Minnesota’s Crossroads: Leadership, Trust, and the Games People Play
Minnesota has survived a lot — brutal winters, barn-burner political fights, and the heartbreak of yet another near miss at the Super Bowl. But our toughest challenge in recent years hasn’t come from Mother Nature or sports luck — it’s come from a slow erosion of public trust in our own state government.
And it’s not the kind of problem you can fix with a shovel in January or a grill in July. It’s systemic.
Governor Tim Walz’s time in office has been marked by moments of clear action and moments of glaring hesitation — and, more troublingly, a pattern where his words promise one thing but his decisions deliver another. Let’s unpack it, step by step.
A Pandemic Playbook That Left Too Many Pages Blank
When COVID-19 first hit, Walz invoked emergency powers to impose stay-at-home orders, curfews, and restrictions on businesses. In those chaotic early months, many Minnesotans gave him the benefit of the doubt. Public safety had to come first.
But while other states began adapting and recalibrating their measures based on emerging data, Minnesota’s restrictions lingered. Restaurants were forced into long-term closures, youth sports seasons vanished, and small businesses — already running on thin margins — couldn’t get a straight answer on when they could reopen. The decision-making process felt more like waiting for spring ice-out on Mille Lacs: you knew it would happen eventually, but the date was anyone’s guess.
Even when legislative leaders from both sides offered targeted reopening plans, Walz held the line on broader closures. His rationale shifted from week to week — sometimes based on infection rates, sometimes hospital capacity, sometimes on a yet-unreleased “reopening plan” that Minnesotans were told to trust without seeing.
Minneapolis Riots: The Price of Hesitation
The summer of 2020 brought not just a public health crisis, but one of the most turbulent civic crises in Minnesota’s modern history. After the killing of George Floyd, peaceful protests gave way to looting, arson, and days of chaos in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
The National Guard was eventually deployed — but not before three nights of destruction and hundreds of millions in damages, much of it in immigrant-owned neighborhoods.
Past governors, whether Democrat Rudy Perpich or Republican Arne Carlson, had reputations for acting decisively in emergencies. Carlson in particular had a knack for cutting through bureaucracy when fires (literal or political) broke out. Walz, by contrast, waited — consulting, assessing, weighing optics — while the flames spread.
When help came, it was too late for many business owners, whose livelihoods were reduced to ashes. Insurance didn’t cover everything, and state aid, when it arrived, came with delays and paperwork that made flood recovery look like a picnic.
Fraud: A Pattern, Not an Accident
If COVID and civil unrest tested Minnesota’s social fabric, the next wave of crises tested its financial backbone. And we failed.
Under Walz’s watch, the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) became a repeat player in headline-making fraud:
Feeding Our Future: A pandemic-era food program designed to feed children in need was exploited to the tune of $250 million — the largest fraud of its kind in the nation.
Housing Stabilization Services: In 2025, FBI raids exposed what the U.S. Attorney described as a program in which the “vast majority” of spending was fraudulent. Estimated statewide fraud: over $1 billion.
Medicaid & Autism Services: More millions lost to inflated or fake billing.
In each case, the sequence was eerily similar: warnings ignored, fraud allowed to grow, federal authorities stepping in, and only then — only then — did the Governor’s office halt payments or announce reforms.
Walz himself has acknowledged that Minnesota’s fraud safeguards “aren’t strong enough,” a statement that directly contradicts his earlier confidence in DHS’s oversight. The result? Slower payments and tighter restrictions for honest providers, while the crooks had years to enjoy their haul.
Budget: From Surplus to Squeeze
When 2023 began, Minnesota had a historic $17.5 billion surplus. The DFL-led legislature and Governor Walz saw it as an opportunity for bold investment — and passed a record $71.5 billion budget, increasing spending nearly 40% over the prior cycle.
But surpluses, like Minnesota summers, don’t last forever. By 2025, with federal COVID aid gone and federal freezes under President Trump cutting into expected revenues, the state was staring at a projected deficit. The response was a leaner $66 billion budget and $283 million in cuts, especially to DHS programs — the very department already mired in fraud scandals.
Minnesota’s leaders blamed the revenue shortfalls on Washington. But budgeting 101 says: plan for the bad years during the good ones. That lesson was ignored, and now the state is tightening its belt in ways that hurt the very people it claimed to protect.
The DFL Then and Now — A Call Back to Our Roots
Minnesota’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party was born from a marriage of two worlds: the grit of city laborers and the backbone of rural farmers. It wasn’t just a political label — it was a promise that the party would stand up for the folks milking cows at dawn and the machinists punching in at midnight.
Names like Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman, and Wendell Anderson weren’t just DFL icons because they won elections. They were respected because they listened. They understood that Minnesota’s heart beats in both our small towns and our city neighborhoods.
