The all-American working man demeanor of Tim Walz—Kamala Harris’s new running mate—looks like it’s not just an act.
Financial disclosures show Tim Walz barely has any assets to his name. No stocks, bonds, or even property to call his own. Together with his wife, Gwen, his net worth is $330,000, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal citing financial disclosures from 2019, the year after he became Minnesota governor.
With that kind of meager nest egg, he would be more or less in line with the median figure for Americans his age (he’s 60), and even poorer than the average. One in 15 Americans is a millionaire, a recent UBS wealth report discovered.
Meanwhile, the gross annual income of Walz and his wife, Gwen, amounted to $166,719 before tax in 2022, according to their joint return filed that same year. Walz is even entitled to earn more than the $127,629 salary he receives as state governor, but he has elected not to receive the roughly $22,000 difference.
“Walz represents the stable middle class,” tax lawyer Megan Gorman, who authored a book on the personal finances of U.S. presidents, told the paper.
If we’re going that route you may as well take issue with the word “average” instead of using mean, median, or mode. Because the lack of specificity there is even greater than leaving off the age modifier.
But the whole thing is a weird pedantic exercise anyway. They are reporting using the standard models in a way that makes sense to the reader.