OPINION EXCHANGE | What America needs to know about Tim Walz of Minnesota

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As Democrats scramble to assemble a ticket following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is putting himself out there as potential vice-presidential pick. He is making the rounds of national talk shows bragging about his record. A closer look reveals little to brag about.

During his first term as governor, Walz faced two major challenges: The riots following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and COVID-19. He fumbled both.

As the Twin Cities burned for three days in May 2020, Walz froze, terrified of upsetting his party’s activist base which sympathized with the rioters, for whom Kamala Harris raised money. Walz hesitated to commit the National Guard — whom he dismissed as “19-year-old cooks” — but when they finally were deployed, the violence ceased immediately.

This concern for criminals over law-abiding citizens has contributed to Minnesota becoming a high-crime state for the first time in recent history, with part one crimes, such as murder, aggravated assault and rape, now above the national average. Indeed, Minnesota’s crime rates began climbing in 2018, when Walz took office and two years before George Floyd’s death. In 2024, violent crime in Minneapolis remains 29% above 2019.

In response to the second challenge, COVID-19, in defiance of the science, Walz shut down schools, churches and businesses and instituted draconian mask mandates and shelter in place orders. This was driven by a computer model cooked up by a couple of graduate students over a weekend and which was such a failure it was quietly abandoned. Walz spent $7 million on a morgue to hold all the forecast bodies. This, too, was quietly sold without ever housing a single body. Walz’s failed nursing home policies resulted in over 5,000 deaths from COVID, one of the highest percentages in the country. And the man who likes to talk tough on cable news, telling Republicans to “mind your own damn business,” created a phone line for people to snitch on their neighbors who violated COVID regulations.

For all this government activity in response to COVID-19, Walz still managed to oversee the largest COVID fraud scheme in the country, with $250 million stolen. Millions more have been wasted in other fraud schemes throughout his time in office, but no one has been fired or held accountable.

Walz frequently touts his experience as an educator, but Minnesotans have seen no benefit from this, with the quality of Minnesota’s K-12 schools falling steadily during his time in office. Minnesota fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores on national tests are the lowest in 30 years. On the education component of CNBC’s much-heralded — including by Walz — “Best States for Business” rankings, Minnesota has dropped from fifth in 2018 to 17th. Walz will tell national audiences he “fully funded” K-12 education, but more money does not translate to stronger achievement.

Instead of achievement, Walz focused on instituting radical social studies standards and ethnic studies requirements that infuse critical social justice ideology into K-12 education. He used a bait-and-switch to sell ethnic studies as “learning about other cultures,” while hiding the real purpose: to reshape our children’s identity around skin color and convince them that America is a “racialized hierarchy” defined by oppression and injustice. Walz also allowed protesters to tear down a statue of Christopher Columbus and changed Minnesota’s state flag because he wrongly believed it was racist.

In 2023, Walz squandered a $17.6 billion budget surplus and raised taxes on income, sales, gasoline, car tabs, deliveries, boats, marijuana and businesses. His new family leave program will be funded with a new tax on every employee and employer in the state. They are yet to launch the program but have already raised the tax rate. Under Walz’s leadership, Minnesota recently fell behind the country in GDP per capita for the first time in modern history.

Walz signed away Minnesota’s energy future by locking us into a renewable energy mandate that is driving up electricity costs in the pursuit of unmeasurable climate change goals. Running an energy grid with weather-based, intermittent energy sources, as called for in Walz’s 2023 renewable-energy mandate, is causing massive price increases and will ultimately lead to blackouts.

Minnesotans have been voting with their feet during the Walz governorship with new data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) showing a net loss of 13,455 individuals leaving Minnesota for other parts of the U.S. in 2021-22. The population loss is across the board — every age group tracked by the IRS shows a net loss of people.

Now that we think of it, promoting Tim Walz could be a really good idea. He couldn’t possibly do more harm to Minnesota in the relatively meaningless job of vice president.

John Phelan is senior economist and Bill Walsh is director of communications for the Center of the American Experiment.