But the issue was not resolved in the court of public opinion, where it has resurfaced periodically throughout the Minnesota governor’s career and, now that he’s been selected by Vice President Kamala Harris as her running mate, is bubbling up once again.
At the time, Walz was living in Alliance, Nebraska, coaching football, teaching at Alliance High School and serving in the Nebraska Army National Guard. His political career would not begin for more than a decade. He ultimately agreed to resolve the issue in court by pleading to a reduced charge of reckless driving, a misdemeanor, and paying a $200 fine.
On the night of Sept. 23, 1995, a 31-year-old Tim Walz was pulled over by a Nebraska state trooper for driving a silver Mazda at 96 mph in a 55 mph zone. The officer smelled alcohol, and after Walz failed a field sobriety test and a preliminary breath test, he was arrested and initially charged with speeding and driving while intoxicated.
Advertisement
In the past few days, critics of Walz have peppered social media with posts about the arrest, along with his mug shot and grainy scans of the arresting officer’s affidavit, labeling the politician a criminal who is unfit to serve.
Defenders of the governor have dismissed the offense as not only minor, but very old — something from nearly three decades ago now. They have also pointed out that George W. Bush had a quarter-century-old drunken-driving arrest on his record when he ran successfully for president in 2000, and that Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., who serves as the majority whip, was twice arrested on suspicions of driving drunk as a young man.
Still, part of the anecdote’s staying power might rest in the way Walz’s story has changed over time.
The arrest first came up in 2006, during his initial run for Congress, when a Republican political researcher noted it on his blog, Minnesota Democrats Exposed.
At the time, Walz’s campaign blamed the hearing loss that Walz had from serving in a field artillery unit in the National Guard, saying that his partial deafness led to a miscommunication with the state trooper who pulled him over. (In 2005, he had surgery to mitigate the hearing issue.)
Advertisement
“He couldn’t understand what the officer was saying to him,” Walz’s campaign manager at the time, Kerry Greeley, told a reporter for The Rochester Post Bulletin, noting that deaf people can have balance issues and claiming that Walz was not drunk at the time.
But during his first run for governor in 2018, he told The Minneapolis Star Tribune a different story, acknowledging the sobriety issue and explaining he’d been watching college football on that 1995 evening (for the record, in Big 8 football action that day, No. 2 Nebraska beat Pacific 49-7, while No. 3 Texas A&M was upset by No. 7 Colorado).
“You have obligations,” his wife, Gwen Walz, recounted telling him at the time. “You can’t make dumb choices.”
Tim Walz has said he no longer drinks alcohol, and instead prefers Diet Mountain Dew — the same drink that, curiously enough, is favored by the Republican candidate for vice president, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
The arrest made headlines again in 2022, late in Walz’s bid for a second term as governor, when a digital news outlet in Minnesota procured a transcript of his plea hearing from March 1996. The court record revealed that the governor had a blood alcohol level of 0.128, well over Nebraska’s legal limit of 0.1 at the time (it’s since been reduced to 0.08).
The latest round of stories about Walz’s offense, which began appearing in volume once his name started circulating as a potential vice-presidential nominee, have — at least so far — failed to pry up any more revealing details about that long-ago Saturday night on Route 385 outside Alliance.
A copy of the hearing transcript reviewed by The New York Times does provide a bit more color about the event and its aftermath, however. In court, defense lawyer Russell Harford stated that Walz said that when the state trooper began to follow him, he “thought somebody was chasing him” and accelerated, “fearing that somebody was after him.”
Advertisement
“The faster he went, the faster the state patrol officer went,” Harford said.
“He felt terrible about this,” Harford added, noting that Walz immediately reported the incident to the Alliance High School principal, ceasing all of his extracurricular activities including coaching, and offering to resign from his teaching job — an offer his boss talked him out of.
“He, I think, takes the position that he’s a role model for the students there,” Harford said. “He let them down. He let himself down.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Walz’s decades-old drunken driving arrest draws new attention
