Wednesday’s fatal shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer threatens to recreate the political conditions of “peak woke” thought to be reversed by President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, just months before the midterm elections.
Once again, the precipitating incident occurred in Minneapolis, and progressive Minnesota Democrats are leading the charge. This includes Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), just days after a Minnesota day care fraud scandal that was arguably enabled by left-wing racial sensitivities brought an end to his reelection campaign and possibly his political career.
Unlike the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, however, there was not even an initial period of unity. Trump, for example, condemned post-Floyd rioting but not the arrest of police officer Derek Chauvin, who was later convicted of murder in the case. Then, in his first term as president, he said in the Rose Garden that “all Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd.”
But Trump took a clearer stand in favor of the ICE officer on Wednesday, saying on social media, “The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
“The situation is being studied, in its entirety,” he added, “but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!”
The video captured by eyewitnesses quickly became a Rorschach test, in which viewers saw either a woman tragically killed while attempting to run over a federal law enforcement officer or an obvious case of ICE overreach.
Walz may see this as a way to stave off political extinction as he leads an anti-Trump revolt. “What we’re seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines, and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV, and today that recklessness cost someone their life,” he said at a news conference. The governance in question, according to Walz, is Trump’s.
Just as Floyd’s death triggered riots and protests nationwide, though especially in heavily Democratic areas, Wednesday’s events could intensify the episodically violent anti-ICE demonstrations that have spread throughout Trump’s second term.
Democrats have been trying to escape the excesses of Black Lives Matter and woke culture for much of the past six years. After taking over as the Democratic presidential nominee last year, former Vice President Kamala Harris was unable to shake comments she made during this time period or while she was competing for progressive support during her first short-lived campaign for the White House in 2019. When Democrats finally turned to Harris in 2024, she was not helped by her choice of Walz as her running mate.
The influential Democratic data scientist David Shor concluded these issues hurt Democrats as far back as 2020, when Republicans gained House seats even as Trump lost his reelection bid. Democrats’ Hispanic support dropped, and the party became increasingly reliant on college-educated white voters. “In liberal circles, racism has been defined in highly ideological terms,” Shor told New York Magazine in 2021. “And this theoretical perspective on what racism means and the nature of racial inequality have become a big part of the group identity of college-educated Democrats, white and nonwhite. But it’s not necessarily how most nonwhite, working-class people understand racism.”
One of the reasons Joe Biden was able to win anyway was that he did not follow the Democrats’ race to the left in either the 2020 primaries or the general election. “The Biden campaign does not care about the critical race theory-intersectional left that has taken over places like the New York Times,” a Democratic strategist memorably told Politico at the time. “The Biden campaign’s unspoken primary slogan could have been, ‘Twitter isn’t real life,’” the authors of that story wrote.
As president, however, Biden didn’t consistently govern the way he campaigned. Most disastrously, he allowed a large influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border rather than anger the left-wing activists who once called former President Barack Obama, who was for eight years Biden’s boss, the “deporter-in-chief.” The Biden border crisis created the political space for the tough second-term Trump immigration policies Democrats now decry.
While midterm election history and popular attitudes about the economy, especially the cost of living, give Democrats a leg up this year, a re-awokening could set them back. The party and its leading candidates could once again be painted as hostile to basic immigration controls and law enforcement more generally.
There are risks for Republicans, too. One is that the pendulum could swing back toward the Democrats. While voters like that Trump has secured the border, they are more ambivalent about interior enforcement measures and may now view illegal immigration as being under control. The swing needn’t be huge — while Trump’s 2024 political comeback was impressive, he still won the popular vote by just 1.5 points and the battleground states that put him over the top in the Electoral College by similarly narrow margins.
THE SPECTACULAR FAILURE OF THE TIM WALZ DEMOCRAT
Another is that some of the voters who have been gravitating toward the Trump-era GOP, such as Hispanics, may be turned off by the combination of ICE and inflation’s aftershocks. This could cause them to stay home in November or return to the Democrats. Meanwhile, the Resistance voters are high-intensity and sure to turn out. Progressives and hardcore anti-Trumpers are predisposed to believe that the president is unleashing ICE to target Americans in the streets.
There are key differences between now and 2020, the biggest being the absence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economically damaging lockdowns. However, a return to similar cultural conditions, even before the summer months, just ahead of elections that will decide control of Congress, would be an unpredictable and highly combustible turn of events.