Agencies
Chicago
Tim Walz is running for vice-president, but for a while on Wednesday night, it felt like he was campaigning to be the nation’s high school football coach.
Before he spoke, roughly a dozen of the players on the team he helped coach to a Minnesota state championship decades ago ran on stage, some wearing their old high-school jerseys, bouncing to the blasting horns of a marching band.
Once Walz did appear, delegates in the packed arena waved signs that read "Coach Walz” – and the crowd chanted "coach, coach, coach!”
As this was Walz’s first significant opportunity to introduce himself to the nation, his speech was heavy on his personal story – his time as a football coach, of course, but also his upbringing, his enlistment in the Army National Guard, his work as a high-school teacher, and his service as a congressman and governor.
During parts of his speech his daughter Hope, 23, and son Gus, 17, were seen in tears in the front row of the arena. "That’s my dad!” Gus mouthed as the television camera focused on him. In the folksy style that the Democratic campaign believes connects with moderate voters in the crucial states of the Midwest, he told the crowd that he was "ready to turn the page on these guys”, referring to Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance. "So say it with me: ‘We are not going back.’”
He drew from the first speech he gave in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, earlier this month after being chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, repurposing some of the same zingers.
"In Minnesota, we respect our neighbours and the personal choices they make,” he said. "And even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a Golden Rule - mind your own damn business!”
Personal freedom has become a common refrain among Democrats at this convention and in pivoting to it, Walz described "the hell of infertility”.
IVF fertility treatment has become entangled in America’s debate over abortion rights and the Minnesota governor has repeatedly alluded to the process on the campaign trail when talking about his family’s story.
His wife, Gwen, recently clarified that they went through a different procedure, drawing Republican criticism that Walz had been misleading. On the convention stage, he said he wanted to talk about their struggle having children because this election was about "freedom”. "When we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean your freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people you love,” he said.