Tim Walz: The Rahm Emanuel Democrat who became a Nancy Pelosi Democrat

With a few weeks left in his bid for a third House term, Tim Walz (D-Minn.) received a critical boost: an enthusiastic endorsement from the National Rifle Association.

Then-Rep. Walz had provided support on key issues for the pro-gun lobby: for legislation allowing guns in national parks; signing onto a legal brief helping the Supreme Court gut the District of Columbia’s gun laws; and co-sponsoring legislation to slash the powers of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

“I’m proud to stand with the NRA to protect our Second Amendment rights, and I’m truly grateful for their endorsement,” Walz said in a statement the group issued on his behalf, a development that helped him narrowly win in the otherwise disastrous 2010 election season for Democrats.

For those who knew Walz during his 12 years in Congress, the NRA embrace is no surprise. But for progressives cheering on the selection of Gov. Walz’s as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate — as well as Republicans trying to paint him as a socialist — Rep. Walz’s House track record doesn’t square with his current image. That image includes championing background checks on gun purchases, expanding abortion access and signing other liberal agenda items into law.

Walz’s split political personality has given everyone across the Democratic ideological spectrum something to applaud, for now anyway.

Over six House terms Walz cut an image of a centrist Democrat focused on local issues related to farming and the military, serving on the Agriculture and Veterans Affairs committees.

He so assiduously courted GOP support for his legislation that even in his final term — while running in a contested Democratic primary for governor — one independent analysis found Walz to be the 12th most conservative Democrat. Only 12 other lawmakers, out of 435, signed on to more bipartisan legislation during that term.

The cheering of his pick as Harris’s running mate has come from all corners of the Democratic spectrum.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (I-W.Va.), who left the party earlier this year and has not endorsed Harris out of fear she’s too liberal, said Walz would “bring balance back” to Democrats, while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) joked about being “on the same side of an issue” with Manchin.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who first claimed the speaker’s gavel almost 18 years ago on the backs of Walz and other rural Democrats, mocked both Republicans and far-left liberals for trying to paint him as anything other than a traditional Democrat.

“He is, again, a voice for rural America,” Pelosi told reporters Wednesday. She paused. “I mean, I know lefty, I’m from San Francisco.”

In many ways, Walz’s drift from gun-loving, socially conservative Democrat into a more mainstream liberal represents the party’s ideological and regional shift over the past 20 years.

In sum, Tim Walz was a Rahm Emanuel Democrat. Now, he’s a Nancy Pelosi Democrat.

Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff now serving as U.S. ambassador to Japan, helped recruit Walz to run in the 2006 midterm elections for the rural southern Minnesota congressional district.

Then-Rep. Emanuel chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He wanted candidates who tapped into the anti-Iraq War movement for liberal bona fides but used their culturally conservative positions on guns and backgrounds in the military, law enforcement or sports to appeal to moderate, even conservative voters.

A 24-year veteran of the National Guard who served as an assistant coach when Mankato West High School won its first state football championship, Walz fit the bill and won a longtime Republican seat.

Following that, Democrats went on a run over several years of political wins, claiming rural seats across the Midwest and into the Deep South. They built a House majority close to 260 seats that allowed them, during Barack Obama’s first two years as president, to pass sweeping economic recovery legislation, the Affordable Care Act and an overhaul of financial services regulation.

But those major Democratic achievements in economic policy did not come with commensurate victories on social policy — in large part because rural Democrats thwarted those ambitions.

Walz did vote to repeal the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy toward gay military service members, which became law in December 2010, and supported the Dream Act to allow children brought to the United States without legal documentation to have a path to U.S. citizenship, which fell short of clearing a Senate filibuster because of conservative Democratic opposition.

They also showcased Walz’s early views on immigration, which were at odds with those of future Gov. Walz, who signed legislation allowing undocumented immigrants to get Minnesota driver’s licenses.

His initial 2006 campaign included tough language suggesting that undocumented immigrants need to return home before any citizenship possibilities were considered. And in June 2012, when Republicans turned a botched federal crime program called “Fast and Furious” into the early battle cry of Democrats being soft on the border, Walz joined just 16 other House Democrats in holding then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for blocking document requests from the GOP majority.

