Not Your Father’s Bipartisanship

Tim Walz has ended up an unexpected progressive firebrand, partly because he never really was one.

A former service member who flipped a deep red rural Minnesota House seat for Democrats in the 2006 wave election — when he was one of the few former military figures recruited by the Democrats that year to actually win — Walz always described himself as a pragmatic moderate. Claiming that he was largely apolitical until the Iraq War, he gave the occasional hint of progressive populism over five reelections, like his vote against the bank and auto bailouts that most of his party supported, but still took numerous conservative positions, including advocating for greater scrutiny of refugees and keeping gun laws loose.

His 2018 gubernatorial campaign didn’t give much sign of it either. Considered a party centrist, Walz first beat out a rival in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) primary who took the progressive lane in the race, before running a fairly conventional center-left campaign in the general: gun control, a gas tax for infrastructure repairs, legalizing weed, and more funding for social services and, especially, schools, where Walz had added credibility as a former teacher himself.

Running on the theme of “One Minnesota,” Walz pledged to bridge both the state’s political divides and its growing rural-urban divide, winning hundreds of precincts Donald Trump had carried in 2016 while outperforming Hillary Clinton in more than a thousand precincts where she had come out on top that year. He defeated his GOP challenger by a sizable thirteen-point margin.

Once inaugurated, Walz and the DFL had quite the task on their hands. A housing affordability crisis had produced the largest number of homeless people in Minnesota in nearly thirty years, the provider tax underpinning the state government’s health care programs was set to expire, and underinvestment was rife, along with many of the other social and political ills plaguing America as a whole, from gun violence to a dysfunctional health care system. They would have to try solve all of this with a divided state legislature, the only one in the country, all while delivering a legally mandated balanced budget.

Walz was sure it wouldn’t be a problem. He was “an eternal optimist,” he said, who didn’t think of politics as “a horse race nor a poker game to see who can best the other,” but as a matter of “working together.” His goal over his first year, he said, was “restoring faith in bipartisan decision-making,” something he would get done by listening to the other side’s point of view, not assuming the worst about their motives, and by organizing family activities with his rivals, as well as inviting them jogging, hunting, fishing, or hiking. He used his first State of the State speech to urge lawmakers to come together across the partisan divide and compromise for the good of Minnesota.

It was all straight out of the typical Democratic rhetorical and political playbook, one that, in most Democratic officials’ hands, tended to mean giving the Right much of what they wanted in terms of policy while dragging an increasingly demoralized Democratic base kicking and screaming with a gun to their head.

Only not this time.

First, despite negotiations that dragged on into May, Walz secured a two-year, $48 billion budget deal by the end of that month precisely how he said he would: by getting everyone to compromise. Walz gave up on the ten-cent-a-gallon gas tax hike he had campaigned on to pay for transportation improvements, which Republicans had bitterly opposed. Meanwhile, Republicans agreed to keep in place (albeit at a slightly lower rate) what they derided as the “sick tax” — a levy on health care providers that funded the state’s Medicaid program and MinnesotaCare, its health insurance program for the working poor, and which Minnesota’s largest doctors’ trade group had fought against extending. The budget also saw major increases in health and education spending, a major priority for the DFL and something Walz had partly campaigned on.

How had they done it? The gas tax wasn’t his biggest priority anyway, Walz said afterward, so he was happy to trade it away, especially given the “catastrophic nature” of what would happen to Minnesota’s health care if the provider tax failed to get renewed. His personal relationship with Republican Senate majority leader Paul Gazelka also made negotiations easier. And the middle-class tax cut included in the deal, the first in two decades, didn’t hurt either.

Finally, the two sides had also come to an informal, mutual realization, DFL House speaker Melissa Hortman later disclosed: failing to get it done would have been bad for everyone, an argument more persuasive to Republicans after the electoral losses they’d experienced in 2018. So they agreed to put their differences aside for the year, lay down their bottom lines, and get the thing passed — and after that, they would be free to declare war on each other in 2020.

It also meant shelving all but one of the legislative priorities DFL had gone into the year with: one of the toughest wage theft laws in the country, which, among other things, made it a felony to steal more than $1,000 worth of a worker’s wages. The law went into effect that August.

It wasn’t the only progressive measure Walz could claim credit for that year. On gender equality, he signed into law an end to Minnesota’s disgraceful “marital rape” exception. On criminal justice, he approved reforms to the use of solitary confinement in a state where the lack of any laws on the practice saw it shockingly and regularly abused. On the environmental front, he rolled out a climate plan to reach carbon-free electricity by 2050 and put out a California-style program to lower emissions from cars and increase the use of electric vehicles that in the end survived multiple court challenges.

