Michael Huber 
Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz doesn’t answer his phone when he sees an unknown number on the screen. This reportedly even includes calls from the vice president of the United States offering him a spot on the 2024 Democratic ticket.
On Tuesday, Selina Wang — the senior White House correspondent for ABC News – tweeted that Vice President Kamala Harris had some difficulty in reaching Walz when calling to ask if he would be her running mate. It reportedly took multiple calls for the two-term Minnesota governor to finally pick up when Harris offered him the job due to the call’s number showing up as unknown on Walz’s phone.
“This morning when Harris called Governor Walz to share the news, he didn’t answer at first because it said no caller ID, a source tells me. So Harris had to call again. The second time Walz picked up the phone call,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
The responses to Wang’s post were full of warm sentiment for the Minnesota governor, with MLB.com stats analyst Mike Petriello opining that this made Walz “the most relatable any politician has ever been.” Wired political reporter Makena Kelly tweeted that Walz was “part of the 55+ demographic that learned not to pickup unknown calls for fear of scams.” And former Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York) tweeted: “This happens more often than people think.”
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“He texted the number ‘stop,'” tweeted musician Shilly.
The data seems to back up Jones’ claim. According to a Pew study from 2020, roughly 80% of Americans don’t answer their phones for unknown callers.
“The majority of Americans (67%) say their general practice is to not answer the phone when an incoming call is from an unknown number but to check a voicemail if one is left,” Pew’s Colleen McClain reported. “Less clear is why Americans are not picking up their phones. Some might be overwhelmed by robocalls, others might be taking advantage of call blocking technology and some might screen calls for reasons related to their work or their daily routines.”
The growing number of Americans wary of unknown callers has also worried pollsters. Gallup CEO Jon Clifton said in May that the process of polling has been fundamentally changed with the advent of cellphones. He told Marketplace’s Lily Jamali that response rates for surveys conducted via cellphone were typically “abysmal.”
“It’s bad. I mean, it’s so bad that much of the underlying data that we consume as Americans, even things like unemployment, come from survey research,” he said. “A lot of people think that the unemployment number that gets provided to us, you know, through a CNN news break alert, through Axios, that kind of thing, that information on a monthly basis is a massive survey of 60,000 people. But everyone’s suffering from this problem because people are harder to reach. The other thing is that people are less trusting of organization[s], so it can cause them to be less likely to participate.”
Click here to watch the video of Harris finally reaching Walz and asking him to be her running mate.
