Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz unveils part of his budget focusing on education and child-focused spending, at Adams Spanish Immersion Elementary, January 17, 2023, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Minnesota is typically seen as a reliably blue state. Barack Obama won it twice, Hillary Clinton won it in 2016, and Joe Biden won it once more in 2020. Heck, Walter Mondale won it (his only state victory) in 1984; Democrats haven’t lost Minnesota in presidential races since McGovern. But some of those victories were rather close—particularly in 2016, when Clinton won by less than two points, and Donald Trump ran up gigantic margins in rural areas. And in the state legislature, Republicans have historically been competitive; even when Biden won in 2020, the GOP maintained control of the state Senate.
That changed in 2022, when the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) gained three Senate seats to win a one-seat majority. It also maintained its control of the state House, and the governor’s office when Tim Walz easily won re-election—giving the party its first trifecta since 2014.
The DFL promptly set to work, passing a sweeping set of reforms that puts deeper-blue states like California, Massachusetts, or New York to shame. It’s something of a return to the DFL’s Nordic-style roots.
Probably the most significant law passed during the session was a giant expansion of labor rights. As Max Nesterak explains at Minnesota Reformer, the measure mandates paid sick days for nearly all workers, which will accrue at the rate of one hour per 30 hours worked up to a maximum of 48 hours; forbids noncompete agreements in labor contracts; establishes a sectoral bargaining system for nursing homes; allows teachers to negotiate class sizes; and bans “captive audience” meetings where employers force their workers to listen to anti-union propaganda. It also sets up new protections for meatpackers, construction workers, and Amazon employees. And a separate bill passed on Sunday guarantees a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers.
This is important not only because it helps workers, but also because it might inspire a new wave of union organizing. Minnesota’s union density is relatively high by American standards, with 17 percent of workers organized as of 2020—but that’s pitiful by Nordic standards, which range from 50 percent in Norway to 91 percent in Iceland. A labor resurgence might benefit the DFL:
Strong unions have historically served as the organizational heft behind the party in its social democratic heyday, and given their role as the party that passed these benefits, they would stand to gain if they succeed.
The second-biggest policy is a new paid family and medical leave system. People who have earned at least $3,500 over the past year will be eligible for up to 12 weeks of benefits in both categories, for a maximum of 20 weeks per year. Benefits will be calculated with a progressive replacement rate—90 percent of prior wages under half the state average wage, plus 66 percent up to the full average, plus 55 percent above the average—capped at 100 percent of the state average wage.
Unfortunately, when it comes to parental leave, the work history requirement means it falls short of the ideal Nordic standard. As Matt Bruenig explains at the People’s Policy Project, there is every reason to include a minimum benefit for all parents, even those who have not worked over the last 12 months. Regardless of whether a new parent had a job previously, raising an infant costs a lot of money, and those without jobs likely need the cash more. Pregnancy also tends to happen earlier in life, before people have established careers or even before they’ve entered the workforce at all. About 22 percent of new Minnesota mothers will be ineligible for benefits, and they will still have to pay into the system their whole working lives.
Minnesota’s new universal free school breakfast and lunch program, just the third such program in the nation, is positively Nordic.
Still, this is much better than nothing, and provides a foundation for future reforms. It would be technically trivial to add a minimum benefit to a system that’s already in place.
Another more symbolic but nonetheless important law would protect abortion rights. Abortion is already legal in Minnesota thanks to prior court decisions, but this provides additional protection should the legal environment change. We’re all quite familiar with how impermanent court-provided civil liberties are.
Minnesota Dems also passed a slate of pro-LGBT protections. One bill banned “conversion therapy,” while two others protected nonresidents seeking gender-affirming care or abortions from being punished or extradited by conservative states. That’s a highly welcome development, given the increasingly repressive laws passed in neighboring red states like Iowa.
Numerous other laws have barely been noticed by national media, but still count as major accomplishments—legalization of recreational marijuana, automatic voter registration, restoration of voting rights to felons, gun control measures, a huge education overhaul, making prison calls free, and a law allowing unauthorized immigrants to get driver’s licenses. The state budget, which is still being hammered out by today’s deadline, is poised to increase by 40 percent compared to the previous two-year budget cycle.
Minnesota’s new universal free school breakfast and lunch program, just the third such program in the nation, is positively Nordic, and in signing the bill, Gov. Walz praised how the approach is free of the bureaucracy that weighs down so much U.S. policy: “This is the assurance that no one falls through the cracks because a busy parent didn’t fill out a form.”
All told, it’s quite the record of accomplishment—all done in less than half a year, and with a governor, Walz, who was not notably progressive in his prior career in Congress. One wonders why it is so difficult to get anything even remotely similar done in solid-blue states like New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul has been faceplanting on minor things like getting a state judge confirmed or passing moderate housing reform to bring down her state’s sky-high rents.
I suspect the difference is that Minnesota Dems had to run on a serious progressive agenda to win. By all accounts, the backlash to Dobbs was especially important in the 2022 midterms. Where New York Democrats generally win easily, and so the Democratic establishment focuses above all on maintaining its control of the party machine and associated patronage, Minnesota Democrats have to actually represent their constituents. It turns out when a political party has a coherent agenda that it actually tries to carry out, it can get a lot done.
