This week, US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced that her choice to join her on the ballot as running mate is Tim Walz, who's currently governor of Minnesota.

A number of people on Bluesky, in the Fediverse, and elsewhere have been pointing to a recent speech of his. He spoke to a geographic information systems (GIS) conference run by the behemoth Esri on July 16th, discussing his personal story as a high school geography teacher and Esri user, and how maps and geographic data inform his policy work. Video's available on Esri's site and on YouTube, and the Minnesota Reformer has a text summary.

The transcript is available as a plain text file via Esri's conference site,* and the video has good captions. (By the way, he's spoken at Esri's conference(s) several times, in case anyone wants to watch/read those and report back.)

So I watched the speech and found it pretty illuminating, and figured I'd write down some things I learned from it about Walz's approach. I think we can learn some things from it about what kind of Vice President he'd be.

Delivering and storytelling with data

Walz has been using Esri since the early 1990s, and seems as enthusiastic about GIS tools as Franklin Roosevelt was about radio. He shares several examples of how his state has used geographic data to make and implement better policies (such as protecting carbon sink peat bogs via land use permitting) deliver better services to Minnesotans (such as making lead pipe replacement much easier for homeowners), and to inform and persuade Minnesotans (for instance, during the first two years of the COVID pandemic).

As James Fallows writes in discussing this speech, "helping people understand what’s complicated is the key to so many of democracy’s struggles at the moment." And Walz returns over and over to how maps help us do that:

That was my job as teacher. That was my job as a senior enlisted soldier.… As Governor, the ability to use what I knew about mapping and the visual display of data to convey complex issues is really important....

....Look, we have a vision of what we want to see our world to be. And I believe you've got to have the visionaries. You've got to be. It has to be aspirational. And my wife and I talk about this. We named our oldest daughter Hope for a reason. It's the most powerful word in the universe. But my wife often reminds me of this. It's not a damn plan. You can't hope we stop global warming. You can't hope we bring equity into how we're doing power and economic justice and environmental justice. You have to have a plan.

The tools for that plan are GIS. The tools set in front of us, how we can transfer a vision of a fair society into one that actually has results. And this is the interface with the cynicism of elected office. My job is to have to be able to convey that. GIS helps build trust. Conveying data to people in a complex way helps to build trust. If we can start to build the trust, we can start to make the difference.

The talk isn't primarily a slideshow. This isn't Ross Perot's 1992 infomercial with paper charts, or Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It's a talk by someone who can use the visual display of quantitative information (and I bet he at least has a copy of Tufte's book) while communicating to a broad audience, and does so judiciously. And it makes me think about how we are used to the White House communicating, and what might change if someone like a Vice President were at Walz's level of comfort with this tooling.

But: Leaders who want to gather raw data don't always want to share it. Walz at no point in this speech spoke about open data, citizen science, independent civic tech, and similar stuff. He never said anything about the power of interested neighbors outside of government to use GIS for good. And -- in the context of concerns about his administration's transparency -- that makes me a little concerned. I think it's worth noting that Walz is a huge fan of Esri specifically. Esri is a private company and it sells proprietary software and data. Walz wasn't, for instance, speaking at State of the Map US, a conference for OpenStreetMap, where one would find a significant number of open tech nerds.

Paperwork and the power of defaults

In two separate examples, Walz demonstrates that he understands a significant problem with many government-provided benefit programs: if you make people fill out paperwork to get something, way fewer people get it. Tax credits frequently have this problem. So:

...we have made the pledge, we're one of five states with the lowest childhood poverty rates. We are going to become the lowest within the next 12-18 months. And the way we're going to do that is, we have the most aggressive child tax credit in the country. Meaning, and again, this is coupled with the most progressive tax code. (Meaning if you make more, you pay more. If some of you are getting paid a lot here, I'm sorry, we have a lot of services. It's good. Come to Minnesota. You can still get it. But I don't make any apologies about it, because that progressive tax code lets us lower things like childhood poverty, lets us lower things like uninsured rates.)

But here's the kicker in this. Because we have that tax code, many of our citizens don't have to file an income tax. They don't have to file income tax. They don't make enough to be able to get to that. That in itself is not a problem, except for a tax credit, a refundable tax credit, you got to file taxes for that.

So we had this great idea to reduce childhood poverty. We passed a law most aggressive in the country, to give money back to families with children up to age 18, reducing childhood poverty, because it's amazing. You know why people are poor, a lot of times, they don't have any money. A lot of times, if you can get that to them, it makes a difference, and especially with children.

But we had to get out there and find out who's not filing for taxes and break it down to the street level. And what that means is the people who made these maps for us, we then deployed our resources out there, to go to people and went where they were at, whether it was their houses of worship. We set up pop up tax filings outside of grocery store doors. We went almost door to door.

And historically, when we do a tax credit, after that tax credits been in place for five years, we usually have an uptake of about 70-75%. In our first six months of this, we had an 82% uptake, meaning we were hitting the people who needed it, reducing childhood poverty by a third in the state of Minnesota.

And, even better, if you can give out a benefit to everyone -- change the defaults -- you reduce paperwork burden, and get way better uptake and outcomes.

... we did something in Minnesota last year too. We passed universal free meals, breakfast and lunch. Never again -- some of you know -- never again, are we going to give a kid a different-colored lunch ticket to try and shame him. For Christ's sake, we produce more food in Minnesota than any place on the planet. Our kids can eat a damn doughnut or something for breakfast -- or something healthier. Turkey or something for breakfast. That's something we can do. And we implemented this, and what we saw was what you would expect.

