Nancy Pelosi Praises Tim Walz as Representing ‘Heartland Values’

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, praised Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate on Tuesday, saying he spoke to “heartland values.”

“I think he brings the heartland values — not that they aren’t values that we all share, but as are perceived by the heartland — to the debate,” Ms. Pelosi said in an interview with NBC News.

“And that’s useful every place in the country,” she said. “What works there works almost everywhere. What works, say, in my district in San Francisco might not work everywhere, but what works in the heartland of America works everywhere.”

Mr. Walz served in the House from 2007 to 2019, a period in which Ms. Pelosi was initially the speaker and then the minority leader after Republicans took control of the chamber.

Ms. Pelosi noted Mr. Walz’s position as the top-ranked Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and his focus on agricultural issues in Congress, saying his priorities had been informed by his background growing up in rural Nebraska.

She also pushed back on descriptions of Mr. Walz as liberal. “I can say this with some authority: He’s not on the left,” she said. “He was right down the middle, right down the middle in his values and leverage in the debate in the Congress.”

Mr. Walz has shifted his position leftward on a number of issues, among them guns and immigration, since his time in the House, where he represented a conservative-leaning district. As governor, he and Minnesota’s Democratic-led legislature have enacted a broad set of liberal policies, including protections for abortion and transgender rights, legal marijuana, free college tuition for low-income students and free meals for schoolchildren.

“He and Kamala know that we have to govern from the center, and that’s where we are,” Ms. Pelosi said. “I’m, again, a San Francisco liberal, and I say with respect where I know they have to govern from the middle for the whole country — to bring people together, to have respect for different points of view and to have decisions that will be sustainable, to support the legacy of Joe Biden.”

At the same time, she said that to win the election, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz would have to articulate “a message that is progressive and bold, but not menacing.”

Ms. Pelosi added that she would have been happy with many of Ms. Harris’s running-mate options.

“It showed the strong bench of the Democratic Party as we go forward,” she said. “She had many good choices to make.”