Don’t Be the Next Joe, Tim

Let me lay out my argument point by point. First and for context, as nearly everyone except Joe Biden and his family now concedes, our past president would have faced serious difficulties in commanding the White House from 2025 until 2029 – or even winning the right to do so. To summarize Biden’s drawbacks: low popularity, concerns about his age and competence, and high levels of blame for things that went wrong in America during his time in office. No need to rehash all of that here.

My second point is that Tim Walz was one of the primary Democratic national leaders who tried to provide political cover for President Biden’s re-election campaign. For example, when Minnesota’s Rep. Phillips announced his candidacy to unseat Biden as the Democratic nominee in 2023, Walz was quick to undercut Phillips, referring to what Phillips was doing as “crazy” and a “political sideshow for [Phillips himself].” Gov. Walz pointedly said that Phillips and other Democrats should “stay in our lanes,” meaning that Phillips should not interfere with the Biden re-election effort.

Even after President Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 26, 2024, Walz remained a Biden campaign surrogate. Walz persisted in expressing “confidence in the president’s ability,” assuring voters that Biden still would defeat Donald Trump, and that the president remained the same “guy that all of us believed in the first time.” Then, as chair of the national Democratic Governors Association, Walz traveled to Washington, D.C. a week after the debate debacle to meet with the president as part of an orchestrated attempt to save the Biden campaign. After that face-to-face meeting on July 3, 2024, Walz pronounced Biden “fit for office.”

Third, although Walz has different problems than those that toppled Biden, Walz has more of them. He and his DFL legislature blew Minnesota’s $18 billion budget surplus and added half again as much new annual spending. Minnesota government programs have suffered from huge levels of fraud and abuse not caught by his administration. Education at the K-12 level has declined in Minnesota, while even some Democrats have said schools are more concerned about a student’s ability to choose his/her/other pronouns than “students not even knowing what a pronoun is.” Then there were covid shutdowns; George Floyd and prosecution of police offers; economic issues like inflation, high taxes, unaffordability of college, child care, and housing; excessive regulation; emphasis on identity groups; appointment of political donors to the state board of regents; and the state payment of $430,000 to prepare Walz to testify at a U.S. House committee hearing.

Add all of those problems to the perception that Governor Walz did not exactly make Minnesota (or Kamala Harris) proud of his selection as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, and one would think the Minnesota DFL could find in 2026 a candidate who possesses more of a clean slate.

My fourth point is that, as with President Biden in 2023 and 2024, Democratic powers-that-be are giving Walz total deference in the Gopher State. Remember, Democrats here hold all statewide offices – including gubernatorial feeding grounds like attorney general, secretary of state, and lieutenant governor – with two Democratic U.S. Senators and half of the state’s eight-member U.S. House delegation being Democrats. The state senate majority leader and more than 30 other state senators are members of the DFL, as are 66 members of the state house of representatives. Nonetheless, not one of these Democrats has announced a campaign to replace Walz.

The state’s leading Democrat, U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, has gone on record as wanting Walz to run for re-election, and everyone else has fallen in line. (Not surprisingly, this is reminiscent of Klobuchar’s support of Biden and discouragement of Phillips in 2024.) These “leaders” and Governor Walz appear to be deluding themselves to the detriment of their own party, our state, and the Walz legacy.