A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Last night at a rally in Philadelphia, Vice President Harris introduced the nation to her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Part of the resume - he's a former high school football coach.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: And in 91 days, the nation will know Coach Walz by another name - vice president of the United States.
MARTIN: It was the first time the new Democratic ticket appeared together in person.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid was there in the arena. So what was the new ticket like, Asma?
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Well, Harris and Walz walked out into this massive arena together. The campaign says that there were over 12,000 people there. It's the largest rally that they've had to date. A lot of people in the crowd were wearing red, white and blue light-up wristbands, so a lot of energy. Harris spoke first, and the governor of Minnesota, as you know, is not necessarily a household name to many, so she spent a lot of time just running through his resume and explaining why she chose him. She talked about his strong record on policies like paid family leave, gun safety and reproductive rights.
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HARRIS: After Roe was overturned, he was the first governor in the country to sign a new law that enshrined reproductive freedom as a fundamental right.
KHALID: Harris also laid out his personal story, describing him as this kind of folksy dad from the Midwest, a former member of the National Guard and a former high school teacher who became the faculty adviser for a gay-straight alliance, someone, she said, who comes from a different corner of the country than her but ultimately shares her same values.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. That was Harris on Walz. What about Walz? What did he have to say?
KHALID: So when he took the mic, he praised Harris for bringing joy back into this campaign and whatnot, and he also spoke a bit about his own background. But where he was most effective was in energizing the crowd when he went on the attack.
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TIM WALZ: And make no mistake - violent crime was up under Donald Trump.
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WALZ: That's not even counting the crimes he committed.
KHALID: He threw some verbal punches at both Trump and his running mate, JD Vance. And, you know, frankly, this is part of why Harris chose him, this belief that Walz could be an effective messenger to go on the attack against Trump and Vance. You know, a few weeks ago, Walz was making the rounds on cable news, and he started describing them as weird. And that is a label that stuck. It gained a lot of traction from other Democrats.
MARTÍNEZ: All right, so here we are. The Republican and Democratic ticket are set. Asma, what's the state of the race?
KHALID: Well, the race is extremely close. Harris keeps referring to herself as the underdog. Today, she and Walz are headed to two other critical states, Wisconsin and Michigan. Then they'll be in Arizona and Nevada later this week. Meanwhile, Trump is not campaigning in any of the presidential battleground states this week, though his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, is attempting to counterprogram, holding events in some of the states where the Democratic ticket is campaigning this week. You know, Republicans have been testing out a bunch of ways to respond. They don't seem to have found a definitive answer to Harris. They're trying to define her, and now they're also trying to define Walz, as being liberal extremists. At the same time, the Harris campaign is working to define itself. And, you know, at the moment, Harris seems to have momentum in her favor, but a lot can change during this brief period still we have of campaigning.
MARTÍNEZ: A lot can change. That is an understatement, Asma.
KHALID: Yeah.
MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid. Thanks a lot.
KHALID: Good to talk to you.
MARTIN: As Asma said, for many Americans, last night was their first introduction to Governor Tim Walz.
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WALZ: Over those next 91 days and every day in the White House, I'll have Vice President Harris' back.
MARTÍNEZ: So how does the country's first impression of Tim Walz, a centrist Midwestern dad, compare with the image he cuts in Minnesota?
MARTIN: For more on that, we're joined now by Dana Ferguson of Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. Dana, good morning.
DANA FERGUSON, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So could you just start off by giving us a bit more background on Tim Walz?
FERGUSON: Sure. So Walz is obviously well known here in Minnesota, but he actually grew up in rural Nebraska. He enlisted in the Army National Guard at 17 years old and enrolled in college under the GI Bill. Walz then became a teacher and met his wife. Gwen Whipple was her name at the time. Now she's Gwen Walz. They moved here to Minnesota, where he taught high school geography and worked as an assistant football coach. Walz says he remembers taking a group of students to a campaign rally for then-President George W. Bush. Walz said he was asked to leave because some of those in his group were wearing stickers supporting John Kerry.
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WALZ: I think at that point in time, it was a combination of being a little bit frustrated and kind of a sad epiphany moment, how it felt for people to be looked right through by people.
FERGUSON: Not long after that, he made the move to run for Congress.
MARTIN: How did that go?
FERGUSON: He was able to make the case to Minnesotans that he was the right one. He unseated a longtime Republican congressman here in southern Minnesota. That 2006 campaign centered on the war in Iraq and on economic issues. And then Walz spent more than a decade in that role before announcing his bid for Minnesota governor in 2017. He won in 2018 and then again in 2022, when Democrats also took control of the state House and state Senate here.
MARTIN: So tell us a bit about his track record as governor. And we assume, of course, that the Republican ticket is going to have their own interpretation of that, but for now, start us off - what does his track record as governor look like?
FERGUSON: Yeah. Right now, like I said, Democrats control the state government, but they didn't during his first few years in office here. That meant he had to compromise with GOP leadership to pass a budget and navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, he's been able to work with Democratic majorities in the state capital, and that has meant passing a long wish list of progressive laws from free school meals to legal guarantees for abortion access, legalized marijuana, gun restrictions and paid family and medical leave. That list of accomplishments helped Walz lock up the role of chair of the Democratic Governors Association and then yesterday, of course, the VP spot on the Democratic ticket.
