The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.

They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a paired-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.

This time, it was a “hard no.”

“It was like kind of ‘Over my dead body,’” she recalled in an interview. “He would have shut down state government if they insisted on vouchers.”

Since taking office as governor in 2019, Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, has earned a national reputation as a progressive willing to champion and experiment with liberal ideas for governing. That approach was especially apparent in his handling of Minnesota’s public schools, according to critics and allies, who said Walz has retained the heart and priorities of the teacher he was for nearly two decades before seeking elected office.

He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.

Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.

During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid. Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.

Asked about the covid response, Harris-Walz campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz shifted the blame to Donald Trump, who was president at the time: “Schools were closed because Trump failed on Covid.”

He added that Harris and Walz would be far better for American education than their opponents.

“They will fight for a strong public education system, schools safe from gun violence and investing in every community,” he said. “It’s a stark contrast to Trump and (JD) Vance.”

Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them.

And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights.

“He understands what our schools and students need,” said Jake Schwitzer, executive director of North Star Policy Action, a liberal research and advocacy group that is funded in large part by labor unions. “He believes in the power of government to improve people’s lives and in his responsibility to move our policies in that direction.”

Walz’s sweeping agenda has been met with pushback from conservatives, who point to falling test scores to argue that he was focused on the wrong issues and catering to the teachers union.

Scores fell across the country during the pandemic, but in Minnesota, reading and, in particular, math scores fell more than the national average. In 2015 and 2017, the state’s fourth-grade math scores were 10 points higher than the average national score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress; in 2022, they were only four points higher. Eighth-grade math scores also fell faster than average, to their lowest level in three decades.

Cristine Trooien, a mother of three and executive director of education advocacy group the Minnesota Parents Alliance, which formed in 2022 to fight for parents’ rights in education, argued that public schooling in her state “has literally never been worse.”

“Sadly for Minnesota students, the union-controlled Walz administration decided it would rather use its power, influence and bottomless resources to saturate the K-12 conversation with straw man issues like ‘book banning,’” she said in an email, “than confront and solve the literacy and student achievement crisis.”

Delivering for teachers

When Walz first ran for governor in 2018, he filled out a 13-page questionnaire from Education Minnesota and left no doubt about his position opposing vouchers.

“As a former public school teacher, I will always do everything in my power to protect our public education system from privatization,” he wrote.

His promise was quickly put to the test.

During budget negotiations in 2019, Republicans were pushing for a variety of tax cuts, but their top priority was a tax credit for donations to a scholarship program — a type of voucher program used in many other states. They argued it would give students stuck in poorly performing schools more options. Teachers and most Democrats opposed it, saying vouchers drain money from public schools and improperly mix tax dollars with religious private school instruction.

As the budget deadline approached, Republican Paul Gazelka, the Senate majority leader at the time and one of Walz’s staunchest political opponents, continued to press his voucher plan but met unyielding resistance.

Hortman recalled that at a point during their closed-door talks, the governor replied, “You know I’m a member of Education Minnesota, right?” (He actually was no longer a member but had been as a teacher.)

Gazelka walked away frustrated.

“I was willing to give up a lot to get that, but it just didn’t happen,” Gazelka said. “We just weren’t asking that much, but that’s how passionate he was against any kind of education reform. He would never go against the teachers union.”

Four years later, Walz pressed his own education agenda.

In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.

After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.

“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.

The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.

Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program.

“Our union came to him with a pretty big list,” said Denise Specht, president of Education Minnesota. “He certainly delivered.”

A covid shutdown

Like every state, Minnesota shut down its schools in March 2020 in response to the coronavirus. As the pandemic persisted, resistance to the state’s response grew.

For the 2020-21 school year, the governor left decisions on reopening partly up to school districts. But he also mandated that, in order for schools to reopen fully, localities had to see their virus cases fall below 10 per 10,000 people over a two-week period. That meant that some school districts — including big ones in Minneapolis and St. Paul — would stay remote, or mostly remote, for months.

He loosened these restrictions near the end of 2020, allowing elementary schools to reopen in January 2021 regardless of case counts. The month afterward, he permitted all middle and high schools to open back up, too, and declared every campus must offer some in-person teaching by March 8.

By March 2021 — a full year after the initial shutdowns — 90 percent of Minnesota districts and charter schools were offering at least partial in-person instruction, according to Walz’s office.

Minnesota schools remained remote longer than average among states, said Nat Malkus, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute who has analyzed the length of time districts remained remote during the 2020-21 school year. In Malkus’s ranking of states — from most remote learning to most in person — Minnesota came in 19th out of 50 states, based on the number of weeks of full or partly remote school, weighted by student enrollment.

The state’s ranking is “not too bad,” Malkus said. “That makes it somewhat worse than average, but better than average for blue states.”

Critics, both then and since, said Walz made it too difficult for schools to reopen, inflicting irreparable damage on children’s academics and mental health.

