Inside the Three-Day Bootcamp that Launched Tim Walz’s Political Career

On a frigid weekend in January 2005, in the cavernous carpenters’ union hall on the outskirts of downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, more than 100 aspiring politicians, operatives and activists gathered with the goal of shifting the state’s political landscape in a more progressive direction. For the next three days, they took part in a kind of bootcamp aimed at developing core political skills: honing stump speeches, raising campaign cash and discussing thorny policy issues with voters.

An extraordinary array of future leaders of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Democratic party is known in the state, gathered for their training. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, future Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and future St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter were among the trainers at the gathering. The students included Mark Ritchie, who went on to serve two terms as Minnesota’s secretary of state, and Andy Luger, who’s now in his second stint as the state’s top federal law enforcement official.

Arguably the most inauspicious participant was a high school social studies teacher and Army vet named Tim Walz. A paunchy 40-year-old in jeans and a T-shirt with no political experience, he also had an extreme long-shot political goal: Knock off six-term GOP incumbent Rep. Gil Gutknecht — who’d won his previous two reelection contests by at least 25 points — in Minnesota’s staunchly conservative 1st Congressional District.

“One of the themes of the weekend was, ‘Who’s that guy?’” Carter, who’s now serving his second term as mayor of St. Paul, recalled, referring to Walz.

At the time, progressives both in Minnesota and nationwide were in a deep funk. George W. Bush had just been reelected president by a surprisingly robust margin, and a Democrat hadn’t occupied the governor’s office in Minnesota for 14 years.

Perhaps even more disheartening for progressives in the North Star state, their patron saint Sen. Paul Wellstone — a former Carleton College professor who’d become a national liberal icon with presidential ambitions — had died in a plane crash just over two years earlier. To add insult to injury, his seat had been taken by a Republican.

Out of that desperation, Wellstone’s family and colleagues created a program that could raise up a new generation of progressives and give them the tools they would need to turn their party’s fortunes around. The program, dubbed “Camp Wellstone,” had begun holding these three-day seminars across the country.

“A lot of people felt a lot of despair about things,” recalled Jeff Blodgett, who had served as Wellstone’s campaign manager and then became executive director of Wellstone Action, the nonprofit group formed to run the bootcamps. “The camp turned out to be a place [for] people who felt like they needed to step up now and kind of follow in Wellstone's footsteps.”

Walz was one of them. Interviews with nine people who attended the 2005 camp said that despite his unassuming demeanor, Walz quickly displayed some of the political chops — most notably his plainspokenness, sense of humor and Midwestern dad vibes — that have catapulted him from somewhat obscure purple state governor to the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee in just a matter of weeks.

“Pretty much everybody just thought, ‘Wow, this is a guy who seems to match a life of service with some pretty excellent communication skills. We know he probably won’t win this race, but he’s really incredible,’” Carter recalled.

The Camp Wellstone attendees were on one of three tracks: candidates, campaign operatives or issue organizers. They were drilled on the basics: how to call donors and ask for money, how to knock on doors and talk to voters, and how to find the right kind of staff.

For campers on the candidate track, which included Walz, one of their big tasks was learning to deliver a two-minute stump speech, which the group would then critique. By all accounts, many of the neophyte politicians struggled to make a compelling, concise case for their candidacies. Walz — who was significantly older than many of the attendees — already knew to lean in on his two decades of experience in the classroom, the football field and the National Guard.

“A lot of the people at the camp would go right to a set of issues or policy proposals,” recalled Blodgett, “but what Tim was really all about was his story and the values that he would bring to elected office.”

Still, his delivery needed improvement. Attendees remembered that he spoke too fast, making it hard for listeners to follow along. Over the three days, he would work to sharpen his message and slow down his pacing.

Many of the people who attended that camp nearly two decades ago remain staunchly loyal to Walz. Flanagan — who was serving on the Minneapolis School Board at the time — says Walz impressed her so much that she was motivated to travel to the southern Minnesota district and doorknock for the long-shot challenger.

“I was like, I love this guy and I’m going to step outside my comfort zone and go knock in a community where I don’t live,” recalled Flanagan, a Native American and enrolled member of the White Earth Nation.

The following year, Walz pulled off a massive upset, defeating Gutknecht by 15,000 votes, part of a wave election that saw Democrats pick up 31 House seats and take control of the chamber. Walz then demonstrated that his success wasn’t just fortuitous timing as he went on to win five more terms. In 2016, while former President Donald Trump carried his district by almost 15 percentage points, Walz still eked out a win by a less than 1 percentage point margin.

His fellow Camp Wellstone alums were stunned by the result.