Because the critics said, "we already have this free program." It's hell, you go to fill out all this paperwork, you have to do this, and then it separated [children] in that lunch room. But once we did it, we started gathering data about: where was it at? What did we use? And then we conveyed this to the public. And by the way, middle class people saw this as a massive tax cut, and middle class women who know, that if the husband and wife, or the partners are working, the women end up doing most of the domestic work at home, which means fixing the damn breakfast when everybody's going to work. So those women said, I have women say to me, "Thank God, you did this. I've got more time, and my kids are able to eat."

But take, for example, Ely, up in Northwest -- Northeast Minnesota. They went from 217 students being able to eat there to 536, 147% increase. And guess what happened too: Truancy rates went down, and achievement rates went up, and behavioral issues went down. Funny how a kid has food in their stomach. It works.

This makes me think a Harris-Walz administration could advocate for more universal programs, and fewer programs where we spend more money on making and checking paperwork than we supposedly save sifting out the "undeserving".

Genocide intervention

In the early 1990s, as a high school teacher, Walz happened into two opportunities that he identifies as inflection points for his life. He got a free copy of Esri's GIS software, and he did a fellowship in Holocaust education and genocide studies.

And now I had two things. I had what I considered a tool after I learned the GIS, and I said to my colleagues, "this is going to change the way we teach and change the world."... And I said, "I think it could be applied in ways we hadn't been thinking about."

And so I took that GIS, taught it to my students. (They taught me in a lot of cases.) And used the work we had done around Holocaust education. Look, my students could tell you when the Holocaust happened but for them it was a historical anomaly in time, and they could write it off to monstrous people. And that was about where it went. The idea that you were reactive to every situation and that we could not be proactive as a people to address really difficult issues like the killing of thousands or millions of fellow citizens or climate change or anything else.

And so those students got to work, and they started layering GIS. They started looking at food insecurity, potential drought, just like the UN was doing around famine early warning. And then they started laying over colonialism, and they started overlaying all these things.

And the capstone project was, this is 1993, for my seniors, was to come up and publish looking at a global world map with all the layers they'd put in GIS. "Where do you think the next genocide is going to be?" And they came up with Rwanda.

Twelve months later, the world witnessed the horrific genocide in Rwanda.

Very traumatic for those kids. I will say though, many work for NGOs now. Many work globally on trying to make differences. Many joined different organizations that many of you are part of to be part of that. And it was profound, the impact that you could make. Many of them became cynical about the ability. Why didn't anybody listen? How could a bunch of students in Western Nebraska Alliance use a computer program and some past historical knowledge to come up with this? Why was nobody doing anything about that?

I found this a powerful story, and from it I believe you can infer some things about Walz's thoughts on the duty to intervene to prevent genocide, and about his priorities in education. (By the way, speak up if you have a digital copy of his 2001 master's thesis on "Improving human rights and genocide studies in the American high school classroom" -- the library at Minnesota State University at Mankato has two copies -- one is only available to view in person, and the other is only available for paper interlibrary loan, not digital.)

I think this story also implies that, in Walz's view, governments have a moral duty to gather and analyze information proactively to protect against other gathering threats -- and in particular, he mentions climate.

Climate resilience

Over and over, Walz discusses the specifics of climate policy, including clean energy mandates and protecting histosols. He clearly believes we need to mitigate gas emissions, and increase resilience to disasters caused by our changing climate. I'm super on board with that. I do think it's odd how he hesitates (starting 27:10 in the video) and doesn't actually say that climate change was caused by humans:

Our climate portfolio. And again, my God, I still... I'm in a political place. We're still debating, we're still debating the causes of climate change to a certain degree. It's [the debate is] kind of ending. Look, the insurance companies and the actuarials have already made it pretty clear that's happening. So again, I'm, I guess I'm agnostic for you on this. We're going to have to address it. We're going to have to build resiliencies.

So that's an interesting choice, from a communications strategy perspective. I wonder whether that was in any way specific to this audience, or whether he does that a lot.

Bipartisan candor

Walz has some tendencies and capabilities I find thought-provoking. One is that he will reach across the aisle to an ideological opponent to achieve a pragmatic goal while still insulting them.

And what I tell those who politically or ideologically disagree with this, I don't care if you want to do any of this because it's the right thing to do. It is. But all of these things create a healthier economy and make everyone wealthier. And so if you're in this just for the money, it's still a good idea. It means you're a horrible person if that's why you're in it; it still shouldn't prohibit you from doing it.

For all I know, "you're a horrible person" is going to become his "basket of deplorables" moment and he will suffer for saying this now that more national political attention is on him. But maybe not. Maybe he is engaging in a kind of candor that says: You can trust my integrity and authenticity because I'm willing to insult your character -- which means you can trust the other stuff I say, too. And we can trade insults while getting along, and get stuff done together.

Maybe this is all of a piece with sports-style trash talk, which I have historically had trouble getting comfortable with. Maybe it's like how Ben Rosenbaum talks about the joy of playing basketball with his friends: "the easy way they can hold competitiveness and good humor tied inextricably together."

In any case, it's mediagenic. I'm now motivated to learn more about Walz -- and it looks like I'll probably get to do that a lot over the next few months.

* To get the plain text transcript:

1. Go to the conference webpage.
2. There are 3 tabs: Details, Attachments, and Share. Go to Attachments.
3. Download 446569972 - 1_d2sqkrju - PID 3057483.txt (38.78 KB).
   
   [Edited 8 August 2024 to add these instructions because my previous hyperlink did not work.]