Talk about a long fall.

A mere year ago, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was within spitting distance—well, maybe llama-spitting distance—of the vice presidency. Today he is a political has-been, having now announced that he won’t be running for a third term in office.

Making that announcement, he attributed his decision to the need to focus on “defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity,” which focus, he explained, would prevent him from giving “a political campaign my all.”

“So I’ve decided,” he continued, “to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.”

He was right that the predatory criminals to whom he referred were instrumental to his surprising decision. But it was less his need to focus on their crimes—something that the Department of Justice and the FBI are fully capable of doing on their own—than it was Mr. Walz’s having missed the massive fraud that has lately put Minnesota in the national limelight.

That fraud dates back to the coronavirus pandemic, when a Minnesota-based nonprofit called Feeding Our Future was created to provide school lunches for thousands of students.
Widespread fraud was later uncovered in the organization, with 78 defendants—72 of Somali descent—associated with Feeding the Future found guilty of stealing public funds.

Over the course of several years, those who ran what might better have been called Frauding the Future amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in program funds, an operation the Justice Department has called the “largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the United States.”

There are assertions, too, of other illegal schemes heavily involving the Minnesota Somali community, in areas like housing and day care facilities, which federal prosecutors said could ultimately amount to $9 billion or more—nearly half the federal funding provided the state for the programs at issue.

And Mr. Walz, along with others in the state’s Democratic leadership, have faced criticism for their lax oversight of the allocation of the welfare payments. A House committee is probing his possible role in what it called a “massive fraud.”

Might a message about progressive politics lie in the Walz washout?

When the current outgoing Minnesota governor first ran for Congress in 2006, he was regarded as a moderate “Blue Dog” Democrat. (The Blue Dog Coalition is the most conservative grouping of Democrats in the House.) He generally voted with his party’s moderates.

He broke with liberals on gun rights—at one point receiving an “A rating” from the National Rifle Association—and on energy policy, and he maintained strong support for Israel.
But as governor, he began to pander to his party’s progressive wing, embracing criminal justice reform and gun control (and was downgraded by the NRA to an “F”).

Mr. Walz also has been disturbingly supportive of his fellow Minnesotan Representative Ilhan Omar, she of anti-Semitic tropes and ugly anti-Israel views. And, responding to Republican criticism over the thievery that took place under his nose, Mr. Walz resorted to accusing his critics of racism.

It was speculated, too, that Kamala Harris chose Mr. Walz as her running mate in the 2024 presidential election, over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, to please the anti-Israel wing of the party.

Minnesota Republican Congressman Brad Finstad, who represents the congressional district Mr. Walz once held, stated the obvious, that the governor has “definitely changed.”

“I would say,” Mr. Finstad offered, “the only thing that’s conservative left about Tim Walz is his haircut.”

While the decline of Mr. Walz’s political career is due to the pilfered funds, it can’t be overlooked that his evolution from Blue Dog to bleeding heart—which, in fact, played a part in his deficient oversight of how federal funds were used by some Minnesotans—may say something about the progress of progressivism.

Much attention has been given to the ascension of Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty of New York City. And troubling it is.

But whether the future of the left wing of the Democratic Party is more accurately presaged by the election of a radical as mayor than by the downfall of a progressive governor is far from clear.

Let us hope that as has gone Minnesota will go the nation.

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