What polling shows about Tim Walz approval from voters compared to JD Vance

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been chosen to run alongside Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and while current polling shows that most Americans aren’t familiar with him past polling shows he is popular with voters.

Unlike Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, Walz has decades of political experience, having first been elected to represent Minnesota’s 1st district in the House of Representatives in 2006 with 52 percent of the vote.

Despite his experience, an ABC News and Ipsos survey from July found that out of 1,200 Americans, most did not know who Walz was.

Tracking 18 years of Walz’s re-election and approval rating, can lend some early insight into what he brings to the Democratic ticket and how he compares to his counterpart on the Republican side.

From 2006 until 2016, Walz’s constituents in Minnesota’s first district re-elected him, often by a considerable majority every two years.

When he ran for governor in 2018, he came away with 53.9 percent of Minnesota’s vote – the largest margin a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate won by in more than 30 years. In 2022, he was re-elected with 52 percent of the vote.

His re-elections are often tied to a respectable approval rating. A January 2024 approval rating poll, conducted by local Minnesota news outlet KAAL-TV, found that 55 percent of respondents thought Walz was doing a good job.

When another local outlet asked people who Harris should pick as her running mate, 22 percent indicated their governor would be a good choice.

Those numbers are slightly higher than the ones Vance has seen from his state of Ohio – though as a freshman senator, he does not have the same amount of polling information.

Vance, a businessman and