Steering Through Chaos

Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, likely the most controversial run of Walz’s time as governor came during the chaotic months of the pandemic.

Walz’s strategy to deal with the pandemic mirrored that of many states and the federal government: spending big — partly thanks to the federal money cannon put into use by Trump — and using emergency powers to expand government authority to keep people whole while keeping them out of indoor spaces. Those efforts saw Walz and the legislature, over the course of the pandemic’s first month, put in place a pause on evictions, extend paid leave to state employees, create emergency childcare grants, make it easier to get unemployment insurance, increase penalties for price gouging, and expand support for a variety of groups and humanitarian entities like food banks and homeless shelters to the tune of $100 million. Another $100 million in housing assistance and $56 million in daycare funding soon followed.

The initial mood of unity and bipartisanship soon curdled as Republicans increasingly objected to and tried rolling back Walz’s emergency powers, and protesters chafed at his stay-at-home orders, sentiments that each grew as frustration at pandemic restrictions mounted. But Walz’s approach — which combined near-constant public visibility with stubbornly defying political and business pressure to reopen before the vaccine rollout — ultimately paid off: by June 2021, Minnesota had a lower death rate from COVID than any surrounding state, at 136 deaths per 100,000. For Iowa and North Dakota, governed by Trump-emulating anti-restriction Republicans, that figure was 194 and 200, respectively. Walz’s approval rating, a strong 65 percent at the start of the crisis, dropped to a still-healthy 57 percent by September 2020.

That’s not to say his response was flawless. Walz may have extended paid leave to government workers under emergency, but he used the same powers to let agency heads waive parts of collective bargaining agreements. His government also controversially went along with federal guidelines allowing hospitals to discharge COVID-infected patients to nursing homes, even as they, at one point, accounted for the majority of Minnesota’s deaths from the virus. Walz later acknowledged he had made mistakes over the course of the pandemic, but insisted he had been doing the best he could with the data he was given.

His pandemic governance eventually got a leg up thanks to the election of Biden as president and the March 2021 passage of the American Rescue Plan Act. The ARP’s massive stimulus allowed Walz and the DFL to strike another budget deal with Republicans to make much-needed public investments without raising taxes. Thanks to the ARP’s injection of $2.8 billion of federal money (and better-than-expected tax revenue), Minnesota politics avoided a protracted fight over painful cuts and taxes. Walz instead signed a larger-than-usual $52 billion two-year budget that poured $75 million into summer-school programs to make up for the lost school year during the pandemic while providing nearly $1 billion in tax relief.

“It proves once again that our democracy is strong. That compromise is a virtue, not a vice,” Walz said at the time.

More controversial was his response to the massive protests over the police killing of George Floyd, which had taken place in Minnesota. Walz’s attempts to thread the needle between empathy and racial justice on one hand and public order on the other at times left him pleasing no one.

Walz publicly backed “swift justice” for the officers involved in Floyd’s murder, drawing the ire of the state’s police groups. He lamented that the protests and property damage taking over the streets were “symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish unheard,” and a response to a loss of trust in institutions like the police that he as a “white man” couldn’t fully understand. He announced a state civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department and carried out symbolic actions like issuing a proclamation for eight minutes and forty-six seconds of silence for Floyd and pardoning a long-dead black circus worker convicted on flimsy evidence of rape a century earlier.

At the same time, Walz activated the National Guard to deal with protests over Floyd’s murder, which he dubiously claimed were 80 percent out-of-state troublemakers. Even as he criticized Trump for turning up the temperature at a “volatile” moment with his rhetorical attacks on protesters, Walz condemned the protests as a “mockery of pretending” to be about police brutality and injustice, even saying they had begun to resemble a “military operation.” He apologized for the embarrassing on-air arrest of a CNN reporter covering the protests, but over the course of the next year, law enforcement under him continued to heavy-handedly deal with protesters using rubber bullets and tear gas, including against journalists.

Walz signed a limited police reform bill into law at the height of the protests, banning chokeholds and “warrior” training techniques and mandating training for police and a duty to report on fellow officers using excessive force. It also created a statewide investigatory unit for, and a database for public records on, police misconduct. Despite vowing to “burn political capital” to make it happen, further reform efforts died in the gridlocked legislature, and the cycle of police violence and protest has continued long after Floyd’s death. Deaths at the hands of law enforcement in the state are still at elevated levels.

