Tim Walz is a lot like a party balloon. He spent some time soaring, but it was always clear that the Minnesota governor would either slowly leak air or pop on a tree branch. A little more than a year after being launched into national politics as Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential nominee, Walz has landed back on the ground, dropping his gubernatorial re-election bid and watching his state go up in flames. The damage to his career may be irreparable.
A haphazard Kamala Harris campaign plucked Walz straight from cable news, where he was effectively defining the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird” throughout the mid-summer of 2024. Clips of Walz — a Midwestern Dad seemingly straight from central casting — were going viral on social media during the heyday of Couchgate: baseless allegations that JD Vance had once engaged in sexual activity with a couch. Indeed, just one day after Harris named him to the ticket, Walz referenced the meme about Vance’s supposed lust for living-room furniture.
“I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,” Walz smirked. “See what I did there?” (Vance was widely regarded as the winner of their debate.)
It was an early sign that the second-term governor might not have been as wholesome as depicted. As the country acquainted itself with Walz, the signs became impossible to miss. In retrospect, it’s remarkable the Harris campaign ever took a gamble on a man with Walz’s record — though unsurprising in the context of the Democrats’ Biden-era hubris.
On paper, Walz had characteristics that made the consultant class swoon. He was a teacher, a veteran, a football coach, a gun owner, a father of two from the Upper Midwest. Like the uncle you catch up with every Thanksgiving, Walz was affable and balding and fluent in sports.
Vibes aside, Walz had also pursued a progressive agenda in a rural state. This made him an enormously attractive pick for Harris, who was herself a perfect embodiment of the party’s rudderless direction in 2024. Democrats needed to maintain the Biden coalition by appealing to suburban voters and winning back some of the white working class that Hillary Clinton lost, while also keeping young voters and activists energized.
Walz was slightly less popular than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Harris’s other option for the ticket, but a 54% majority of registered voters in Minnesota approved of his job as governor. As Walz ascended to the top of the ticket, multiple outlets profiled his shift Left-ward since serving in Congress. “How Tim Walz Went From ‘Blue Dog Democrat’ to Progressive Champion,” ran a headline from National Public Radio.
CNN enumerated the items in Walz’s progressive agenda: “codified protections for abortion access; restored voting rights for felons who’ve completed their sentences; driver’s licenses for people regardless of their legal status; a state child-tax credit; free public college for families making less than $80,000 annually; protections for gender-affirming care; and a paid family and medical leave program.” Most Democrats couldn’t pull that off with a 54% approval rating, so national Democrats saw in Walz a relatable “prairie populist” who could sell the Harris campaign’s cultural progressivism to middle America.
Enter “Tampon Tim.” Trump World immediately neutralized Walz’s efficacy as a critic of “weirdness” by calling attention to a bill Walz signed that required public schools to provide tampons and pads “to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students.” In other words, Walz put tampons in boys’ bathrooms; Trump knew just how to brand him.
A closer examination revealed other obvious red flags. Despite being heralded as a white-working-class whisperer, the governor did poorly outside Minnesota’s deep-blue urban centers in both his 2018 and 2022 races, losing most rural counties handily. Pundits and consultants may not fully realize how wealthy and how progressive the Minneapolis suburbs have become. A re-election landslide in Hennepin County won’t translate to support from swing voters in the Rust Belt.
Walz’s record included a burgeoning fraud scandal of massive proportions among the state’s Somali community; 70 people had already been indicted in the Somali fraud ring by the time Harris tapped him. The record also included Walz’s memorably horrific response to the George Floyd riots of 2020 that permitted the state to burn rather than allowing police to intervene; inconsistencies in his military record; and a deeply strange affinity for China (he made a whopping 30 trips to China over the course of three decades, including on his own honeymoon).
If anything, Harris may have caused a net drag on her campaign by adding Walz — and that wasn’t an easy thing to pull off, since few people’s votes are influenced by veep picks. As Republicans battered Harris with “Kamala is for they/them” ads, it didn’t help Democrats that “Tampon Tim” attacks only reinforced some voters’ impression of the ticket as being out of touch.