“We would go to trainings for the weekend and try to inspire people,” said Carter, speaking of Walz, “and every now and then we’d meet somebody there who just inspired the heck out of us.”

Walz’s upset mirrored the unlikely political path of his role model, Wellstone. Like Walz, Wellstone started out as an educator, teaching political science at Carleton College. In 1990, he shocked the political world when he ran for U.S. Senate and upset two-term GOP incumbent Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, despite being outspent sevenfold. Wellstone had barnstormed the state in his trademark ramshackle green school bus and grabbed voters attention with quirky, humorous political ads , ultimately prevailing by almost 50,000 votes. He then went on to defeat Boschwitz again in 1996.

Wellstone quickly became a leader among the Senate’s more liberal Democrats. Minnesota has a storied history of electing progressive politicians who have risen to national prominence, including presidential aspirants Walter Mondale, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. Wellstone was soon seen as their successor, including as a potential presidential candidate.

But just days before the 2002 election — locked in a fierce reelection battle with former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman — Wellstone, his wife and daughter, along with five others, perished in a plane crash near Eveleth, Minnesota. Coleman went on to defeat former vice president Mondale, who stepped in as the Democratic candidate after Wellstone’s death. And the party’s losses didn’t stop there, with Republicans winning four of five statewide races, including the gubernatorial contest. Democrats were on the rocks.

Against that backdrop, Wellstone Action was created to try and rejuvenate that progressive legacy. The Camp Wellstone bootcamps were designed to raise up a whole new generation of activists and candidates.

“It was all about what my dad believed in,” Dave Wellstone, who helped start the group with his brother Mark, Blodgett and other allies, said in an interview. “We wanted to train people in a grassroots, Wellstone style to be the best that they could be in their communities, whatever that meant. That might mean running for school board. It might mean passing bond referendums. It might mean organizing to get your local park cleaned up.”

Two years later, Walz signed up.

Walz held onto his congressional seat for five more cycles, earning a reputation for centrism and moderation by supporting gun rights and championing the needs of rural Americans and veterans.

In 2018, he took another big political risk, giving up his House seat in favor of running for governor. He beat back two other formidable challengers in the DFL primary and went on to win the general election contest by double digits.

Walz’s first term as Minnesota governor wasn’t an easy one. He had to navigate a divided legislature, the turbulence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the massive — and violent — protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the state’s largest city. Most notably, Walz called in the National Guard to help quell the unrest after decrying the local response as an “abject failure.” Republicans have pilloried his handling of the volatile situation as weak and ineffective in the days since Walz joined the Democratic presidential ticket, but President Trump apparently praised his actions at the time .

Walz was reelected in 2022 by an 8-point margin, validating his handling of a particularly challenging first term in office.

“What you see is what we saw back then, but it has been strengthened with extraordinary experience,” said Marcia Avner, another of the trainers at the 2005 Camp Wellstone that Walz attended. “He has been so seasoned by the work here.”

There were other ways Camp Wellstone accelerated Walz’s ascent, including by providing him political allies, like Flanagan, his former trainer. When Walz decided to run for governor in 2018, he tapped Flanagan to be his running mate.

“He understood needing to have a perspective that was different from his own as we were crafting policies and working together,” Flanagan said. “What America is seeing in this moment is what I’ve known about Tim Walz for almost 20 years.”

Another participant in the bootcamp, Jeremy Kalin, who went on to serve two terms in the Minnesota House, recalls Walz delivering a speech during the camp that was so frenetic — roughly 100 words in 15 seconds, in Kalin's estimation — that at the end he was befuddled. "It was like, woah, what's your name again?" he recalled.

That stood in stark contrast to the command that Kalin and others witnessed when Walz joined Harris in Philadelphia on Tuesday for their kickoff campaign rally.

“His ability to tell stories, his ability to hold an audience, he's always had that," Kalin said. "But the ability to ... distill it into a really core, clear message that you can do in 20 to 40 seconds. … I definitely see that training at Camp Wellstone.”

Camp Wellstone is no longer putting on bootcamps; Wellstone Action eventually became embroiled in a nasty dispute over the proper direction of the organization. Dave Wellstone and his brother were ousted from the board in 2018, and the group was rechristened Re:Power , which continues to offer leadership training for people looking to build a “progressive ecosystem.”

But the legacy of Camp Wellstone lives on in the political careers it helped launch. And there’s now no more famous alum than the folksy teacher from Mankato, Minnesota, who showed up in 2005 with self-deprecating humor, big political ambitions and no experience.

“What were the odds he was going to be the VP? Not high, as of a few weeks ago,” Dave Wellstone said. But he noted that Walz has always defied expectations, and the odds: “He’s always been a winner.”