In fall 2020, a mother of five, distressed by school closures and a pause of youth sports statewide, founded an advocacy group called Let Them Play Minnesota. The group soon swelled to 25,000 members and sued Walz twice over the sports halt, although both suits were later dismissed. The mother, Dawn Gillman, a Republican, rode the following she gained for her advocacy to a seat in the Minnesota House.

A few months later, Republicans in the Minnesota Senate rebuked Walz for school closures by proposing a bill that would have stripped the governor of the emergency powers he used to close campuses. The measure passed the Republican-dominated chamber but died in the Democratic-controlled House.

Some schools also tried to resist.

Sibley East Public Schools, a rural district southwest of the Twin Cities, voted in September 2020 to ignore the state’s reopening restrictions and shift to in-person instruction for all students — only to back down a week later and resume hybrid schooling. The district fell in line after the state schools superintendent called the Sibley East superintendent, the Star Tribune reported, and the district’s attorney warned of a possible legal battle with the state.

How things played out in Sibley East was typical of the governor’s pandemic policies, said Scott Jensen, a Republican and former Minnesota state senator who lost to Walz in the 2022 gubernatorial race.

“Tim Walz gave the public impression he was letting individual school districts make the decision they needed to make, but I don’t think that was quite genuine,” Jensen said. “I think school districts felt a tremendous amount of pressure to toe the line.”

But Walz enjoyed the strong and continued support of teachers’ unions for most of his pandemic decisions.

He pursued teacher-friendly policies, issuing an executive order that “strongly” discouraged schools from asking educators to provide in-person and virtual instruction simultaneously, a form of teaching that many found burdensome. The order also mandated that districts give teachers an extra 30 minutes of planning time a day. And like a handful of other states, he put educators near the top of the priority list for covid vaccinations once they became available, holding mass vaccination events for them. As a result, 55 percent of school staff and child-care workers were vaccinated by March 2021. His administration also delivered biweekly, free shipments of coronavirus tests to schools statewide.

“There was really no playbook, nobody knew what to do,” said Specht, the Education Minnesota president. Walz “looked to the science, and he engaged our union quite a bit.”

Pushing against ‘hatred and bigotry’

In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.

“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”

Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.

He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.

“He’s a strong supporter of kids, he wants to build schools where young people can thrive,” said Rep. Leigh Finke (D), Minnesota’s first openly transgender lawmaker. “In Minnesota, we are providing meals. We’re not taking away books.”

Walz also signed a law last year that requires menstrual products be made available in all school bathrooms regularly used by “menstruating students” in grades 4 through 12, permitting the placement of pads and tampons in boys’ bathrooms. The inclusive language, meant to accommodate transgender children, has since drawn attacks from Republicans; conservatives in the state tried to amend the law so it only applied to women-only and gender-neutral restrooms, but failed.

Walz’s administration also updated teacher certification standards to require, among other things, that candidates examine their biases and affirm students’ gender identities and sexual orientations. And his education department revised state social studies standards to require ethnic studies, including an examination of social identities of race, gender, religion, geography and ethnicity.

Walz’s agenda drew backlash from Republican lawmakers in the state, who decried the book removal law as unnecessary — and warned that permitting gender-affirming care would undermine parental rights. Conservatives also unsuccessfully challenged the standards for teacher certification and social studies in court. In their own platform and a spate of 2022 bills, Republicans sought to boost parents’ control of education, for example proposing parents should review curriculums.

Walz has also attempted to address the significant racial disparities in academic achievement. White students score higher on standardized tests, according to a 2019 study by the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis, and Minnesota’s racial gap in graduation rates that year was the largest in the country, per the state’s Department of Human Rights.

Among the governor’s ideas to fix the problem: anti-bias training for school staff, stepped-up recruitment of teachers of color and more a inclusive curriculum.

Still, after five years of Walz’s governance, “we haven’t been able to move the needle much,” said Josh Crosson, the executive director of EdAllies, a statewide education group that advocates for students of color, those with disabilities and low-income learners. He said that’s partly due to the pandemic.

Crosson pointed to two Walz administration initiatives he thinks will help down the road. The 2023 READ Act requires schools to adopt “evidence-based” reading curriculums and teaching practices, such as sound-it-out instruction known as phonics. The act also gave schools $70 million to train teachers, conduct literacy assessments and purchase new curricular materials.

Crosson also cited a law Walz signed, which took effect last school year, forbidding suspensions as a form of punishment for students in kindergarten through third grade. (A 2022 state report found that Black students were eight times more likely to be suspended or expelled than White students.)

“It is a long-term investment in closing gaps in the future,” Crosson said of the two initiatives.

Nonetheless, Crosson said he wished Walz had done more to prevent school police officers from using a hold known as “prone restraint” on children in school. Black, multiracial and Native American special education students are disproportionately likely to be placed in physical holds at school, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Education.

