Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate Tuesday. The move is a huge win for the right-to-repair movement.
In 2023, Walz signed an omnibus bill that included robust right-to-repair provisions. Minnesota was the fourth state to pass right-to-repair laws, but it was by far the most comprehensive. Minnesota’s Digital Fair Repair Act made it so that companies have to provide diagnostic tools, documentation, and repair parts available to the public and third-party repair stores.
The Minnesota law covers all electronics except cybersecurity tools, video game consoles, cars, medical devices, and farm equipment.
Walz has been a Veep frontrunner for weeks and as the scrutiny around Harris’ potential picks heated up, an old clip of him surfaced online. In the picture, Walz stands in front of the open hood of a 2014 Ford Edge working a tool near the headlight. In a companion video, Walz sits in his car showing off the headlight harness he had to replace. “For $7.99 at NAPA Auto Parts here in the city, you can replace this,” Walz says.
A favorite from my Walz archive. pic.twitter.com/IXOzUnRne1
— Matt Wagenius (@mattwagenius) August 5, 2024
It’s a folksy and candid video, the kind of thing that endears a person to a politician. “Here is a Governor who knows how to fix things,” a political wizard might say. Thankfully, Walz wants to make it easier for everyone to repair their own stuff.
Companies have spent the last 20 years making it difficult for people to fix their own stuff. If you drop an iPhone and shatter the screen, Apple makes more money if you buy a new phone than it does if you repair it.
But the tide has turned against companies making it hard to repair stuff. The FTC formally endorsed the right-to-repair in 2021, Biden signed an executive order the same year aimed at making it easier for people to repair stuff, and local legislation has become increasingly popular.
The public overwhelmingly supports this legislation and even companies like Apple and Google have begun to loosen restrictions. Others, like John Deere, have continued to fight against the changing tide. Farm equipment is one of the biggest sources of right-to-repair woes in America and it’s one of the markets not protected by the Minnesota bill.
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