When Tim Walz launched his 2006 campaign for Congress in rural Minnesota, he boasted in his public biography that in 1993, he "was named the Outstanding Young Nebraskan by the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce for his service in the education, military, and small business communities." That was not true.
It was a small lie about a minor honor, but for Walz it was part of a pattern of deceit and embellishment that helped pave the way from high school teacher to Congress to the Minnesota governor's mansion and now, should the Democrats win in November, to the vice presidency.
Walz’s 2006 boast about being named "Outstanding Young Nebraskan" can still be found in an archived version of his campaign website. That November, the president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, Barry Kennedy, wrote Walz to object. "It has come to my attention that as part of your campaign for U.S. Congress, you have posted your biography on your website that claims you received an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce for your service to the business community," he stated plainly. "We researched this matter and can confirm that you have not been the recipient of any award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce."
Kennedy asked that Walz remove the reference from his website and noted that the Chamber had endorsed his opponent, Gil Gutknecht, the Republican incumbent who’d held the seat since 1995. Kennedy could not be reached for comment and the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce did not respond to calls or emails seeking comment.
Walz's campaign manager at the time said he'd in fact won an award from the Junior Chamber of Commerce, according to a report in Minnesota's Alpha News, and attributed the mistake to a "typographical error." The Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
But Gutknecht, who lost to Walz that year, did speak to the Washington Free Beacon. "It fits a pattern of misleading and fabricated statements he has made throughout his political and personal life," he recalled. "All political figures are guilty of a bit of puffery. He frequently went well beyond that into prevarication."
That pattern of prevarication is now dogging Walz on the campaign trail.
In early August, the Harris-Walz presidential campaign changed the biography of Walz it had originally posted to its website. Gone was the reference to the Minnesota governor as a "retired command sergeant major," echoing a claim Walz himself has made repeatedly. Now, the campaign states that Walz ended up "rising to the rank of" command sergeant major, a rank he wouldn’t keep because he retired without completing the requirements.
Then, in the midst of the Democratic convention, it emerged that Walz had lied about his own children. The governor has made his family’s fertility struggles a central part of the narrative as he introduces himself to the country—"Thank God for IVF, my wife and I have two beautiful children," he told MSNBC in July. But his kids were not, actually, conceived via in vitro fertilization. Rather, they were conceived through a far less costly, less invasive, and non-controversial procedure known as intrauterine insemination, which does not involve the cultivation and potential destruction of embryos.
"Governor Walz talks how normal people talk," a spokeswoman for the campaign told reporters. "He was using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments."
Many couples who've undergone the ordeal of IVF—with its weeks of injections and enormously expensive, and invasive, surgical withdrawal procedure—would beg to differ.
Walz’s IVF lie is part and parcel of the frequent "prevarication" that Gutknecht described. It belongs to a pattern that ranges from outright lies to minor misrepresentations. All of them, however, accrue to Walz’s benefit, beefing up his résumé, enhancing his character, or connecting him to a political issue in personal terms. And they stretch back long before Harris introduced Walz as her vice presidential nominee in Philadelphia, all the way back to that first congressional campaign in Winona, Minnesota.
In the same 2006 campaign biography he used to launch his congressional campaign, Walz cites a yearlong stint teaching in China. It’s another credential he has inflated over the years, telling voters that Harvard hand picked him to travel to Asia.
"Harvard University offered Walz an opportunity to gain a new perspective on global education by teaching in the People's Republic of China," the biography claims. His congressional biography, published after Walz had won his seat, said the same thing. Indeed, a 2018 version indicated that Walz taught in China "through a program at Harvard University."
The program in question is the WorldTeach program, a nonprofit founded by Harvard undergraduates, including the Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer, in 1986. For a time, the program was funded by Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House Association, which the Harvard Crimson has characterized as "a student-run community service group" that disburses resources to an array of nonprofit organizations and facilitates volunteerism for Harvard students. WorldTeach, which is currently dormant, does not appear to have ever been an official program of Harvard.
Walz, who is casting himself as a homespun midwesterner and mocks Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance for attending Yale Law School, now omits any mention of Harvard from his biography.
Reached for comment, a spokesman for Harvard could not say whether WorldTeach ever had a formal affiliation with the school. Kremer, the WorldTeach founder, and representatives for WorldTeach did not respond to a request for comment.
Also gone from Walz’s biography is a reference to another award he touted when he launched his congressional bid. In 1989, he said, the year he graduated from college, he "earned the title of Nebraska Citizen-Soldier of the Year."
That is a significant exaggeration that makes it sound like Walz was the sole recipient of an award. In reality, Walz was one of 52 reservists in 1989 who were invited to a brunch in Omaha for the "31st Annual Citizen Soldiers Awards," put on by the Aksarben Foundation, a local non-profit that, at the time, owned a race track and funded community events through horse betting.
A newspaper article on the event said the 52 reservists at the brunch were honored "for military reserve service." The newspaper announcement was followed by an item that said Barnie Calef, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was the sole winner of a duck calling contest.
A spokeswoman for the Aksarben Foundation, a philanthropic group whose name is Nebraska spelled backwards, said it no longer holds its Citizen Soldiers Awards event.
EDITOR's NOTE: This piece has been updated to note a 2006 response from Walz's congressional campaign manager, who said Walz won an award from Nebraska's Junior Chamber of Commerce rather than the Chamber of Commerce.