After the murder of George Floyd, the governor signed a law forbidding prone restraints, which spurred many police departments to pull their officers from schools in protest. Ultimately, the Minnesota legislature reversed itself and passed another law allowing such restraints in “physically dangerous” situations, which Walz signed. And, Crosson said, he would have liked to see Walz do more to diversify Minnesota’s teacher workforce, which remains overwhelmingly White.

Mani Sayes, a biracial mother living in Minnesota’s Lakeville school district, said she is generally pleased with how Walz has conducted himself when it comes to education. She praised his attention to educators’ needs and his focus on achieving racial equity.

“He ensures when kids can go to school, they can learn,” said Sayes, 40. “If that means putting in free lunches to take the burden off parents, then he does that.”

As he campaigns in one of the nation’s most competitive U.S. Senate races, Montana Republican Tim Sheehy recounts how he started an aerial firefighting business in his barn and built it into a publicly traded company on the front lines of increasingly dangerous wildfires. “That’s a success story,” he said in a June television interview.

Reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in recent months tell a different story about Bridger Aerospace, known for its “Super Scooper” planes that can remove up to 1,400 gallons at a time from a body of water to dump on a nearby wildfire.

Bridger is facing a cash crunch so dire that there is “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue,” according to public filings that show the company lost $77.4 million last year and $20.1 million in the first three months of 2024. Several directors have left, including one who flagged concerns about internal auditing, as an unusually slow wildfire season in 2023 put the company at risk of defaulting on its debt.

And then last month, Sheehy said he couldn’t devote enough time to running the company and resigned — a move that Bridger, which had promoted his key role in “every facet” of the business, previously said would happen if he was elected to the Senate.

“The business has disappointed,” said Vince Martin, a North Carolina-based investment analyst and blogger who has examined the SEC filings. “As a result, they don’t have a ton of room for error.”

In response to questions about the company’s finances, the Sheehy campaign released a statement saying, “Tim is proud of the successful company he created, the jobs he created, and he is proud to be an active firefighting pilot protecting our communities and our public lands.”

Bridger, in a statement, noted steady revenue growth at the “fast-growing, ambitious company” over the past five years, adding that it “has materially enhanced the composition and capabilities of its board of directors to lead the company in its next stage of growth.”

The company’s struggles have received little national attention even as Sheehy competes in a closely watched contest that could determine which party controls the Senate. Voters in the deep-red state of Montana heavily back former president Donald Trump — who endorsed Sheehy earlier this year — but have elected Democratic incumbent Jon Tester three times.

“He better win,” Trump said Friday night at a rally with Sheehy just 11 miles from Bridger’s headquarters at the Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport.

Sheehy, 38, has attracted national support largely on the strength of his biography as a war hero and entrepreneur, but his first campaign for public office has exposed some potential vulnerabilities.

Sheehy, an ex-Navy Seal who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has faced scrutiny over an incident involving a firearm in Montana’s Glacier National Park in 2015. Documents show Sheehy told a park ranger at the time that he accidentally shot himself in his right arm and the wound was treated at a hospital. Sheehy told The Washington Post he did not shoot himself but had lied to the ranger, a federal law enforcement officer, to protect him and his platoon-mates from a potential military investigation into an older bullet wound he said he got in Afghanistan in 2012. He has talked about being shot in the arm in combat while campaigning.

He has also emphasized his business experience, telling voters that he has signed “the front of the paycheck, not just the back” while condemning Congress for the ballooning national debt.

“I’m a business owner,” Sheehy said during a March campaign event. “If my business isn’t doing well, I don’t get paid.”

Yet amid Bridger’s significant losses, Sheehy has received millions of dollars in compensation. He received a $2.3 million bonus on top of a $149,000 base salary in 2023, according to SEC filings, and a bonus of $4.4 million and a $450,000 base salary in 2022, as the company lost $42.1 million. Sheehy received additional income leasing two planes to Bridger and co-owning a business that provides flight training, SEC filings show. Sheehy also sold a plane to the company for $3.9 million; the filings don’t detail if he turned a profit or loss.

“That itself is not wrong, but it doesn’t look great,” said Dhierin-Perkash Bechai, an analyst at AeroAnalysis International, which covers the aerospace and defense industries, referring to Sheehy’s bonuses and additional income from Bridger. “While the company is bleeding cash, Sheehy is still making money.”

Other experts who track the company are more optimistic. Austin Moeller, a New York-based analyst with Canaccord Genuity who said he has met with Sheehy and other executives while researching Bridger, noted the forecast for a busier fire season in 2024. Bridger is cutting costs and expanding operations into Canada and Europe, he said, while lenders have been willing to work with the fledgling public company. Bridger also has multiyear contracts with federal agencies totaling $226 million.

“Tim did a good job as CEO running the early-stage public company, and the current management has the right experience,” Moeller said. “If they need more capital, they have an agreement in place to raise that, so I don’t think there’s any risk of the company going bankrupt.”

