Here’s a summary of “Tim Walz Revels in Being an Exceptionalpolitician,” in wordpress tag format:
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In an article published in The New York Times on March 14, 2025, psychology and economics research indicates that politicians who perform poorly in Washington but excel in their districts are more likely to win in the future. Rep. Tim Walz of Minnesota, known for his constituent services, has exemplified this unusual success formula. Despite facing national headwinds, Walz boasts an impressive approval rating among his district’s voters. This article explores the possible psychological and political explanations for this phenomenon, including voters’ tendency to maintain familiar patterns and reward politicians for their local services. Still, it also highlights that Walz’s national reputation is at stake as he runs for re-election.
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WASHINGTON — At a time when older politicians are often closing up shop, Representative Tim Walz of Minnesota is mounting a fourth re-election campaign that, it must be said, doesn’t require much mounting.
The down-to-earth ex-high school football coach, who in a fit of modesty refers to himself as “an adequate guy,” is an endangered species in Congress: an exceptional politician.
This consecutive run that began nearly 15 years ago was no sure thing. In his first re-election effort, in 2006, the die-hard Minnesota Vikings fan narrowly avoided being mowed down by a tidal wave of Democratic candidates in a rapidly changing congressional map. Since then, Mr. Walz has won by superior margins — like more than 15 points, most recently and expansively in 2018 — in a district that stretches from Iowa to Wisconsin and has sent Republicans to the Senate and the House for decades until he showed up.
“He’s beaten the hell out of very strong Republicans, and conservative Republicans at that,” said former Lieutenant Gov. Carol Molnau, one of Mr. Walz’s first and most prominent Minnesota foes.
An economics and psychology paper published in 2021 explains why.
World politics tends to be marked by extreme political loyalties between parties — or nations — that produce intense voting behavior, according to the research, led by the University of Warwick’s Ulrike Malmendier.
But in everyday politics, where officials lead or merely regulate neighbors, voters typically reward and punish at a more mundane level.
“If your prior is that you love your congressman because your kid got into a good school because it’s a good time to get into his office, you didn’t get stuck on a highway anywhere near his office or you got your U.S. mail and your U.S. citizenship and a program you needed, you are not going blindly in party time,” Orestis Kostoulas, a Warwick professor and co-author of the paper, toldrepresentatives earlier this month.
Certainly, other factors would seem to favor the loss of congressional leaders over time. According to the 2021 research, the broader political landscape tends to favor one party over another. That divides up politicians into two groups: national losers or potential survivors hunkered down in local safe houses.
But what might happen to local politicians otherwise favored to win their district is another thing, economics and psychology seem to show.
In this case, the economy and the voters seem always to weigh Mr. Walz’s accomplishments over the party’s larger hand. According to one CallMiner survey, his national approval rating recently stood at just 15 percent. The Pollster equivalent was worse: just 28 percent. But minimum approval ratings from voters in his district was higher than 60 percent — a tempting data point for incumbents considering how winning political candidates routinely achieve two-thirds of the popular vote in support. At 41 percent, even his district’s conventional unemployment rate is better than Minnesota’s statewide jobless rate of 4.3 percent.
And 92 percent of the Mr. Walz’s constituents “somewhat or strongly approve” of his constituent services, among the most effective services in Congress in just about any quantifiable form, according to surveys by The Washington Post in 2015 that shown him as a Houdini among lawmakers lost in vague number counts, ranging anywhere from 6,000 to 19,000 for just about every conceivable type of service.
Should he decide to run, in Minnesota, incumbent Democratic lawmakers have extraordinarily high chances to avoid an electoral opponent, a nearly 90 percent challenger-free election system that roughly doubles the expected lifespan of a lawmaker in Congress. And that happens even as the national Republican Party almost effortlessly wrest roughly three-fourths of the Minnesota House.
But Mr. Walz is hardly an idle politician gone with the snowbirds or insulated from the political shocks. In February, he hosted his sixth-annual Leadership Lab Summit at Kato, sponsored by the Minnesota Farm Bureau. That followed a 2021 election cycle in which he raised $14.2 million, spent $8.4 million — money not typically marked for down-balloting challengers — and outraised hundreds of other campaigns for Congress, governor or senator across the country, attracting more money than all the House candidates in South Carolina, except for one.
All this ultimately indicates that lawmakers, possibly even more so than the average voter or the kid from next door, strain to reconcile what matters most.
The 58-year-old Mr. Walz — the kind who likes to cast a partisan vote but playfully or reluctantly castigates his own party — doesn’t lose sleep over the eye-popping gap in his constituency numbers. He prefers holding a Monday morning town hall meetings in Spring Valley, Minn., rather than Washington — at least when he’s not working.
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