A lot of the excitement surrounding Walz right now seems to stem from the assumption that he’ll help the Harris campaign defeat Trump in November. That’s understandable, given how real and dangerous the possibility of a second Trump term has felt over the past few months. Just a month ago, some Democrats were going on the record saying that they were “resigned” to a second Trump term. At the very least, it’s a relief to see them actually trying to win. But the value of Walz goes beyond his ability to get Kamala Harris into the White House. He provides a blueprint for how she can be successful once she’s there. If she does win, she’ll face the challenge of actually governing, and she’ll need all the help she can get. If she does manage to win the presidency, current predictions suggest that in the best-case scenario, she’ll come in with a gossamer thin majority in the House and Senate with which to try to pass policy. Looking back at Walz’s domestic agenda as governor of Minnesota provides us with a sense of direction for what Democrats could accomplish nationally.
Joe Biden spent much of his early presidency laboring under the delusion that Republicans would have some “epiphany” and decide to meet his party halfway to pass significant legislation, something that largely did not happen. And in the rare cases that it did, like the bipartisan infrastructure bill or the post-Uvalde gun reforms, the result was something thoroughly watered down from what Democrats had initially hoped to pass. Of course, defenders of the Biden administration at the time would tell you that Biden was at the mercy of obstinate members of his own party, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to sign onto any legislation that lacked Republican support. But as Branko Marcetic argued at the time in Jacobin, Biden had plenty of tools of coercion and persuasion he could have used to get them on board. A hypothetical President Harris will not have to deal with Manchin and Sinema obstructing her legislative agenda like Biden did—as they will both be out of the Senate. But the problem ran deeper than those two. As Sam Brodey reported for the Daily Beast, other Democrats considered Manchin and Sinema to be a “heat shield” that allowed them to avoid having to stick their own necks out to tank liberal proposals.
The lesson you could take from this is that with a slim majority, you simply have to lower your expectations for what can be accomplished. But this is not true at all. It is still possible to not only govern in such conditions but to have one of the most productive legislative sessions in recent memory. We know this because it’s exactly what Tim Walz did in Minnesota last year.
Walz didn’t achieve much during his first term as governor, for the most part because any legislative goal he attempted to achieve had to make it through a Republican-controlled legislature. In 2022, an election where both chambers were expected to lean Republican, Walz’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party surprisingly achieved a legislative trifecta for the first time since 2012 by the slimmest of margins: with a 34-33 Senate majority and just a six-vote edge in the House, a situation that gave him even less room for defections than Biden had at the beginning of his term.
At the national level, Democrats took their narrow majority as a sign that they needed to proceed with caution and seemed to govern from a place of fear. But in Minnesota, the DFL saw their first opportunity to wield power in a decade and decided to make the most of it.
In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which had unleashed a wave of ruthless state-level abortion bans around the country, one of the Minnesota DFL’s first acts in 2023 was to codify the rights to an abortion and contraception into state law, which would make it more difficult for it to be overturned by a future state supreme court case. In a display of exceptional party discipline, the caucus weathered dozens of Republican amendments designed to weaken the bill. Two months later, the legislature passed another bill which made the state a “safe haven” for abortion seekers in the many surrounding states where it is banned or heavily restricted. Minnesota also declared itself a refuge for transgender people living in states with bans on gender-affirming care. It also banned the abusive practice of gay “conversion therapy.”
Minnesota took steps toward a more humane criminal justice system. The legislature granted voting rights to 55,000 people with prior felony convictions, something which had been a legislative priority for attorney general Keith Ellison since he entered the legislature two decades before. Minnesota banned the practice of sentencing minors to life in prison and allowed for the possible supervised release of at least 40 people who’d been behind bars since they were children. It granted undocumented immigrants the right to obtain a driver’s license. (Republicans are currently losing their minds over this one even though this policy has allowed undocumented immigrants to more easily participate in society and has also improved road safety in general.) And Minnesota became the 23rd state in the country to legalize recreational cannabis and wiped out conviction records for 58,000 people, with more on the way.
The Minnesota legislature also entered government with a large budget surplus that they put to fantastic use. One of their biggest goals was to tackle child poverty, which had doubled nationally in 2022 after the U.S. Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire. If you know about any of the Minnesota legislature’s policy accomplishments, it’s that they passed free breakfast and lunch for all public school children. But Minnesota also passed its own sizable child tax credit that is expected to cut child poverty in the state by a third and has already benefited nearly half a million children. Minnesota introduced the “North Star Promise,” which guarantees free tuition at public colleges for students from families who make less than $80,000 per year. The state has poured huge investments into education, affordable housing, public infrastructure, and green energy.