At the Friday rally with Trump, Sheehy said he had created hundreds of jobs and called Bridger “a Montana success story.” He described how he personally flies planes, saying “Just last week I was out water bombing, protecting your land.”

***

Sheehy founded Bridger Aerospace in late 2014, after a celebrated Naval career in which he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He and his wife were starting a new life on 60 acres they purchased near Bozeman, Mont. Sheehy had $300,000 in savings and $100,000 from his parents to settle in Montana and start a new business with a handful of fellow veterans, according to his memoir, “Mudslingers.”

“I can honestly say that the goal was not to become multimillionaires,” he wrote. “The goal was to create a viable business in a region of the country where we wanted to live and to provide jobs that would support the people of that region while doing work that mattered in some way.”

Aerial firefighting seemed promising at a time when wildfires were ravaging the West. Private equity giant Blackstone became a crucial investor as Bridger sought to expand, and by 2022, the company had bought six Super Scoopers, which Sheehy has called “the AK-47 of aerial firefighting planes.”

Sheehy and his business partners also launched a drone company, Ascent Vision Technologies. A defense contractor bought Ascent for about $350 million in 2020, an “incredible” boost to its stakeholders, Sheehy wrote in his book. He personally netted about $75 million, Bloomberg reported.

Sheehy and his executive team started making aggressive moves to grow Bridger. In 2022, the company reached an agreement with Gallatin County, Mont., where it is based, to get access to the municipal bond market. The $160 million raised was slated to pay for two new airplane hangars and to expand the company’s fleet of Super Scoopers, which cost about $30 million each. The deal also came with an 11.5 percent interest rate and a requirement that the company have at least $8 million in cash on hand, public records show.

The company took another chance by merging with an investment corporation in early 2023 to go public. The merger could have added another $323 million to the balance sheet, according to a presentation to investors.

Instead, the merger was an early signal of the challenges ahead, costing the company nearly $17 million, public filings show.

Sheehy downplayed the result in a podcast interview, saying, “We didn’t have an acute need for any of the capital. We don’t need it to run the business. We don’t need it to grow organically.”

Six months later, director Debra Coleman quit the board, effective immediately — “a result of the functioning of the Board’s Audit Committee,” she wrote in a brief resignation letter in September, referring to a panel that typically reviews financial disclosures for accuracy.

Bridger responded that board members “continue to have full confidence in the governance and effective functioning of the Audit Committee Company,” filings show. Coleman, who had retired as a managing director in investment banking at Bank of America Securities, Inc., declined to speak publicly about her decision to leave.

One month after Coleman’s departure, the company canceled a public offering and plans to buy an aircraft company after a sharp decline in its stock price. Those setbacks punctuated the slowest fire season in more than two decades, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center. Bridger’s annual report for 2023 reflected significant challenges: more than $211 million in debt, the possibility of default on the $160 million bond deal and a violation of the terms of a $12.9 million bank loan.

“Our liquidity position raises substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern,” the report said. “We have incurred significant losses since inception, and we may not be able to achieve, maintain or increase profitability or positive cash flow.”

In another potentially troubling sign, the company said it had “identified material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting.” In other words, the company could not guarantee that its books were accurate, though Moeller said this disclaimer is not unusual among small, newly public companies getting their accounting up to speed.

In a March call with investors, Sheehy touted the company’s record-setting revenue of $67 million in 2023 despite an unusually slow fire season. “While each fire season has its own seasonal and regional fluctuations and complexions, the overall trend of larger wildfires and longer fire seasons continues,” he said.

When Montana-based media outlets covered Bridger’s poor financial performance, the company pushed back at what it called “politically motivated attacks.” Bridger said the media was taking corporate statements out of context and exaggerating the risks and disclaimers it is legally required to put in SEC filings.

“By highlighting these losses and emphasizing risk factors in Bridger’s public filings, these reports do not paint an accurate picture of the future of Bridger Aerospace,” the company said in May. “The fact is that Bridger has been a Montana success story.”

But in another indicator of the company’s hunger for cash, Bridger raised $9.2 million in April by selling common stock to directors and executive officers — a quicker and less expensive way to raise money than selling to the public, analysts following the company said.

Two directors, Todd Hirsch, a Blackstone senior managing director, and McAndrew Rudisill, Bridger’s chief investment officer, resigned on May 31 from Bridger’s board. The departures were “not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matters relating to the Company’s operations policies or practices,” according to an SEC filing.

A Blackstone spokesperson said of Hirsch’s departure: “It is ordinary course for Blackstone to wind down its board representation when it only has an older, small, minority stake remaining in a company.” Rudisill did not respond to requests from The Post for comment.

Sheehy stepped down from the company on July 1, saying, “This exceptional team deserves a fully focused CEO during its busy fire season.” The new executive chairman said the board “has been preparing his possible departure,” though company filings had previously said Sheehy “will resign as Chief Executive Officer if he is elected to U.S. Senate.”

