Gwen Walz and Tim Walz are known as a team. But Minnesota’s first lady has been a powerful force in her own right

Chicago (CNN) — “I’ll make it happen.”

It’s an expression Gwen Walz is known to use no matter what role she’s playing – a mom protecting her kids, an educator trying to increase graduation rates, or a colleague delivering food to a friend whose spouse has cancer.

“That’s what she will say all the time, is, ‘I’ll make it happen,’” said Paula O’Loughlin, a provost at Augsburg University, where the first lady of Minnesota has been actively involved since her husband was elected, even teaching a master’s course this spring.

Gwen Walz’s biggest test on the national stage will begin Wednesday night, when she is introduced to America at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago – just two weeks after Kamala Harris selected her husband, Gov. Tim Walz, to be her running mate.

Since the Walzs made their national political debut in Philadelphia earlier this month, their background as former high school teachers who met in the classroom has become a key narrative about the Midwestern sensibility Democrats think they bring to the ticket.

But in conversations with former students, colleagues and friends of Gwen Walz, what’s emerged is not just a portrait of a cardigan-wearing American literature teacher; she’s a political spouse who’s also been a political partner, driven by her own passions and ability to connect with people and think strategically in ways that complement her husband.

“The country is sort of getting a twofer,” said John Klaber, who first met the couple in 1996 as new teachers at Mankato West High School, where he was serving as a school psychologist.

“They’re both passionate, skilled, you know, bright people. And neither one is a shrinking violet.”

A political partner

Tim and Gwen Walz are often described as a team.

But from the time they were teachers together, first in Nebraska and then in Minnesota, they’ve brought different skills to that partnership.

“Gwen’s a talker,” said Paul Pribbenow, the president of Augsburg University, who described her as an extrovert who often introduces her husband.

And sometimes she’s spoken when her husband cannot. Klaber recalled seeing Gwen Walz step up to deliver a speech for a laryngitis-stricken Tim Walz at a local Democratic-Farmer-Labor fundraiser.

“I don’t think I was the only person who looked around the room wondering, geez, maybe that’s the Walz that should be running,” he said.

Tim Walz is known as more “goofy,” their former colleagues said, but Gwen Walz’s storytelling and humor is very familiar to those who know her.

On Wednesday morning, Gwen Walz was greeting Mankato West football players and alumni who arrived in Chicago for the convention, said Principal Sherri Blasing. “She’s got them in a huddle and then they break, and she starts singing the school song. She knows how to bring people together,” said Blasing, also a friend and former neighbor who recalled the Walzs tearing down the obstructive hedge between their two yards so that they could garden together.

When Tania Lyon first met Gwen Walz in 1996, at new teacher orientation in Mankato, they initially connected over a game of “two truths and a lie.” Over years as a colleague, friend and neighbor, she observed a keen ability to develop people, as they traded feedback on their own work, especially each other’s writing.

“In some ways, she’s still a teacher. … She’s listening to what’s going on in the room and helping people … reach their conclusions,” added O’Loughlin, who’s worked closely with Walz on various initiatives at Augsburg, including those for underserved communities in Minnesota.

“She’s very cognizant of how things affect other people all the time,” O’Loughlin added – showing a level of attention to detail and to those around her that she said may stem from not being as much in the limelight as her husband.

“She is somebody who really is out there and building relationships, more personal relationships, I think, in a lot of ways,” Pribbenow said.

That comes through in her work, which has championed criminal justice reform and, of course, education. “She thinks about a lot of ways in which things can connect to each other,” O’Loughlin said.

“She is maybe a little bit more of a strategic thinker than Tim is,” added Klaber, recalling their work together in the Mankato school district.

“Sometimes we do things in public education because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” he said. “She was willing to say, ‘OK, so exactly, why are we doing this? And what are we hoping to gain from this?’”

Roots in the classroom

Megan Holleran, Klaber’s daughter, said she was not an obvious choice to be editor of the Mankato West High School newspaper in the early 2000s.

“I was a dyslexic kid,” she explained, and “someone you could look over.”

But Gwen Walz, the newspaper adviser, saw something else. “She knew that I had fire in my belly; she knew that I really wanted to be there, and she knew it would mean a lot to me and knew what it could give me.”

Walz made sure Holleran had a strong copy editor to help her.

“She knew how to take me from where I was, with my doubts and with my concerns, and show me that there was a way forward,” she said.

Walz, who also coached cheerleading for a while, never betrayed her own political opinions at the time, Holleran said, letting students write their own columns for the newspaper and reach their own conclusions.

But she wasn’t an easy teacher.

“She had a prescribed method where we had to organize our American lit binders,” Holleran said. “That was wild and crazy, like no teacher did that. And I remember some students pushing back, and then those same students, myself included, were so thankful when we got to college.”

Lyon recalled the two of them, just starting out as English teachers, meeting in the hallway to discuss their observations about curriculum: “That it was, you know, very much made up of dead White men.”

Walz pushed to diversify those voices, Lyon said, recalling that she had a particular fondness for women authors and transcendentalist writers, and later new Minnesota writers she was exposed to as first lady.

Stepping onto an even bigger public stage

Second spouses – or those hoping to become them — are usually the least well-known of the four principals who typically make up a ticket.

It’s been a “largely invisible role” for most Americans, said Katherine Jellison, a professor at Ohio University who has studied first ladies and women in history.

But Walz is getting a crash course in how the most intimate details of one’s life can be picked apart in the national spotlight.

This week, for example, she issued a statement clarifying that she did not use in vitro fertilization to conceive – which her husband had suggested on the campaign trail by generally referring to IVF – but a different fertility treatment, intrauterine insemination.

“Like so many who have experienced these challenges, we kept it largely to ourselves at the time – not even sharing the details with our wonderful and close family,” Gwen Walz said in her statement. “The only person who knew in detail what we were going through was our next door neighbor. She was a nurse and helped me with the shots I needed as part of the IUI process. I’d rush home from school and she would give me the shots to ensure we stayed on track.”

Walz said they had decided to share their story about fertility struggles “after seeing the extreme attacks on reproductive health care across the country.”

But Sen. JD Vance, who’s had his own stumbles in his rollout as Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, seized on the revelation to accuse Tim Walz of dishonesty – to which the Harris campaign sought to put the GOP back on the defensive.

“The Trump campaign’s attacks on Mrs. Walz are just another example of how cruel and out of touch Donald Trump and JD Vance are when it comes to women’s health care,” spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said in a statement to CNN.

Those rooting for the Walzs have cited Gwen Walz’s strong opinions and leadership as a testament to her husband’s willingness to surround himself with powerful women – including Peggy Flanagan as lieutenant governor.

But would Gwen Walz ever decide to take a step further and run herself someday?

“I think she’s figured out the ways she likes to make a difference in the world. And I don’t think running for office is one that she wants to do,” O’Loughlin said.

“I’d love it if it’s something she wants,” said Klaber, who was impressed when she stepped in to deliver that speech for her husband. But he stressed that she knows what her role as spouse is in this moment.

“She will not in any way overshadow Tim.”

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