For Hope Walz, the night of the 2024 presidential election can be summed up in two selfies.
Around 8 p.m., she photographed herself beaming into a mirror in a Washington hotel room, wearing a blue hoodie in support of the Democratic ticket that included her father, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, as its vice-presidential nominee. Later that evening, she took a close-up of her face, a mixture of tears and mascara streaming down her cheeks.
Afterward, she walked around Washington with campaign staff and began to process that the wildest three months of her life had ended in heartbreak.
“It is a new reality,” Ms. Walz, now 24, said in an interview earlier this month. “I kind of accepted that I was never going to be the same, and I don’t want to be.”
Ms. Walz has had, to put it mildly, an unusual year. Last summer, her father was the surprise selection to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate after beating out a field of better-known contenders on the national stage.
The Walz family — Tim and his wife, Gwen, who met as teachers, and their children, Hope and her younger brother, Gus — was thrust into the national spotlight practically overnight. Ms. Walz, then 23, spent the remainder of the campaign crisscrossing the country by her father’s side, the tattooed Gen Z foil to his slightly square Midwestern Dad.
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