Sheehy, who is now campaigning full time, has a net worth spanning $102 million to $297 million, according to an analysis of his financial disclosure filed in June. He owns a home in Bozeman that property records show is valued at about $2.5 million, a 20,000-acre cattle ranch, rental property in Big Sky, Mont., and cabins in Polson, Mont.

The company’s July 1 report to the SEC notes the continued pressure to raise cash and the purchase of another aerospace company for $17.5 million. It also addresses the “material weaknesses” noted in the annual report, saying Bridger did not misstate its overall financial position.

Moeller says early reports of this year’s wildfire season show a dramatic increase over 2023. The company has also secured an “ATM agreement” with an investment banking firm that allows it to issue up to $100 million in stock.

Bridger, though, has less than $8 million in unrestricted cash as of the end of March — in violation of the requirements of the bond deal — and has reported that it might not be able to meet the minimum cash threshold over the next 12 months. Stock sold 18 months ago at $10 per share closed Friday at $3.27.

Paying down debt, buying four additional Super Scoopers and expanding operations outside the United States are key to the company’s survival, Martin said.

“They’ve simply got to start generating cash,” Martin said. “That’s going to be tough — but it’s possible, particularly if they get a strong fire season … It’s a very narrow path right now.”

Liz Goodwin and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

Former president Donald Trump predicted Thursday that abortion is “going to be a very small issue” this election, portraying it as a settled matter.

“I think the abortion issue has been taken down many notches,” he said during a news conference at his gilded Mar-a-Lago estate. “I don’t think it’s a big factor anymore.”

But over a thousand miles away, Democrats were betting on the opposite.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, standing beside Vice President Kamala Harris as part of the newly minted Democratic presidential ticket, forecasted that Republicans would do more to restrict abortion nationwide than they were letting on.

“They will ban abortion across this country no matter what Congress says,” Walz warned while speaking at the United Auto Workers Local 900 union hall in Wayne, Mich.

“That’s my choice,” a woman in the crowd shouted.

“Damn right it is,” Walz responded.

In a string of events in battleground states across the country this week, Harris and Walz riled up Democratic supporters with similar one-liners, calling the patchwork of abortion restrictions in various states “Trump’s abortion bans” and promising that “we’ll fight for a woman’s right to choose.” The mention of reproductive health care in any fashion stood in stark contrast to the message from the Republican ticket. Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), held campaign events alongside those by Harris and Walz in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and made little mention of abortion or reproductive health care.

The disparate approach to the issue on the campaign trail highlights the complicated politics of the moment. Republican voters are largely supportive of some abortion restrictions, though there are disagreements on the details, and Trump has taken credit for the Supreme Court overturning federal protections for abortion, saying it was a popular decision. But most Americans say the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade was bad for the country. Abortion rights advocates have won battles against antiabortion candidates and ballot referendums since the decision, and Democrats won midterm victories in campaigns that focused heavily on reproductive rights.

Democrats believe they can once again harness that energy to help them keep the White House. But the Trump campaign is betting on a message that voters in individual states now get to decide how to address the issue.

“Has Trump found a way to defuse the issue by saying everybody wanted us to give this back to the states for 50 years, which might not be factual?” Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, said in an interview. “He’s trying.”

Harris has placed blame for the harshest bans on abortions on Trump since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. But the Democratic message around abortion has also expanded to broadly include all reproductive health care, motivated in part by an Alabama Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that sparked outrage and debate over the use of in vitro fertilization. On the campaign trail this week, Walz brought up his own family’s experience using IVF to conceive his children, saying the issue is personal for him.

Walz on Friday described going through “years” of fertility treatments with his wife, and the devastation of learning the treatments had failed. His eldest daughter was conceived via IVF, and the process inspired her name, Hope, he has said.

“So when Vice President Kamala Harris and I talk about freedom, we’re very clear: We mean the freedom to make your own health-care decisions,” Walz told cheering Arizona voters.

At the same time, Trump and Vance have spent little time discussing reproductive health care with voters. Vance did not bring it up in the past two weeks of speeches in five battleground states. And Trump at a news conference Thursday said he believes the issue of abortion bans is resolved because it is being decided on by states — but he also suggested he was open to revoking access to a key abortion pill.

“I’ve done what every Democrat and every Republican wanted to have done,” Trump said. “And we brought that issue back to the states.”

Later in the news conference, Trump was asked if he would direct the Food and Drug Administration to “revoke access” to mifepristone, a medication used for abortions, and he did not reject the idea. (His campaign later said he didn’t hear the question and maintained the issue is settled because the Supreme Court declined to limit mifepristone access, even though that decision has no bearing on whether a future administration could restrict the drug.)

Although Republicans have traditionally advocated for a federal abortion ban, the party has retreated from that position under Trump, striking the language from its party platform at the Republican National Convention last month. Trump has said the issue should be determined by states and has added that he would not sign a federal bill banning or restricting abortion.

