Julia Nikhinson/AP Photo
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks at a campaign event, August 18, 2024, in Rochester, Pennsylvania.
Tonight, Gov. Tim Walz accepts the nomination for vice president at the Democratic National Convention. The program that Walz and the Minnesota legislature enacted after the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party took back the state Senate by a single vote in 2022 is a progressive dream come true. Walz deserves great credit for seeing his narrow majority not as a reason for temporizing and compromising but as a moment to go big. But his success, and his move to the left, were built on a prodigious amount of prior and continuing organizing in a state honeycombed with progressive activism.
Better yet, these programs are popular with Minnesotans. The right has tried and failed to demonize Walz as far-left, but the programs are as economically mainstream as Walz presents as culturally mainstream.
The roster is almost too long for a single column. It includes:
Labor Rights. These include a ban on noncompete agreements and anti-union “captive audience” meetings; unemployment benefits to school workers laid off during the summer; and a Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board with power to set wages across the industry. And the state made general contractors liable for wage theft by subcontractors, and raised standards for workplace safety in meatpacking plants and warehouses.
Reproductive Rights. The legislature not only eliminated virtually all restrictions on abortion but passed a “shield law” to protect women who travel to Minnesota for abortions by prohibiting state courts, law enforcement, and health care providers from cooperating with out-of-state authorities and vigilantes.
Education and Family Benefits. These included an expanded refundable child tax credit, paid family and medical leave, free school breakfasts and lunches, free public higher education for most Minnesotans, and increased spending on K-12 education by $2.3 billion.
Progressive Tax Policy. The legislature eliminated state income taxes on Social Security income for people earning less than $100,000 a year, and passed a 1 percent sales tax increase in the Twin Cities metro area, with 0.75 percent dedicated to transportation and 0.25 percent for housing.
Health Care. Minnesota created a public option for people without employer-provided health insurance to buy into state Medicaid.
Infrastructure and Jobs. Walz signed a $2.6 billion package in 2023 funding construction jobs repairing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure.
And a great deal more, including criminal justice reform, housing investments, driver’s licenses for undocumented inmigrants, as well as ambitious environmental mandates.
WHEN WALZ FIRST RAN FOR GOVERNOR IN 2018, he did not run on this program. Much of it was brought to him by the House legislative leadership, which took back the Minnesota House in that same 2018 election. The legislative leadership in turn has worked closely with Minnesota unions, education groups, and other grassroots organizations such as the widely admired progressive faith-based coalition ISAIAH and its affiliate Faith in Minnesota to fashion this comprehensive progessive program.
Initially, many progressive groups did not endorse Walz in the August 2018 primary. He was known as a six-term congressman who had won election in a heavily Republican district and who positioned himself as a moderate. One of his opponents was Erin Murphy, who was well known to progressives as the DFL leader in the state Senate. (A third candidate, then-attorney general Lori Swanson, was leading the race until a scandal over her using staffers for campaign work, uncovered by Prospect alum Rachel Cohen, sunk her.)
After Walz defeated Murphy in the primary, all of the progressive groups quickly rallied to support him. Walz was elected governor in 2018; however, the state Senate remained with a Republican majority. So his first term was marked largely by partisan gridlock.
When the DFL did take back the Senate in 2022, progressives had a program ready to go, and they worked hard to make sure that newly elected Democratic moderates who had won in heavily Republican districts did not defect. They had two things going for them. Walz had been elected in just such a district, and knew how to talk to these Democratic legislators. Progressives also did extensive grassroots organizing in these districts.
One of the first tests of whether the one-vote Senate majority would hold was the bill to enact paid family and medical leave. The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce declared that defeating the bill, by claiming that it was bad for small business, was its top priority. But progressives organized child care centers, small businesses that needed parents to care for sick kids, and other social service providers. The majority held, and the bill passed.
Walz also proved superb at packaging. One of his themes was making Minnesota the best state in America to raise a family. What could be more mainstream than that? Under that rubric, Walz included the expansion of the child tax credit as a general subsidy for parents, paid family leave, major invesments in affordable child care, and better-compensated child care workers, as well as free school breakfast and lunches for all, and free college education for those with incomes under $80,000. It all passed.
In the end, Walz turned out to be a great progressive governor. The reason is less that he had changed—Walz was pretty progressive to begin with—than that the political circumstances had changed. And that took decades of work by the Minnesota progessive movement.
As Doran Schrantz, leader of Faith in Minnesota, puts it, “Without the organizing, the political conditions would not have been in place for Walz to be Walz.”
That’s not a bad takeaway for the other 49 states.