When Trump mounted the comeback of a lifetime and easily defeated Harris, Walz went back to Minneapolis with a bruised ego but also with national name recognition and clout in elite spaces. He slimmed down and dressed up. Yet by November, just one year after Walz was at the top of national politics, everything started to crumble.
Conservative media had for years sought to draw national attention to swelling fraud allegations among Minnesota’s sizable Somali community. During the pandemic years, Somali scofflaws in Minnesota escaped scrutiny by weaponizing identity politics, fraudulently accepting millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that were supposed to be distributed to children and other vulnerable Minnesotans. As governor, Walz presided over the bureaucracy that allowed this to happen despite clear warning signs.
Federal investigators, for example, uncovered massive fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services, as well as federal child-welfare and autism programs. Indicted and convicted conspirators, for example, would recruit Somali children into autism therapy services — even if a child didn’t have a diagnosis — facilitating fraudulent claims. Parents reportedly received monthly kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child, with some allegedly threatening to go to other fraud networks unless their rates were increased.
“The picture emerging of Minnesota is one of a state in chaos — not unlike what unfolded in the summer of 2020 under Walz’s supervision.”
After City Journal and County Highway published exposes around Thanksgiving, The New York Times published a lengthy investigation of its own into the scandal. The headline was devastating: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch.”
From there, the story took on a life of its own, both in mainstream media and Right-wing social media. Walz responded by taking responsibility and claiming to have cracked down on fraud while also putting up identitarian deflections: he talked about “white men” and said the Somali community was not to blame, even as some Somalis disagreed.
The war of words between Trump and Walz heated up. As the scandal broke into mainstream spaces, Republicans saw an opportunity for high-profile immigration enforcement in a sanctuary city with clear-cut immigration problems. Trump launched “Operation Metro Surge,” dispatching thousands of ICE agents to the Minneapolis area and pledging to arrest “over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens” in the area.
The Associated Press notes that Trump “has repeatedly linked his administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota to fraud cases involving federal nutrition and pandemic-aid programs, many of which have involved defendants with roots in Somalia.”
The eyes of the country have been focused on Minnesota since the fraud story led to the ICE surge. While polling is hardly going in Trump’s favor, the picture emerging of Minnesota is one of a state in chaos — not unlike what unfolded in the summer of 2020 under Walz’s supervision.
On Jan. 5, Walz shocked the political world by suddenly — and angrily — dropping his re-election bid, connecting his decision directly to the attacks he’d sustained, starting with the recent wave of fraud coverage. According to Axios, it was actually “fellow Democrats” who applied the “mounting pressure” that forced the governor’s hand.
Just two days later, Renée Good died in her car, shot by an ICE officer on duty as part of Trump’s crackdown. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti died during an interaction with Customs and Border Patrol. Between the incidents, organized activists disrupted a Baptist worship service, drawing more criticism that Walz and his allies were inciting raucous disruptions that left ordinary Minnesotans vulnerable.
Walz, for his part, has practically begged anti-ICE rioters to remain peaceful — to no avail. While it’s clear the public is not cheering on Trump, anti-ICE disrupters are also causing property damage and creating a sense of general bedlam, producing viral moments on a near nightly basis in clashes with federal officers.
After Pretti’s killing stirred up days of escalating confrontations, Trump and Walz tried to smooth tensions. Both sides claimed victory. Trump yanked Gregory Bovino, the face of the operation, out of Minneapolis. A MAGA pundit claimed that “Tim Walz and Jacob Frey bent the knee and local law enforcement is doing their job” as police made arrests shortly after Walz and Trump spoke.
For Walz — whose fame rested on the idea that he could be the adult in the room, a normal Midwestern Democrat fed up with MAGA’s bullshit — the turn of events must sting painfully.
Perhaps the most devastating rebuke of Walz’s career came on Monday from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After Pretti’s death, Walz lectured in a Sunday news conference: “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody is gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”
The Holocaust Museum called this deeply offensive, releasing a statement the following day that read: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as anti-Semitism surges.”
Walz, the embodiment of “Minnesota nice,” the man so relatable he could supposedly sell a progressive culture war to the white working class, was finally revealed to be reckless, divisive, and incompetent. The party’s over. The Walz balloon is now a sad piece of plastic lying on the floor.