And on gun rights, during the era of near-super-majority status for Democrats, Congress actually became more aligned with the NRA, thanks to “Emanuel Democrats” like Walz.

With Democrats politically cowed from the belief that the 1994 crime bill, including the assault weapons ban, led to their massive loss in that midterm election, Republicans exploited those fears. Walz was one of 105 House Democrats to vote to allow guns in parks and national refuges. The Senate voted to allow guns on Amtrak trains.

“The NRA is basically taking over the House and Senate,” Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), whose husband was killed and son gravely wounded in a 1993 mass shooting, told the Associated Press in 2009.

Walz was one of 67 House Democrats who signed a legal brief in the District of Columbia v. Heller case that led to a 2008 Supreme Court ruling overturning the capital city’s ban on firearms in homes — and also led to five justices declaring that the Second Amendment provided a constitutional right to bear arms.

It was a devastating blow to the anti-gun-violence lobby, and that little extra pro-gun effort got Walz the NRA endorsement in late September 2010.

“On November 2nd, I urge all Minnesota NRA Members and gun owners in the 1st District to vote Tim Walz for Congress,” Chris W. Cox, chairman of the NRA’s political arm, wrote.

Walz got just 49 percent of the vote to win House reelection that year, the lowest total he has received in the eight general elections he has stood for in Congress or as governor. Many of his 2006 Democratic classmates had their careers ended that night.

By 2012, when President Obama won his district by just 2 percentage points, Walz triumphed by a double-digit margin again, clearing 57 percent. Two years later Walz received 54 percent, while the incumbent Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, lost in the 1st District.

In 2016, Donald Trump stomped to victory there, winning by 15 percentage points, and Walz won by less than 1 point in a rematch against Republican Jim Hagedorn.

In Minnesota, where the name is still officially the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the farmers were abandoning Walz. Labor union workers at 3M plants across the state began to embrace Trumpism.

By then Walz rose to become ranking minority member on the veterans committee, a prime spot for one of the highest ranking enlisted soldiers ever to serve in Congress. Rather than continue this climb, which risked another close House race in 2018, he announced in March 2017 that he would run for governor.

That’s when Walz became a Pelosi Democrat, embracing the types of policies that sold well with suburban professionals who drifted away from Trump and the GOP.

Finally, in late February 2018, after the Valentine’s Day mass killing at a high school in Parkland, Fla., Walz announced his support for an assault weapons ban.

In a pretty frank admission, he told local media that he changed because he was running for statewide office and had to represent a different electorate.

“I’m not just asking to be the congressman from the First Congressional District,” Walz said. “I’m looking at a broader state with broader issues, broader population densities, and I think as a legislator I’ve been proud to say if the facts dispute our ideology, change the ideology.”

His leading opponent found the election-year conversion both deeply aggravating and refreshingly honest. “That the congressman is finding his voice in this is a good thing, but it’s taken him too damned long,” Erin Murphy, the progressive favorite, told The Star Tribune in 2018.

Walz won the gubernatorial nomination with just 41 percent of the vote, backed by trade unions, as Murphy split the more liberal vote with several other candidates.

In the general election, buoyed by Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s 24-point victory at the top of the ticket, Walz clinched the governor’s race by a comfortable 11-point edge.

DFL Party nominees won four other statewide races and flipped two GOP-held House seats in the suburbs — yet, in a sign of today’s politics, Republicans flipped two Democratic seats in rural areas.

Hagedorn won Walz’s seat in southern Minnesota, a district that has remained Republican ever since.

In his own 2022 gubernatorial reelection bid, Walz lost in his former congressional district by 7 percentage points. Yet the margins in the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs propelled Walz to a victory of nearly 10 points and swept Democrats into power in both legislative chambers.

Unleashed from any Republican restraint, those Democratic legislators sent a raft of liberal wish list items to Walz’s desk — on abortion, gun control, cannabis legalization — that prompted the headlines about St. Paul turning into a “laboratory in pushing progressive policy.”

But people like Pelosi just laugh at the suggestion that Walz is any different from other Democratic governors.

“It’s not this guy. It’s not this guy. He has values,” Pelosi said, explaining his policy accomplishments. “He’s done great things as governor. But those are our standard Democratic fare.”