatically reduce recidivism rates and most importantly, transform lives.”
She has been influential in her husband’s policymaking
When Tim Walz came to the governor’s office in 2019, the unofficial role of Minnesota’s first lady had been unfilled for eight years, as Walz’s predecessor Mark Dayton was not married. When Gwen stepped into the role, she also remade it, becoming the first Minnesota first lady to keep an office in the Capitol.
“We’ve always worked really closely together,” Gwen told Minnesota Public Radio in 2019. “Tim said, ‘Maybe you want to have a desk here, and come and go out of my office.’”
Gwen said her husband “talks too much,” and she opted to set up her office down the hall from his.
The Star-Tribune reported that Gwen sat in on the hiring interview for the new commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Corrections. She has also been outspoken on gun-control measures pushed by her husband’s administration.
In 2019, Gwen was among those who rallied at Minnesota’s Capitol to pressure the Republican-controlled state Senate to pass measures to expand background checks and adopt a red-flag law, according to the Star-Tribune.
Gwen threatened that holdouts would face consequences at the ballot box.
“If they do not put it up for a vote, there are seven senators sitting in seats where Tim Walz won — and we are coming,” Gwen Walz said.
She has two kids, a dog and cat with Walz
The Walzes are parents to Hope, 23, and Gus, 17.
Earlier this year, Tim Walz revealed that the couple went through IVF treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., showing his support for the procedure after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling threatened to limit access to IVF in a decision that pushed fertility treatment more broadly into the national debate.
In September 2019, the family held a news conference to introduce its newest member: Scout, a then 3-month-old black Lab mix who was a rescue dog. The governor’s office released the news with the playful announcement that “after a months-long search, Governor Walz delivers campaign promise to his son.”
Like other politicians vying for office, Tim Walz pledged to Gus that if Walz won the governorship, the family would adopt a puppy.
On election night in 2018, then-12-year-old Gus reacted to the news of his father’s victory by exclaiming, “I get a dog!”
At Christmastime last year, the family added Honey, an orange and white rescue cat, after their previous cat, Afton, wandered away from home.
