Tim Kaine
Tim Kaine has been a United States senator for Virginia since 2013 and was Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016. Born in Minnesota in 1958 and raised in Kansas City, where his father ran a small ironworking shop, he studied economics at the University of Missouri and law at Harvard. He interrupted his legal studies to spend nine months as a Jesuit volunteer in Honduras, running a vocational school in El Progreso, where he became fluent in Spanish — he later delivered the first entirely Spanish-language speech on the Senate floor. He practised civil rights law in Richmond for seventeen years, specialising in housing discrimination cases. He entered politics on the city council in 1994, became mayor of Richmond in 1998, lieutenant governor in 2002, and governor of Virginia from 2006 to 2010. He was one of the first prominent officials to endorse Barack Obama in 2007, and chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2009. As governor he faced the Virginia Tech shooting in April 2007, in which thirty-two people were killed, and later signed an executive order closing a gap in background checks for people involuntarily committed. He has made war powers his defining Senate issue, arguing consistently across administrations of both parties that Congress must vote before military action. He forced votes on Iran in 2020 and pushed to repeal the 1991 and 2002 Iraq authorisations, which succeeded in the Senate in 2023. A practising Catholic who personally opposes abortion but votes to protect its legality, he was chosen partly to reassure moderates in 2016. The ticket lost the electoral college while winning the popular vote by nearly three million.
- Lived: 1958 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: senator, governor
