These days, the only thing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem seem to have in common is that they’re both former-members-of-Congress-turned-Midwestern-governors.
Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, is a darling of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, while Noem, once seen as a potential vice presidential contender for former President Donald Trump, is most comfortable in the more conservative circles of the GOP. Since Walz’s rise to Democratic VP nominee, Noem has been bashing her governing neighbor as a “radical” who criticized her efforts to maintain “freedom” during the height of the Covid pandemic.
But just a decade ago, Walz and Noem, then colleagues in the House of Representatives, had a far different rapport, cosponsoring legislation, taking selfies and kindly speaking of the other. Over a decade ago, as they taped a short video together touting a prairie lands bill, they were more than just a little gracious with each other.
“It’s a smart bill and I’m grateful to the Congresswoman both as we share similar geography out there, and while our producers are great stewards of the land, we share that land with our sportsmen and making sure that we have those resources available,” Walz, then a congressman at the time, said as he sat on a couch with Noem.
“I love working with Tim just because he’s got such a commonsense approach, which I like too,” Noem said.
Compare that to Noem’s words about Walz in recent weeks.
“Walz is no leader. He’s a radical. I served with him in Congress. He pretended to be moderate, then showed his true extremist colors as soon as he became governor,” Noem wrote on X.
In broadcast interviews, Noem went further. She said on NewsMax that Harris had “chosen a radical leftist governor who truly believes that socialism is the future for America and put him on the ticket with her.” And in an interview with Fox News, Noem piled on, saying that during the protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Walz “didn’t take decisive action, didn’t support his cops.”
Walz has refrained from responding to Noem’s more recent comments.
In a statement, Walz spokesperson Teddy Tschann said Walz was eager to work with Republicans to help farmers and veterans.
“Governor Walz routinely worked with Republicans in Congress to pass legislation aimed at helping veterans and farmers, and he struck bipartisan deals with a split legislature in Minnesota to cut taxes and fund schools,” Tschann said. “He knows how to compromise without compromising his values, and he’ll always work across the aisle if it means delivering for the American people.”
Separately, Ian Fury, a spokesman for Noem, echoed Noem’s recent comments and dinged Walz’s stewardship as governor of Minnesota.
“Governors are CEOs, and their agendas speak to their priorities. As Governor, Walz’s radical agenda has shown he consistently tramples on basic freedoms and refuses to protect the rights afforded to all Americans -while Governor Noem has stayed true to the U.S. Constitution by allowing people to make their own decisions,” Fury said in a statement. “Tim Walz has been a horrible CEO of Minnesota. He’s lost thousands of people and billions of dollars in business to other states including South Dakota. When someone fails this badly, they don’t deserve to be promoted.”
Time in Congress
As a team, they pushed the Protect Our Prairies Act of 2013, a proposal aimed at disincentivizing crop producers from farming on protected land. The two even taped a roughly six-minute video together to vouch for the proposal. In the video, Walz, then the representative for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, sits next to Noem, then South Dakota’s at-large congresswoman. As a pair, they describe how the bill is commonsense – and how easy it is to work with each other.
“I love working with Tim just because he’s got such a commonsense approach which I like too,” Noem says at one point during the video.
At another point, Walz describes the common background he shares with Noem as it relates to protecting rural land.
“It’s not theoretical for us. It’s how we grew up,” Walz said. “We lived in these towns, and our rural areas are not just underdeveloped urban areas. These are unique places to live that people choose to be there and I think it’s important. I think what Congresswoman Noem and myself are doing is, it’s not a false choice of either or.”
The prairie bill became just one of many that Noem and Walz would sign on to as cosponsors. During their time in Congress together, Noem and Walz were co-sponsors on more than 150 bills. What’s more, eight of the bills Noem introduced were co-sponsored by Walz and four of the bills that Walz brought forward were co-sponsored by Noem, demonstrating that a Noem-Walz team-up wasn’t just a one-time thing, though it wasn’t a daily tag team, either.
This camaraderie was especially remarkable given their antithetical political approaches. When they were in the House, Walz was known as a moderate Democrat who had an ease with Republicans. Noem, meanwhile, was cutting her teeth as a next-generation conservative warrior.
On one hand, that Noem and Walz would work together in Congress seems obvious. Their states neighbor each other, and both representatives prioritized agriculture and rural protections.
“South Dakota and southwest Minnesota share some of the best pheasant habitat on the planet. And so we worked a lot on bills that preserved that habitat, or that could potentially preserve that habitat,” said Randolph Briley, a former congressional staffer for Walz.
Now, though, the two seem as different as possible. Walz’s signature achievements as governor, an expansive set of social welfare programs, have been panned by Republicans as excessively liberal. And as she rose from the US House to the governor’s mansion of South Dakota, Noem has framed herself as a conservative firebrand.
Congress occasionally produces unlikely friendships or pairings that can endure long after those lawmakers leave Capitol Hill. From his earlier days in the Senate to his years as president, Barack Obama maintained a healthy friendship with the late Sen. Tom Coburn, despite the fact that the cantankerous conservative from Oklahoma would famously gum up all kinds of bills in the Senate. And Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden fostered a substantive working relationship in the upper chamber that has since stretched through both Biden’s time as Obama’s vice president and his own presidency.
Briley, the former Walz staffer, said the types of relationships lawmakers make in Congress can be different than those made by a governor because the priorities of the job are different.
“When you’re [an] executive, the buck stops with you,” Briley said. But in the legislature, “you’re always looking for collaborators… Tim Walz is a really easy guy to get along with. He’s really gregarious and he likes everybody.”
From friendly governors to subtweets
The run-ins between Noem and Walz didn’t stop when they left Congress. In 2018, the two Midwestern members of Congress successfully ran for governor in their respective states. Shortly thereafter, they made a point of taking a selfie together, and Walz tweeted it out.
For a time, the geographic proximity of the two governors helped compel them to collaborate at moments. In 2019, Walz and Noem penned a joint letter to then-Environmental Protection Agency director Andrew Wheeler “urging the agency to honor President Donald Trump’s commitment to follow the Renewable Fuel Standard.”
And as governors of two largely rural states, biofuels and agriculture policy drove Noem and Walz together. In 2019, Walz chaired the Governors’ Biofuels Coalition, and Noem served as vice chair.
But by 2020, any public rapport between Walz and Noem began to sour. During the Covid pandemic, Noem garnered national attention for unusually strong resistance to any kind of lockdown orders to curb the coronavirus. She was especially against precautions around the state’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August 2020. In marked contrast, Walz continued to roll out additional restrictions on gatherings in Minnesota. He took aim at Noem, calling the Sturgis gathering “absolutely unnecessary” and said Noem “has taken to traveling to other states and criticizing others – now at a time when that state’s hospital capacity is overwhelmed.”
Things would only get frostier in the years to come. By 2024, their former camaraderie had devolved to subtweets. In April, Noem hoped that her new book, “No Going Back,” would catapult her into the top tier of Republican politics and boost her chances of eventually being picked as Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate. Instead, all attention about the book fell to an anecdote about how she shot dead her dog Cricket for misbehaving.
Walz’s response? To start a pile-on of governors mocking her on X.
“Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit. I’ll start,” Walz wrote, adding a picture of his own rescue pup.
Owen Dahlkamp contributed to this story.