Like most Democratic politicians, as the public mood and political focus shifted from racial justice and police reform to crime and public safety, Walz also largely turned away from police accountability. He opposed the 2021 Minneapolis ballot measure backed by Rep. Ilhan Omar and other progressives that would have replaced the city’s police department with a public safety agency, and spent the bulk of the rest of his tenure asking for and pouring more money into police departments while forgetting about some of the most high-priority reforms, like ending qualified immunity for police, that he and the DFL had once ardently backed in the summer of 2020.

Moderation in Moderation

As he geared up for reelection in 2022, Walz’s calls for compromise hit a wall, and the state’s massive $9 billion surplus went nowhere as the legislature failed to make a deal. Coupled with a rise in crime and unaffordability, Walz should have been in political peril — were it not for the Supreme Court’s striking down of Roe v. Wade in June that year, which gave him and the DFL an unlikely political shot in the arm.

Walz moved quickly to respond, signing an executive order that made Minnesota a sanctuary for abortion rights. It guaranteed legal protection to anyone out of state who sought out or performed an abortion in Minnesota or anywhere else it was legal and prevented state agencies from helping other state governments trying to prosecute them. Calling the situation “dystopian,” Walz vowed his office would “be a firewall against legislation that would reverse reproductive freedom.”

As was the case all over the country, the gutting of Roe proved an electoral game changer that year, and Walz made abortion rights central to his campaign. His Republican opponent, who in an early interview had backed the hard-line stance of banning abortion without exceptions and hammered Walz over crime and inflation, later admitted he had misjudged the public mood.

Walz won reelection by a comfortable nearly eight-point margin thanks to big turnout in the Twin Cities and more or less holding on to his support in the suburbs. Just as importantly, the DFL rode the outrage over Roe to “a Minnesota Senate miracle,” taking control of the upper chamber and giving the party only the second governing trifecta in Minnesota in three decades.

Roe and Democratic promises to codify it were central to the result, but far from the only reason for it. Even as he was stymied by gridlock, Walz had continued pursuing a progressive agenda over the years, signing into law a measure providing affordable insulin, restricting conversion therapy, speeding up his carbon-free electricity target, and giving frontline workers during the pandemic a one-time bonus of $750 each. He had also never stopped publicly advocating for an expansive working-class agenda even as divided government seemed to make it an impossibility, most prominently paid family and medical leave, one-time direct checks to every Minnesotan, funding for child care and early education, and a major investment in construction projects.

Now, with total DFL control of government and a massive, nearly $18 billion surplus providing what Walz called “golden opportunities” on a number of fronts, there were no more obstacles. And unlike Democratic governors in other states with blue trifectas, Walz and the DFL actually made good on their promises.

What followed in 2023 was one of the more consequential recent legislative sessions for working Americans in any state. Unshackled from GOP resistance, Walz declared the moment “a critical time in our nation’s history” and urged his Democratic colleagues to “think big,” dropping talk of compromise and instead pledging an end to “the era of gridlock.”

Understanding that they had limited time and that moving slowly would only give their opponents time and space to pick them apart, the DFL adopted the motto of “LFG” — “let’s fucking go” — and worked at breakneck pace to pass dozens of bills, playing DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” each time they crossed one off the list. The idea, House speaker Hortman explained, was for “the early wins to create momentum for more wins.” While Walz had signed, at best, one or two bills into law by February in previous years, this time, he signed eight, while only four weeks in, roughly double the number of bills were introduced to the House as in previous sessions.

After codifying abortion rights in January, with Minnesota becoming the country’s first state to do so, Walz and the DFL used their one-seat Senate majority to pass landmark legislation in virtually every policy area. Having pledged to “make Minnesota the best state in the country for kids to grow up” and to “build an economy that works for working people and middle-class families,” Walz’s $72 billion “One Minnesota” budget, the largest in the state’s history, saw him set up, among other things, universal free school meals; free public college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 a year; the country’s most generous child tax credit; and, after years of pushing for it, paid family and medical leave at last.

Part of the vision made manifest by that budget was the long-promised investment in Minnesota’s education and, especially, child care, often ranked the country’s most expensive. Walz’s budget put a historic $5.5 billion into E-12 education, and roughly half a billion dollars toward early education programs, with the aim of limiting child care spending to 7 percent of household income.

Walz and the DFL mandated the state’s utilities to reach 100 percent carbon-free energy by 2040, including 55 percent of energy sales from renewable sources by 2035. They extended retroactive unemployment insurance to more than four hundred miners laid off since the previous year. Four years after campaigning on it, they legalized recreational marijuana. Partly relying on federal money, they passed the largest infrastructure bill in state history, worth $2.6 billion, for construction on everything from roads, bridges, and bus lanes to affordable housing, state parks and drinking water.