MARTIN: OK, so as part of the Democratic ticket, Dana, what are some of the issues you think that Republicans will be using to criticize Walz?
FERGUSON: Right. So going back to the pandemic, Walz used his executive authority to shutter schools, restaurants and houses of worship and require Minnesotans to stay home to limit the spread of COVID-19. Republicans pushed back on the mandates and said the governor shouldn't have the sole authority to make decisions about handling the pandemic. Not long after that, George Floyd was killed. It was, as you know, captured on video and sparked protests and riots in the Twin Cities and around the country. The governor deployed thousands of National Guard members and the state patrol to police the region. But Republicans said that call should have come sooner, before a police precinct and local businesses burned. I should note too that former President Donald Trump has already been making a point about that on the campaign trail.
MARTIN: That is Minnesota Public Radio's Dana Ferguson. Dana, thanks so much for this reporting.
FERGUSON: You're welcome.
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MARTIN: Thousands of additional police are flooding British streets today after a week of race riots across the country.
MARTÍNEZ: Far-right mobs have attacked people, mosques, even immigration law offices. It's the biggest challenge today for U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who took office just a month ago. Already, he's in a standoff with Elon Musk about this issue.
MARTIN: NPR's Lauren Frayer is in Tamworth, England, where a hotel housing asylum-seekers was attacked. Hello, Lauren.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Hi, Michel.
MARTIN: So tell us - what's the atmosphere there?
FRAYER: It feels like hysteria, disinformation, people just repeating things over and over that they see online. The hotel that was attacked here - it's been used as temporary refugee housing for the past two years, and locals have all these crime stories that they blame on it. Here's a man named Stephen Roberts I talked to.
STEPHEN ROBERTS: Apparently, the other week by the bowling alley, there was a machete attack, their own fighting each other. Oh, it's been going on for ages, but that doesn't get reported in the news. That's the problem.
FRAYER: You know, there was a knife attack recently. It was reported in the news. There's no indication, though, it involved asylum-seekers from this hotel, and the same jumping to conclusions is what started these riots. Children were stabbed last week. Rumors spread that a suspect was an undocumented migrant, a Muslim, none of which was true, but these riots erupted and have spread across the country. Muslims, minorities, people of color are being targeted, and people I've talked to are terrified.
MARTIN: Lauren, is there any sense that these riots are organized? Do they appear to be organized in any way?
FRAYER: I put that to Julia Ebner, who heads an extremism lab at Oxford University. And she says, yes, the violence is organized in part by the English Defence League, or EDL. It's an anti-Islam group that was thought to be defunct, but clearly is not.
JULIA EBNER: It's not just migration and Islam that they're protesting against. It's also what they see as the complicit media outlets who they believe are covering up stories, covering up migrant crimes.
FRAYER: And here in Tamworth, they're tapping into existing prejudices and amplifying them online. Elon Musk himself is playing a role in this.
MARTIN: How so? What's he been saying?
FRAYER: So Musk - when he bought Twitter, he restored the accounts of some far-right figures who had been banned, including one of the leaders of the English Defence League, a man who calls himself Tommy Robinson. He's a fascist who's been in and out of prison. He and Musk have been interacting on X, sharing conspiracy theories. Musk wrote to his nearly 200 million followers that a U.K. civil war is inevitable, and he's also been sort of taunting the prime minister here, Keir Starmer, online, accusing Starmer of having a two-tier policing system that treats white people unfairly. The U.K. government is pleading with Musk to use his platform responsibly. Lives are at stake here.
MARTIN: And what is the U.K. government doing?
FRAYER: So aside from deploying thousands more police, speeding up court appearances for suspects, the government has a special team flagging social media posts that incite violence. And I've actually seen this anecdotally. People here show me - want to show me something they saw on Facebook or TikTok, and then it's been removed. People are being arrested for hate speech online, hate crime laws are being used, and the government is looking at officially banning groups like the EDL, just like they do for terror groups abroad.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Lauren Frayer in Tamworth, England. Lauren, thank you.
FRAYER: Thanks, Michel.
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MARTIN: And one more story for you - two U.S. gold medals on the track yesterday for Cole Hocker and Gabby Thomas. NPR's Brian Mann is at the Summer Games in Paris. He checked in with the latest and what to look for next at the Olympics.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: It was a crazy day on the track on the outskirts of Paris. We saw a big upset with a guy named Cole Hocker, who came from behind to win the men's 1,500-meter final. It's nearly a mile. He surged from behind to beat the British and Norwegian runners who were expected to win. Also on the track, Gabby Thomas dominated the women's 200-meter final. Her celebration was just a joy to watch.
Pivoting to look forward, a couple of really interesting things are going to be happening over the next couple of days. Algerian Imane Khelif won her bout in the boxing ring. She's going to now fight for a gold medal. Her run in the Olympics has been controversial, but she's fought her way through, and last night, she had huge support from Algerians, who cheered her on. One more thing to point to is that American women beat Germany in soccer, 1-0. The U.S. women will now play for soccer gold in the Olympics for the first time since 2012.
I'm Brian Mann, NPR News in Paris. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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