In Brief:
When Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz won re-election in 2022, his party also took the majority in the state Senate, giving Democrats full control of state government for the first time in nearly a decade. They did not waste the opportunity.
They passed a long list of progressive bills on issues such as abortion rights, gun control, voting rights, marijuana legalization and protections for transgender individuals, as well as spending packages for education and infrastructure that topped $2 billion each. “We had a historic session here in 2023 and 2024,” says Democratic state Rep. Frank Hornstein. “In every area — whether public safety or education or the environment — there were massive, monumental, historic bills passed.”
On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris picked Walz as her running mate on the Democratic national ticket. Walz, who had almost no national presence until his name appeared on her short list, is being hailed by unions, environmentalists and other groups on the left. “Gov. Walz is known as the education governor because he has been an unwavering champion for public school students and educators,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.
Republicans wasted no time knocking Walz, with former President Donald Trump’s campaign calling him a “West Coast wannabe” for trying to spread California-style policies. “While Tim Walz will try to sell himself as a relatable moderate, his record shows that he consistently backs the most liberal policies that national Democrats have to offer,” said Sara Craig, executive director of the Republican Governors Association.
Ideological differences aside, Walz has taken hits from home-state Republicans for a series of state programs that have seen fraud convictions or investigations into overspending and lack of oversight. “We have a pattern of systemic fraud in the state of Minnesota,” Lisa DeMuth, the GOP leader of the Minnesota House, said during a news conference last month. “If those in his administration and the commissioners that he has hand-selected are not willing to take responsibility, then he needs to.”
Trump and his campaign expressed delight, at least publicly, about the selection of Walz. Many observers expected that Harris would choose Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in hopes of locking up that key swing state. “Harris opted not to go with the conventional wisdom,” says David Schultz, a political scientist at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. “The conventional wisdom would have been to pick somebody from a swing state who’s more politically moderate than she is. With Walz, she picked someone who’s not from a swing state and basically sent a signal that she’s going to run from the left.”
No Republican presidential candidate has carried Minnesota since Richard M. Nixon’s 49-state sweep back in 1972. Democrats hope that Walz’s folksy, straight-talking manner will play well in the key neighboring states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
“People have seen a lot of him lately in the last few weeks on the news, speaking up for the vice president and the Democratic Party,” says Minnesota state Sen. Scott Dibble, a Democrat. “They’ve seen a regular person who is really normal and approachable and plain-spoken, talking about regular, everyday, bread-and-butter issues that people care about.”
Political Calculations
Last year’s transportation package was 30 years in the making, says Dibble, who chairs the Minnesota Senate Transportation and Public Safety Committee. It was a long ride through all the ups and downs of divided control, with some governors along the way threatening to veto bills that spent more than they wanted. Walz took a different approach.
“The governor put together a package that definitely had new investments but was not as robust as I would have liked,” Dibble says. “As soon as he introduced the bill, he called me on the phone and said, ‘This is my starting point, it’s a floor and not a ceiling. If you can put together the political support, I’m with you 100 percent of the way.’”
It was like that on a lot of bills. Democratic legislators say there have definitely been differences and negotiations between the branches on various pieces of legislation, but Walz was not only willing to find common ground but to make key calls and deploy surrogates to get bills over the finish line.
Hornstein, the state representative, is known for doing impressions. “The one I do of him, it’s joyful, it’s positive,” Hornstein says. “That’s rare in politics, but he comes from that Humphrey-Wellstone tradition of getting energy from people and being joyful.” (Hubert Humphrey, known as the “happy warrior,” and Paul Wellstone were both Democratic U.S. senators from Minnesota.)
Harris campaign insiders told reporters on Tuesday that one of the reasons Walz got the nod is that she was wary about Shapiro’s transparent ambition. She saw in Walz someone who was politically sympathetic and could be a good governing partner should they win.
“He is not consumed by political ambition like Shapiro,” says Larry Jacobs, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “Harris won’t be worrying about him running in 2028 if she loses, or being anything but loyal.”
