Tim Walz was just starting to flex his macho side when his inner Minnesota nice took over.
“I can outshoot these guys,” Walz, a hunter, boasted during a campaign speech in Wisconsin, referring to opponents of gun safety laws, when suddenly he stopped.
“Ope!” he exclaimed, stepping out from behind the podium. “Can we get somebody to help? Somebody’s hot. Somebody’s hot, can we get somebody to help?”
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He pointed to an audience member as the heat bore down. “You okay?” he asked, sounding more like a worried dad than a pheasant killer. “Drink some water, folks, it is hot out.”
He stood in silence for several seconds before thanking the help that arrived. Rally goers began chanting “they’re so weird,” a reference to the attack he coined against the Republican ticket. Walz chuckled, and put his hand to his heart.
“Thank you all for helping,” he said. “Grateful. Thank you. Thank y’all. Take care of one another on this. This is why we gather.”
He used the opportunity to argue for taking the high road, suggesting he and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris are more about “caring for our neighbor and kindness" than their GOP opponents Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. It was the duo's second campaign appearance together since Harris picked Walz as her running mate.
“That’s who we are,” he said. “It’s not about mocking. It’s not name-calling.”
Walz looked back at the audience member, confirming to someone offstage that all seemed fine..
“We’ll get ‘em taken care of,” he said, before returning to remarks about what freedom means for him.
The interruption lasted more than a minute.
Heat-related illnesses have become common at campaign rallies, which often involve hours of standing around in the sun in tightly packed spaces. In June, a heat wave sent nearly a dozen Trump supporters to the hospital for heat exhaustion, prompting former President Trump’s campaign to take precautions for his Las Vegas rally days later, including providing water bottles, and installing misting stations and air-conditioned tents with medics on site.