About 1 in 8 voters rank abortion as the most important issue for their vote in 2024, according to a KFF poll conducted in February. Those voters were mostly women, young and Black, cohorts that could be critical in this election.

Asked about the messaging and concerns of voters who rank abortion as a major issue, the Trump campaign pointed to the other issues they are focused on, mainly the economy and immigration.

“Kamala Harris is the most unpopular Vice President in history and doesn’t have any policy plans to fix the top issues voters care about, such as ending inflation and securing the border,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “President Trump has been very clear — he supports the rights of states to make decisions on abortion.”

Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said abortion is likely to drive turnout, especially women and young voters. She pointed to the string of ballot referendums, elections and special elections in which voters have sided with fewer restrictions on abortions or stopped harsher bans from passing.

“This is a loser for Republicans,” Kamarck said.

On Saturday, Hawaii will end voting in its House and Senate primary elections, where Democratic incumbents are expected to easily win their races and are likely to defeat their challengers in November in this solidly blue state.

Leading the top of the ballot in the Democratic primary for Senate is Sen. Mazie Hirono (D), who is favored to win a third term. Hirono was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013, and before that represented Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District for six years. She will face salesman Clyde Lewman, who ran in the 2022 gubernatorial primary, and former systems engineer Ron Curtis, who ran against her in 2018 as the Republican candidate for the Senate seat.

Hirono has raised more than $4 million, data from the Federal Election Commission shows. Curtis and Lewman had not reported to the FEC that they had raised any campaign funds.

The Republican primary for the Senate seat is a crowded race with six candidates, including former state representative Bob McDermott. McDermott was a member of Hawaii’s House of Representatives from 1996 to 2002 and then again from 2012 to 2022, when he ran against the incumbent, Sen. Brian Schatz (D), in the general election for the U.S. Senate seat.

Of the six Republican candidates on the ballot, only McDermott and Adriel Lam, a veteran who ran for a state Senate seat in 2022, had raised funds as of Thursday evening, FEC data shows. The other candidates are paralegal Melba Amaral, attorney Paul Dolan, attorney Emmanuel Tipon and Arturo Reyes, who has previously run for a U.S. Senate seat as a nonpartisan candidate.

In Hawaii’s 1st Congressional District, incumbent Rep. Ed Case, who has held the seat since 2019, faces Cecil Hale in the Democratic primary. Case first served in Congress from 2002 to 2007, representing the state’s 2nd Congressional District. In the Republican primary, Patrick Largey is running unopposed.

In Hawaii’s 2nd Congressional District, both Rep. Jill Tokuda (D), who is seeking her second term, and Republican Steve Bond are running unopposed in their primaries. In 2022, Bond had an unsuccessful run in Hawaii’s Republican primary for a Senate seat.

Late one night in July 2022 when she was House speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) got word that House Republicans had pulled support for a bipartisan bill to reenergize America’s semiconductor industry.

Some liberal Democrats were also squeamish about providing corporate welfare, so some of her advisers suggested pulling the bill from the next day’s schedule.

“Let me do it my way,” Pelosi recalled, giving instructions to her staff. “Go tell the Republicans to go to hell. We’re going to go without them. We’re going to go without them.”

Not a single Democrat voted against the bill. Once it was clearly passing and heading to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature, a couple dozen Republicans voted for what would become a popular piece of legislation.

Now the former House speaker, Pelosi recounted that story in a 100-minute interview Wednesday with a half-dozen veteran reporters and columnists who chronicled her 20-year reign as the Democratic leader. The long sit-down was part of her book tour promoting “The Art of Power,” which includes many of these tales of her rise, then fall, and then rise back up to the most powerful post in Congress.

The book, which she started planning many years ago, serves as a lesson in how she wielded power more effectively than most of the other 55 speakers — all White men. It also published just in the wake of another illustration of Pelosi’s continuing influence, even as she has rejoined the rank-and-file without even a seat on a legislative committee.

Many media appearances over the past week have focused on Pelosi’s behind-the-scenes role in helping advise fellow Democrats in their effort to push Biden to step aside from his reelection effort.

While she says she did not call anyone, Pelosi acknowledged receiving “hundreds” of messages from concerned Democrats. She believes the outpouring of support for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign has validated the actions to persuade Biden to step aside, but it’s left her more than four-decade-friendship with the president upended.

“History’s in a hurry. We’re right in the center of it all here. At some point, I will come to terms with my own piece, my own role in this,” she told reporters Wednesday.

Pelosi intended to write this book many years ago and focus on four key issues that framed her first stint as House speaker: her battles with China over human rights abuses; her opposition to the Iraq War; her critical help to the Bush administration in passing the 2008 financial relief package; and passing the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

But by the time she got around to writing after leaving her leadership post at the end of 2022, Pelosi had experienced the Donald Trump presidency, the 2021 Capitol insurrection and the brutal attack on her husband in October 2022 — all topics that had to be addressed.

