Who Is Tim Kaine's Wife? Anne Holton, Champion Of Education, Foster Programs, Is Married To Clinton VP Pick

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine may have been thrust onto the national stage last week when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that he would run alongside her as she seeks the presidency this fall, but he is not alone in receiving that new attention. He’s also not the only politically experienced member of his family.

Kaine’s wife, Anne Holton, will join her husband on the campaign this fall and has quite the resume of her own. Holton, well-known as half of a Virginia power couple alongside her husband, has a history of public service and advocacy on a variety of issues from child welfare to education. In fact, her resume is more extensive than her husband's on those issues.

Holton has been Virginia’s secretary of education, a position that she took after her husband moved on from his post as governor of the state and into the U.S. Senate. Prior to her time in office, Holton served as a juvenile and domestic relations district court judge from 1998 to 2005. After that year, when she left that post to be first lady of Virginia, Holton supported foster care initiatives and was a consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation on Foster care reforms, focusing on judiciary reforms, according to her government bio. She has also worked on community college programs trying to extend access to foster children.

“I have spent much of my working life focused on children and families at the margin, with full appreciation of the crucial role education can and must play in helping young people escape poverty and become successful adults,” Holton wrote in a 2015 op-ed in the Washington Post.

Holton is a lifelong Virginian and the daughter of former Virginia Gov. A. Linwood Holton, a Republican, who worked on behalf of integration in a state that was known for resisting those efforts. She met Kaine at Harvard Law School, where they both graduated. She completed her undergraduate studies at Princeton.