Somewhere along the way, the party’s focus shifted. Critics — including lifelong DFLers — say it’s become too easy to borrow talking points from Washington instead of talking to the café regulars in Willmar or the co-op members in Bemidji. Too often, we see energy spent on national partisan battles or political map-making rather than the bread-and-butter work of making rural hospitals sustainable, keeping family farms viable, and ensuring every community has a fair shot.
If we want the DFL to thrive in the next generation, it’s time to remember what made it strong in the first place: winning trust by showing up, not by drawing lines on a map.
From Grassroots to the Runway
That’s why Governor Walz’s recent schedule has been so frustrating for many Minnesotans — including some in his own party. Since running for vice president in 2024 and losing, Walz has continued to travel like he’s still on the campaign trail, showing up in swing states and flying overseas for “trade deals” while taxpayers foot the bill.
It’s not that Minnesotans oppose trade promotion or building national connections — but when the person elected to run the state seems to be spending more time in Ohio or on international stages than in farm bureaus and school gymnasiums here at home, people start to wonder whose priorities are being served.
The lack of full expense transparency only makes it worse. Without clear numbers on flights, security, lodging, and staff costs, the public is left guessing — and suspicion grows.
To put it in Minnesota Vikings terms, it’s like watching a head coach spend half the season recruiting for another team, then come back and call plays for ours. We’ve seen this before — bad coaching choices, trading away our best players, and wondering why the season doesn’t end the way we hoped. You can’t keep winning if you’re not focused on the team in front of you.
Gerrymandering — Why It Hurts Everyone, Not Just “The Other Side”
Before we get too deep, let’s be clear: this is not about bashing the DFL or Governor Walz for the sake of it. Minnesota’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party has a proud history rooted in both urban labor halls and rural farmsteads. Its greatest strength used to be a simple one — showing up in every county, listening to every voter, and earning their trust.
That’s why it’s worth talking openly about gerrymandering.
For those who don’t live and breathe political jargon, gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing voting district maps in strange, squiggly ways to benefit one party. Imagine if, in order to win the State Fair butter sculpting contest, you got to choose which judges were allowed to vote — that’s gerrymandering.
It flips democracy on its head: politicians pick their voters, instead of voters picking their politicians. It silences moderate voices, deepens division, and leaves whole communities feeling like they don’t matter unless they’re “on the right side” of the map.
Governor Walz has criticized Republicans in Texas for doing it, while at the same time encouraging Democrat-led states like California to do it in “response.” The problem? Once you justify the tactic, you’ve given the green light for everyone to use it. And that’s a race to the bottom Minnesota shouldn’t join.
Travel, Trade, and Taxpayer Tabs
Since losing the vice presidential race, Walz has racked up plenty of frequent flyer miles, visiting swing states and traveling overseas. While promoting Minnesota business abroad isn’t inherently bad, the lack of a clear public accounting of these travel costs leaves taxpayers wondering: are we funding a governor’s business trip, or a campaign in disguise?
The Name-Calling Problem and the Hypocrisy Behind It
Many Minnesotans — including veterans, Holocaust survivors’ families, and everyday citizens — are fed up with being smeared as “Nazis” simply for holding different political views. Such rhetoric isn’t just uncivil; it’s a slap in the face to history and to those who sacrificed to ensure fascism never took root here.
Leadership means disagreeing without demeaning, persuading without poisoning the well. Yet increasingly, we see political discourse reduced to labels designed to shut down debate rather than foster understanding. And the irony is hard to miss: some of the very people who are quick to slap the “Nazi” label on others are themselves veterans of protest movements — like Black Lives Matter — that, at their core, called for recognition, dignity, and the idea that lives matter.
That’s a principle most Minnesotans can agree on. But here’s the contradiction: when someone says “All Lives Matter,” “White Lives Matter,” or “Brown Lives Matter” — not as a denial of the Black Lives Matter cause, but as an affirmation that no life is lesser — those same individuals can become irate, dismissive, or, in some cases, outright aggressive.
This double standard undermines the very equality such movements claim to champion. If we can only talk about some lives mattering and not others, then we’ve traded one kind of exclusion for another. True leadership — and true activism — means standing for everyone’s humanity, even when we disagree on policy, and especially when we disagree on politics.
When political dialogue becomes a game of “your life matters, but not yours,” we’ve lost the moral high ground and replaced it with the same tribalism we claim to oppose. Minnesota — and America — can do better than that.
Final Thoughts
Minnesota deserves leadership that’s proactive, transparent, and respectful — qualities we’ve seen before from governors of both parties. Whether you admired Jesse Ventura’s bluntness or Harold Stassen’s diplomacy, you knew their focus was on the state first.
Governor Walz still has time to course-correct. But until he swaps political gamesmanship for genuine governance, Minnesotans will keep asking the same question: Whose map is he following — ours, or his own?
