Minnesota’s first lady Gwen Walz visited Phoenix on Monday morning to rally teachers behind the Democratic presidential ticket, which includes her husband, vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
Gwen Walz joined Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego to speak to representatives from the Arizona Education Association, a statewide teachers union, ahead of planned stops in Flagstaff and Kingman.
Both Walz and her husband are former educators. She said they will bring the lessons they learned in the classroom — including the value of diversity and the need to adequately fund public education — to the White House alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.
“And we want everyone to have a chance to reach [their potential],” Walz said. “Not just some kids, but everyone. … And these are the values that I know Tim and Kamala share, and it is a commitment that they will take with them, that we will take with us to the White House.”
That message resonated with AEA President Marisol Garcia.
“I know we all get a little emotional when we think about the fact that the Vice President and the second lady could actually know what our jargon means, right?” Garcia said. “They would understand what an IEP is. …They would understand any of this, which is very rarely happening.”
Gwen Walz also criticized Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance for comments he made about school shootings during a visit to Phoenix earlier this month following a deadly shooting at high school in Georgia.
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said before calling for more security in schools. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets.”
Walz rejected the premise that those shootings are “a fact of life.”
“I spent decades in schools and classrooms, and I refuse to accept school shootings as a fact of life,” she said.
Walz asked the teachers in the crowd to volunteer for the campaign to register voters ahead of Arizona’s Oct. 7 deadline, saying teachers are an important part of the coalition the Democratic presidential ticket needs to mobilize in order to win Arizona in November.
“You make every minute count, and you do more with a minute than any other group I know, so I am asking you to lesson plan this thing out,” she said.
Walz’s visit is the latest in a series of stops by both campaigns in Arizona. Tim Walz visited Phoenix last week around the same time that former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, and Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, both visited Tucson.