In the preface she writes about “Know Your Why,” a slogan she has cited for years as advice to those who want to run for elective office so that they can be grounded by the right principles in the job. Her “why” has always been a three-word mantra — “for the children” — signifying leaving the planet cleaner and safer with a bottom-up economy.

But throughout the Wednesday discussion, and after her actions last month, it is clear that Pelosi has a new “why” in this epilogue phase of her career: defeating Trump.

She pounded a table nine times as she explained that her motivation in opposing Biden’s continued campaign was solely about stopping Trump. “My goal in life was that that man would never set foot in the White House again,” she said.

There’s an echo in her second stint as speaker, which began with the last two years of Trump’s presidency, of her first tenure, beginning with George W. Bush’s final two years in the Oval Office.

Each of those congressional terms, 2007-09 and 2019-21, included strong clashes with the GOP president but then also included major bipartisan deals on global crises that ended up being a political burden for Democrats and not Republicans.

In the fall of 2008 as the financial system collapsed, Pelosi’s Democrats provided the vast majority of votes for the $700 billion bailout, stabilizing the system and avoiding an economic depression. But once Obama took office with massive Democratic majorities, Republicans blamed his administration and Pelosi for the lingering Great Recession and its high unemployment.

Voters recoiled as the titans of Wall Street avoided any criminal liability as millions of homes were lost and the unemployment rate topped 10 percent. “Nobody paid a price,” Pelosi lamented.

Obama officials were unsuccessful in creating a campaign to sell their legislative achievements — including a nearly $800 billion stimulus that cut taxes on the middle class — and it all got lumped into bitter feelings about the economy and the bank bailout.

“I truly believe that was why we lost in 2010,” Pelosi said, a midterm drubbing that lost 63 seats and handed the GOP the majority for eight years.

In 2020, fresh off impeaching Trump over his Ukraine actions, Pelosi again worked with the GOP administration when the coronavirus pandemic killed millions and shuttered parts of the global economy. Democrats again provided most of the votes for several relief packages that tallied almost $3 trillion — even sending direct cash payments to taxpayers that were signed by none other than Trump.

Biden won in November 2020 and Democrats, with majorities in both the House and Senate, set out to clean up the Trump administration’s disjointed handling of the pandemic — beginning with a nearly $2 trillion recovery package.

Month by month, with no effective pushback from Biden and Democrats, voters came to place more blame on the new administration for a crisis that started under the GOP’s watch. Republicans won back the House majority in 2022, this time by a narrow four-seat margin, but they have since used that power to boost Trump at almost every turn.

Pelosi resigned from leadership and returned to life in the rank-and-file, working across the street in a House office building for the first time since 2001.

Pelosi will attend the Democratic National Convention this month in Chicago with no real responsibilities — as leader of her caucus she was the co-chair for the previous five conventions — other than a likely speaking role.

Her main political role these days is still raising money and giving advice when asked by others. No speaker in modern times has left the post and stuck around this long in office, but Pelosi rather enjoys the freedom and dispensing wisdom that sounds like a mix of a crime boss and local party activist.

For dealing with Republicans who made fun of the attack on her husband, she said: “Treat everyone as a friend but know who your friends are.”

But a few unnamed GOP lawmakers received the bluntest of messages. “Some of them,” Pelosi said she replied to them, “I just say: ‘We’re out to get you, you’re dead.’”

When it comes to her discussions with Biden, she returned to a motto that former California governor Jerry Brown taught her when she chaired the state Democratic Party in the early 1980s: “Those who talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk.”

She believes Democrats have essentially missed their window to sell the legislative accomplishments, such as the semiconductor plan and the infrastructure bill, ahead of the November elections.

She is advising the Harris campaign team to focus on future proposals such as the expanded child tax credit that expired.

“Really, if I could do one thing, it would be child care. It’ll make the biggest difference in our economy,” she said.

Her “why,” at least through November, is squarely on defeating Trump, whom she called “unpatriotic” and whom she compared to fascist regimes for his attempts to destroy faith in independent media.

She rejected the thoughts from book reviewers that her book title was meant as a tweak on Trump’s original best-selling memoir in the 1980s, “The Art of the Deal.”

“Nothing that I do has anything to do with him, except his downfall,” Pelosi said.

She treasures some friendships with GOP elder statesmen. George W. Bush is a legitimate friend who hosted her at an event early last year, and Pelosi still hasn’t cooked the steaks that Elizabeth Dole sent her three years ago after she visited Bob Dole before he died.

But she’s got no time for new friendships with younger Republicans who like Trump. Pelosi recalled several of the first-term Republicans from New York asking her to attend events tied to their shared Italian heritage.

“When you’re not there, maybe I’ll come,” Pelosi responded to the crew, several of whom are in swing districts that will determine the majority.

She declined their pleas.

“I do not like you. I’m out to get you, I’m out to get you,” she said. “Your defeat is my goal.”

Tim Walz took a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook at his Friday night rally with Vice President Kamala Harris: He bragged about the size of their crowds.

