Tim Walz Left His Career as a Teacher Behind to Mount a Run for Congress

Few stories of the 2024 election have been more compelling than that of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has become pretty popular after becoming Kamala Harris's running mate. Before he was the governor of Minnesota, Walz was a Congressman, and before that, he was a teacher.

His life story is, in some ways, remarkably simple, but some people want to know why Walz decided to leave his teaching career behind. Here's what we know about why he took a leave of absence from that job that turned into a permanent resignation.

Tim first started teaching abroad in China for a year before returning to Nebraska, where he was born, to teach locally. He eventually moved with his wife, Gwen, to Mankato, Minn., and got a teaching job there. While he was a teacher, he was also part of a state championship football coaching staff and became the faculty advisor to the gay-straight alliance at a time when that was not an easy job to take on.

Tim left teaching behind to make a run for Congress in 2006, and has explained that his experience taking his students to a George W. Bush rally gave him the push he needed to take that leap. He explained that organizers turned he and his students away because they believed they were Democrats, which led him to jump into the race and defeat a Republican incumbent in a Republican-leaning district.

In one of his first ads for Congress, Tim discussed his own hearing loss from his time in the National Guard and said that the medical services he eventually accessed allowed him to hear his daughter singing in the morning.

“I am running for Congress because I believe we as a country have a moral obligation to ensure that every father can hear his daughter sing – that every citizen receives the best care our medical community has to offer,” he says in the ad.

In his political career, Walz has never lost a race. He decided to run for governor in 2018 after more than a decade in the House, and won the Democratic primary and then the general election. He was reelected in 2022, and came to national prominence after his frequent appearances on TV in which he called Republicans "weird."

Of course, since he was announced as Harris's running mate, Walz has been painted by Republicans as everything from a radical to someone who deserted his National Guard outfit.

In general, though, Walz has been a reliable campaigner for the Harris ticket and would make history as the first male vice president to a female president if he was elected.

His reasons for leaving his teaching career were simply that he was looking to get into politics. And, given the fact that he has yet to lose a race (with the 2024 election still very much up in the air), it seems like he had the right inclination when it came to his own political skills.