Before Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) became the first casualty of the burgeoning Minnesota day care fraud scandal, he was supposed to be the reason white men and working-class white people more generally might vote Democratic.
Walz, who abandoned his gubernatorial reelection bid on Monday, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024. He was billed as a dad’s dad, an affable football coach, a fixer of trucks who was not afraid to get his hands dirty under the hood.
Instead, Walz was judged by many voters to be as “weird” as he claimed Vice President JD Vance — then a freshman Ohio senator and junior partner on the 2024 Republican ticket — was. He, or at least his aides, bungled a basic football metaphor. He didn’t swing any of the competitive Rust Belt states into the Democratic column.
The Minnesota governor bombed the vice presidential debate as badly as any candidate to make the stage since Ross Perot’s 1992 running mate, James Stockdale. Former Vice President Kamala Harris appears to regret selecting Walz and wrote in her campaign memoir, 107 Days, that he certainly wasn’t her first choice.
Harris makes clear she would have preferred former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but thought he would make an already-diverse ticket too diverse in what could most charitably be described as a rare concession to cultural conservatism — or her own uncharitable view of the general electorate.
Walz was supposed to be a less threatening and ambitious version of Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), a heartland Democrat who could cut into President Donald Trump’s appeal with key demographics. Republicans were starting to peel away from her party’s electoral coalition.
After the election, Walz appeared on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) podcast when the latter was exploring ways to win back voters their party had lost to Trump. Walz took the position that there was nothing that Democrats could learn from MAGA populists, who are fearful of the Minnesotan’s manliness. “I do think I could kick most of their ass,” Walz said. While Newsom has since abandoned his feints to the center, Walz failed to impress in his efforts to get out of Harris’s shadow.
Walz’s political failure suggests that populism wedded to cultural liberalism won’t get the job done with rural and working-class voters. Minnesota shouldn’t have been a remotely competitive state at the presidential level at all. It was the only one of the 50 states to vote against Ronald Reagan during his 1984 landslide victory. No GOP presidential nominee has carried Minnesota since Richard Nixon, then an incumbent president winning a 49-state landslide of his own, in 1972.
Trump didn’t win it either. Like New Jersey, the Gopher State has become the GOP’s white whale in presidential elections. But Harris received 50.92% of the vote in Minnesota with Walz, the sitting governor, as her running mate.
This was before the Somali day care scandal seemingly ended Walz’s quest for a third term and possibly his whole political career. “Walz will never live down the frauds committed under the watch of the state agencies within his jurisdiction,” veteran Minneapolis-based conservative blogger Scott Johnson predicted before Harris had even settled on Walz as her running mate. “By far the most notorious of these is the Feeding Our Future case.”
It isn’t just Walz, of course. The coalition that elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a socialist who did more to downplay his cultural progressivism in last year’s elections than Walz ever did, wasn’t exactly working class.
HOW MINNESOTA’S SOMALI FRAUD INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX STOLE MILLIONS FROM MEDICAID
Maybe none of this will matter in the midterm elections, when angry voters tend to rebuke the party in power. Suburban anti-Trump voters turn out reliably, while many Trump supporters stay home when he isn’t on the ballot himself.
But Walz-style Democrats could become an issue again in 2028. Walz himself doesn’t want to risk it in Minnesota in what should be a fairly Democratic year.