In Philadelphia, the new Democratic ticket packed a 10,000-person arena. A similar crowd showed up in Eau Claire, Wis. “On Wednesday, the largest crowd of the campaign showed up in Detroit, Michigan,” Walz boasted.

Then the vice-presidential pick beamed out at the audience in suburban Phoenix — more than 15,000 people, Democrats said — and delivered the punchline with a big grin.

“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Walz said.

For years Trump, the GOP nominee for president, has been the one boasting about how many people he could pack into a venue. Now Democrats are eager to play the crowd game, too. With enthusiasm surging for their new presidential ticket, they have spent the week needling Trump on a topic he famously obsesses over.

Trump has pushed back with tallies of his own — often inflated.

“I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds,” Trump said at a news conference this week. “Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.”

He bragged, implausibly, that his Washington speech on Jan. 6, 2021 — just before a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol — drew more people than the famous “I Have a Dream” speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

Trump returned to the subject Friday night at his rally in Bozeman, Mont., hours after Walz made his jabs. He mocked the recent attention on Harris: “They said, ‘Oh, she had a big crowd, oh what a crowd’ — the press is talking about the crowd.”

He pointed to his own massive rallies. What about the tens of thousands of people that came to a rally in New Jersey? What about his event last year in Pickens, S. C.? (Trump claimed 82,000 people; local officials pegged a 2023 rally at about 50,000). What about the “Front Row Joes” who show up at every event?

“We have so many people,” Trump said.

A Trump campaign spokeswoman also dismissed Democrats’ newfound interest in large audiences. “Isn’t it funny how the Democrats and Fake News want to talk about crowd sizes now after they have ignored and downplayed the unprecedented and massive crowds that President Trump has been pulling for eight years,” said spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who suggested that Harris’s use of celebrity performances at some rallies amounts to bribery.

Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Trump has been “rage-Truthing about our grassroots enthusiasm and melting down publicly, both online and in front of cameras” while Harris and Walz hit battleground states.

“Donald is welcome to keep doing his thing — our campaign will be putting in the work it will take to win this election,” Chitika said.

Trump has always treated crowd size as an all-important metric. His big 2016 rallies were an early sign of the loyal base that propelled him to the White House and a point of contrast with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump began his presidency with the false claim that more than 1 million people showed up for his inauguration; his then-press secretary Sean Spicer dug in to declare, incorrectly, that Trump drew “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

Facing Joe Biden in 2020 and again in 2024, Trump loved to mock Biden for holding smaller events and his campaign delighted in sharing pictures of extra seats at Democratic gatherings. At rallies, Trump often accused the media of ignoring his crowd sizes and demanded that the cameras pan around. His supporters sometimes pointed to the scale of Trump’s rallies to support their false claims that Trump actually won the 2020 election.

Facing pressure this summer to drop out after a devastating debate performance in June, Biden began to point to crowd size: “How many people draw crowds like I did today?” he told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.

Stephanopoulos responded: “I don’t think you want to play the crowd game. Donald Trump can draw big crowds.”

Now — with Biden out of the race and Harris finding momentum — Democrats are leaning into the subject, jabbing at Trump and reveling in comparisons to the enthusiasm once generated by Barack Obama.

On social media, Harris’s campaign was eager to compare their big Friday night rally in Glendale, Ariz. to a recent Trump event at a smaller venue in Phoenix. The campaign also jabbed at Trump’s Friday event in Bozeman. “Meanwhile at @realdonaldtrump’s rally …,” Harris’s campaign wrote on X over a video clip showing empty Trump seats — ignoring the fact that Trump was set to speak later than Harris and that many people were still filtering in. The roughly 8,500-person venue in Montana was ultimately packed and rowdy.

Leavitt, the Trump spokeswoman, jabbed back at the Harris team Saturday by noting that black drapes covered some seating at the arena in Arizona.

In interviews, Trump supporters in Bozeman brushed off the show of force by Harris this week. Warren Armstrong, 73, blamed “the fake news” when asked about Harris’s crowds and said, “They make things look great.”

Onstage, Trump vented at the media, too. He claimed media outlets ignored the size of his New Jersey crowd — though many did cover it. “They don’t talk about it because they’re fake,” Trump said.

In Arizona, Julie Jonuska, 63, a yoga therapist from Scottsdale, said Harris “has created more excitement, for sure,” gesturing around the Desert Diamond Arena where thousands of supporters still lingered while Harris and Walz worked the rope line Friday.

Jonuska — who wore a button of Harris’s face reading “say it to my face,” the line Harris deployed at her Atlanta rally daring Trump to debate her — said she believes Harris can reach an audience that Biden could not, saying that “now Trump’s the old man.”

“The crowd is your everyday normal people,” she said. “It’s about the people, and not about one person, like Trump is the party of Trump.”

Knowles reported from Bozeman, Mont. Dylan Wells in Glendale, Ariz., contributed to this report.