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The AFT kicked off its first get-out-the-vote town hall with two special guests: Minnesota first lady Gwen Walz (wife of vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz) and longtime AFT ally Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).
In a voice still hoarse from her barnburner convention speech, AFT President Randi Weingarten urged participants to elect Harris-Walz “for the promise of America, the freedoms we should be entitled to … [including] economic freedom, the freedom to thrive.” Noting that this election represents “two very different visions for our country, one of hope and one of fear,” Weingarten celebrated “a new sense of excitement, of electricity, of hope, of a new generation fighting for America.” She noted that both Walzes are AFT members, longtime teachers and “middle-class folk now running on a ticket to seize the future.” Those working-family values matter: Just that day, Weingarten reported, the Biden-Harris administration had announced new prices for the first 10 drugs selected for Medicare price negotiation (expected to save patients $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs in the first year of the program alone).
Weingarten highlighted the contrast between Harris and Walz, who are “thinking about the future for all of us,” and Donald Trump, “someone who thinks only about himself.” She described Trump and his famously misogynistic running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, as irrevocably tied to Project 2025, an extremist blueprint for America’s future that would roll back Americans’ freedoms, devastate the middle class and impose an authoritarian federal government.
Cautioning that it’s “frankly, not a slam dunk. It’s a fight that will take all of us,” Weingarten urged members to make sure they’re registered to vote, and to volunteer here.
AFT Vice President and Education Minnesota President Denise Specht introduced Gwen Walz, calling Gov. Walz “decent, kind and still a teacher at heart,” with a pro-public-education, progressive record that includes billions in new funding for public education, universal free school meals, and free college tuition. When Harris and Walz are elected, she predicted, “Minnesota’s loss will be America’s gain.”
Saying this webinar was one of her first GOTV talks to a large group, Gwen Walz recounted how she and her husband first got acquainted: teaching in an underfunded public school, in an old choir room with a thin wooden wall separating their two classes. “We quickly learned that we shared a belief in the value of each student, … that education can be transformative.” She noted that the Trump-Vance attack on women’s reproductive rights “is personal for me”—she and her husband experienced “the agony of the journey that is infertility” before conceiving their two children through IVF. “If Vance had his way, I’d never have become a mom. [Then] I’d be a second-class citizen because I didn’t have children.”
Walz urged AFT members to “do the work in front of us. We have a chance to build a future of freedom, fairness and opportunity. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
Weingarten introduced Sen. Amy Klobuchar as “a senator’s senator. She knows how to cross the aisle” to get things done. Weingarten praised Klobuchar’s courage in taking on Big Tech to introduce legislation keeping kids safe online and banning deceptive artificial intelligence election practices.
Klobuchar, whose AFT-member mother taught second grade until age 70, called Gov. Walz “the epitome of optimism … [a] geography teacher who took a winless team to the state championship.” She praised him for passing one of the nation’s best paid-leave laws and one of the largest middle-class tax cuts in Minnesota history. Recalling lines from the Biden inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb,” by the AFT Book Club’s first featured author Amanda Gorman, Klobuchar said, “When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?” And she finished with: “Let’s take that light and get this team elected.”
AFT swing-state leaders reflected on the hinge of history this election represents. Detroit Federation of Teachers President Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins said her members will fight to “move this country forward. We understand what is at stake in this election and we are not going backward.”
AFT-Wisconsin’s Vice President for Higher Education Jon Shelton recounted how AFT-Wisconsin members rebounded from despair after then-Gov. Scott Walker passed the vicious public employee union-busting Act 10 in 2011, remobilizing to elect public education champion Tony Evers as governor, flipping the state supreme court, and then seeing parts of Act 10 struck down. Calling Wisconsin a bellwether state “with a history of slaying monsters,” Shelton said, “We kicked Trump out of the White House [in 2020]. We are going to turn out for Harris-Walz. … Let’s get it done.”
The webinar finished with a moving video of AFT members’ activism through the decades, set to the song “Keep Marching” from the Broadway musical “Suffs.” Weingarten summed up, “Politics is about us. … Only if we march, vote, organize, will we see the first female president side by side with a teacher.”
[Chris Bartolomeo]