Workers’ rights saw a major boost beyond paid leave. Noncompete clauses were banned, giving workers “the freedom to seek better working conditions and higher wages without restrictions.” Employers could no longer hold what are known as “captive audience” meetings, forcing workers to sit and listen to anti-union propaganda, and wage-theft protections were strengthened for workers employed through subcontractors. Limits on breaks for breastfeeding workers were lifted, and poultry processing was added to the list of industries covered by the worker protections mandated by the state’s 2007 Packinghouse Workers Bill of Rights, which were also expanded. By executive order, Walz removed the four-year degree requirement from three-quarters of state government jobs, or about twenty-five thousand positions, opening up well-paid, stable employment to a wider pool of working-class Minnesotans.

Walz and the DFL also made headway on certain liberal priorities, or what we might call “culture war” issues. Walz, an avid hunter, signed into law a bill backed by the state’s police chiefs mandating universal background checks and “red flag” orders allowing guns to be taken away from dangerous people, ideas he had run on all the way back in 2019. That same public safety legislation also charted a centrist course on policing and criminal justice, funding officer recruitment while mandating a number of police reforms: limits on no-knock search warrants, greater leniency in the pardon process, expansion of youth intervention to prevent crime, and giving prison inmates the opportunity to shave off their time behind bars through various rehabilitation programs, to name a few.

He expanded voting rights by setting up automatic voter registration, letting Minnesotans choose to go on a permanent absentee voter list, and allowing some teenagers to preregister to vote. He ended solitary confinement in juvenile detention facilities and restored voting rights to around fifty thousand felons who were released from prison. He expanded the right to state-provided health insurance and driver’s licenses to undocumented Americans. He banned conversion therapy statewide. He banned discrimination based on someone’s natural hair and made Juneteenth a state holiday.

During this flurry of activity, there were also lesser-known measures benefiting working people that the state’s DFL made law with Walz’s assistance. These included capping payday lending rates at 36 percent (still exorbitant, but what one critic of the industry said would “disrupt the predatory business model” nonetheless), decriminalizing drug paraphernalia and legalizing injection sites, expanding the body that decides criminal sentences by putting a former prisoner and someone with a rehabilitation background on it, and preventing domestic abuse survivors from being saddled with debt inherited from their abuser.

None of this caused the doom-and-gloom side effects that the Right forewarns. Both in 2023 and a year later today, Minnesota ranks among the top states to do business in. And the state still ended up with a budget surplus of nearly $4 billion for the following two years.

To be sure, there were limits to his progressivism. Walz, proud of having never used his veto, first deployed it during this legislative frenzy, and for the most ignominious of reasons: to kill a minimum wage and worker protection bill for Uber and Lyft drivers, and halt a separate pair of bills giving nurses a say in staffing levels (which was watered down to a student loan forgiveness measure for nurses) and creating a health care affordability board that could penalize providers and insurers for too-high costs. Walz vetoed both after businesses threatened to pull out or withdraw investment from the state.

Despite his action on climate, environmental groups, including the local Sierra Club chapter, have accused Walz’s government of “polluter capture,” citing moves like his approval of the disastrous Line 3 oil pipeline and inaction against polluting farmers. And Walz and the DFL’s deference to police went beyond the streets and into the classroom, where he repealed a measure that banned physical restraint by police of students in classrooms under Republican and law enforcement pressure.

But in many ways, Walz and the DFL’s hurricane of action represented what the US public and Democratic base had been told would come with a Biden presidency: a seasoned dealmaker able to work with Republicans to get things done, who would use a narrow window of political opportunity to press through a bold progressive agenda at lightning speed. Little wonder, then, that Biden’s team invited Walz and his legislative allies to the White House so the president could get advice from them.

A No-Brainer

On paper, Walz seems like the kind of lab-grown candidate the Democratic Party would normally be desperate to slap on a presidential ticket: a former servicemember and teacher from the rural Midwest who loves hunting and fishing, can speak to ordinary people, flipped and held a red county for more than a decade, governs a somewhat purple state, is a centrist on policing, and seems genuinely interested in things like unity, compromise, and bipartisanship.

The only twist is that he’s used his status as a consensus-builder to get things done for working Americans, and has arguably the most progressive record of any elected Democrat in today’s political landscape.

The vice president isn’t just a campaign attack dog and an electoral booster meant to fill in the nominee’s perceived weaknesses. They are an active member of the administration, and are often tapped to step up as the president’s successor. As such, vice presidents need a proven record of effective governing. Walz, it turns out, happens to be very adept at governing — in a way that both moderates and progressives can appreciate. It remains to be seen if the Democratic Party will realize it.