Not a Progressive-Come-Lately
Born and raised in Nebraska, Walz served in the National Guard and became a high school history teacher and coach in Minnesota. He entered politics in 2006 by unseating a 12-year Republican incumbent in a conservative, rural district in the southern part of the state. Schultz, the Hamline professor, notes that Walz ran as a centrist, at one time earning a 100 percent rating from the National Rifle Association.
“A lot of people say he’s only been a progressive lately, but he was pro-gay marriage way back in 2006, and that was a different time,” says Matt Little, a former Democratic state senator. “He was still speaking from his heart.”
Walz ran for governor as a unifier, making “One Minnesota” his theme. During his first term in office, he had to deal with the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic — winning praise from Democrats and complaints from Republicans for taking a strict public health approach — as well as the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Republicans have complained that Walz hesitated to send the National Guard into that city as parts of it were in flames. “He was fearful of alienating his progressive base, who were supporting the riots,” Minnesota Republican Party Chair David Hann said last week on Fox News.
During his first term, Walz unsuccessfully pushed for a 20-cent per gallon increase in the gas tax. As with many of his priorities, he was frustrated by the GOP’s state Senate majority at the time. Since his re-election, Walz and the Democratic legislative majorities have been able to enact a long list of major progressive legislation. One of the Democrats’ first acts last year was to codify abortion rights as “fundamental” in the state. Walz and his wife, also an educator, have two children who were conceived using in vitro fertilization. “It’s not by chance that we named our daughter Hope,” Walz said earlier this year as IVF grew more controversial.
Last year, Walz signed an executive order guaranteeing access to gender-affirming care and signed a bill making Minnesota a “sanctuary” state for transgender individuals coming to the state for such care. Under Walz, Minnesota has created a paid family and medical leave plan that takes effect in two years, funded by payroll taxes. The state also offers free school breakfast and lunch to all children, regardless of income, and free college tuition to families earning less than $80,000.
“Gov. Walz has shown the country the power of spending political capital rather than banking it,” Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said in a statement. (Walz has been serving as chair of the Democratic Governors Association; Kelly issued the statement as the group’s vice chair.)
Cases of Fraud
If all this delights progressives, Republicans complain that Walz squandered a budget surplus that stood at $17.5 billion at one point last year. “He has channeled, encouraged and signed the most progressive body of legislation in modern Minnesota history, including an increase of more than 40 percent in spending [over the course of his tenure] and a law allowing undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses,” says Jacobs, the University of Minnesota political scientist.
Republicans have also charged Walz with mismanagement. Just this week, the federal Department of Labor reported that Minnesota issued $430 million worth of overpayments for unemployment insurance from July 2020 through June 2023 (although that was among the lower rates of overpayment among states during that period).
In June, five individuals were convicted in a fraud case involving $250 million stolen from Feeding Our Future, a pandemic-era program meant to feed hungry children. A series of additional trials involving a web of other individuals is expected. Walz has noted that no state employees have been implicated.
Both the state and the FBI are also investigating multiple programs providing services to autistic children for possible Medicaid fraud. The number of providers has increased by 700 percent during Walz’s time in office, with spending increasing even faster.
Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor has complained that the Walz administration has not listened to the alarm bells it’s sounded in regard to oversight of Feeding Our Future and the Department of Labor and Industry’s failure to verify eligibility adequately when it comes to a $500 million worker pay program. “I have seen increasing rejection of our findings and recommendations, or denial or dismissiveness or excuses,” Judy Randall, the legislative auditor, told the MinneapolisStar Tribune last month. “There’s definitely a shoot the messenger feeling.”
Walz did propose creating a new State Fraud Unit within the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension last year, but the Legislature did not approve it. “One of the things he’s going to get tagged with is the fiscal mismanagement argument,” says Schultz, the Hamline political scientist. “That’s going to be one of the strong criticisms that the Republicans are going to hit him with.”