And Minnesota became perhaps the nation’s most progressive state for workers. Last June, it passed a package of policies, including 12 weeks of paid family leave and 12 weeks of paid medical leave. And against furious objections from business interests, it introduced numerous new workplace protections: it banned non-compete clauses in employee contracts, prevented employers from holding “captive audience” union-busting meetings, allowed teachers’ unions to bargain over educator-to-student ratios in their classrooms, and introduced new regulations on the conditions of work in Amazon warehouses and meatpacking plants. Last month, a new $15 minimum wage took effect.
At the same time, neighboring red states were going hog wild enacting right-wing policies: banning abortion, cracking down on the freedoms of LGBTQ people, and gutting labor protections and welfare spending. This created a sense among Minnesota Democrats that their power was ephemeral and needed to be used to its fullest potential to prevent future backsliding.
Journalist Peter Callaghan, who has covered the legislative session extensively for MinnPost, described their attitude as follows in an interview with Democracy Now!:
They pretty much decided a couple of things. One, they had four years, meaning they could lose the House in two years, but they couldn’t lose the Governor’s Office or the state Senate until '26. So, whatever they passed could stay in place for these four years — it's harder to rescind things than it is to pass things — and that they were going to make a list and check it off as they went.This was not just a figurative list, but a literal one that Walz kept in his office.
It’s clear that Walz’s attitude towards governing is fundamentally opposite to that of the national party and a lot of other state level Democratic governments who tend to err on the side of caution at the risk of jeopardizing their electability. As he put it in an interview with the Washington Post, “I thought this would be a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it should be viewed that way. And I've always said you don't win elections to bank political capital. You win elections to burn the capital to improve lives.” (...)
On one level, the benefit of passing these policies speaks for itself: they are likely to improve a lot of people’s lives. But they have also generated a sense of possibility about what more can be achieved and that is generating enthusiasm for political participation. As Sarah Jaffe recently chronicled in a piece for In These Times, the last few years have seen an explosion of activism under the so-called “Minnesota Model”:
It’s a process that has built up over years, as a small group stacked up wins and more and more groups joined them. […] The Minnesota Model has yielded gain after gain: free school meals and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; getting Amazon to negotiate with workers for the first time; a $15 minimum wage (with proposals to bring it up to $20); so many union contracts it’s hard to count, for janitors and tenants and teachers.…And while Minnesota’s legislative blizzard was framed as something done with the expectation that lawmakers would soon lose power, this might not happen. Nationwide, Democrats, who failed to pass much of their professed agenda during the years 2021-2024, are still polling better than Republicans on the generic ballot, and at least one pollster projects them to hold onto the House in Minnesota. If people will vote for a party that delivered only a sliver of its professed agenda, imagine what accomplishing many things that make people’s lives better could do! (...)
[T]hat alliance changed the face of Minnesota politics, bringing about the Democratic trifecta that passed policies statewide that were goals for members of the alignment.
It speaks to how little we’ve come to expect from the Democratic Party—both at the national level and in other states—that Minnesota’s legislative session is seen as such a departure from what is normal. But if the Democrats have power after 2024, there’s a good chance that the circumstances will look something like what Walz stepped into in Minnesota. They have an obligation to learn from what that state has been doing right. Walz seems to be an exceptional talent for a lot of reasons. But I think the single most important thing is that he understands the importance of taking action while you have the opportunity.
by Stephen Prager, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Sorry for the politics. Not much else going on at the moment with the convention sucking the air out of everything. Naturally, if you read through the whole article, you'll see the inevitable cries of Socialism! Marxism! Progressives! Screw 'em. Most people who throw those labels around have almost no reading or historical perspective to know what they even mean (or their different flavors). C'mon Dems. See what works, and get rid of what doesn't (at least try!)
***
"There is a contradiction at the heart of the Republican Party that does not exist at the heart of the Democratic Party. Democrats are united in their belief that the government can, and should, act on behalf of the public. To be on the party’s far left is to believe the government should do much more. To be among its moderates is to believe it should do somewhat more [ed. like helping normal people avoid not getting punked by corporations at every turn]. But all of the people elected as Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Senator Joe Manchin, are there for the same reason: to use the power of the government to pursue their vision of the good. The divides are real and often bitter. But there is always room for negotiation because there is a fundamental commonality of purpose.The modern Republican Party, by contrast, is built upon a loathing of the government. Some of its members want to see the government shrunk and hamstrung. This is the old ethos, best described by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who famously said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” [ed. Good thing Medicare and Medicade, Social Security, school lunches for children, infrastruce improvement (roads, bridges, electrical grid, waste disposal, web connectivty, fire response, public parks, libraries, etc). - aren't all on the kill switch.. oh, wait...]. The Trumpist faction is more focused on purging government institutions of the disloyal [ed. like Nazi's]. “I think that w hat Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” JD Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview. “Replace them with our people, and when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Either way, to become part of the government as it exists now — to be engaged in the day-to-day process of governing — is to open yourself to suspicion and potentially mark yourself for a later purge." Ezra Klein - Trump Turned the Democratic Party Into a Pitiless Machine (NYT).]
