Hack Walz Down

C an honest government responsive to the people be restored after regime change? We’re about to find out . . . in Minnesota.

In all seriousness, Tim Walz dropping his bid for a third term as governor of Minnesota this morning is very much about corruption of government so pervasive it would make a Latin American caudillo blush. For a state that has long prided itself on its Scandinavian culture of high civic trust, decency, and public integrity, that has been a bitter pill to swallow. Walz has long resisted accountability; as recently as yesterday, he was taking to X/Twitter to brand YouTube gonzo journalist Nick Shirley “a delusional conspiracy theorist.” But whatever criticisms can be lobbed personally at Shirley and the precision of his work, there was no denying that his video exposé of Somali daycare fraud on Walz’s watch was a real story with real political impact based on real crime. In his message this morning, Walz was compelled to acknowledge that, “for the last several years, an organized group of criminals have sought to take advantage of our state’s generosity.”

Now, Walz is the one whose political scalp was claimed.

As Walz rose to the national scene in the summer of 2024, there were three lines of criticism from the right. My own view was that Walz’s problem was far-left extremism. First elected to Congress in the 2006 blue wave as an anti-war candidate with an otherwise apparently moderate profile, he spent twelve years representing Minnesota’s first congressional district, a red-leaning territory along the Iowa border that voted twice for George W. Bush and twice for Donald Trump. But Walz bled support from those voters after becoming governor, especially over his overzealous Covid policies, his response to the George Floyd riots, and the eye-popping, far-left agenda signed into law by Walz in 2023 after his party took sole control of the state legislature. That included repealing Minnesota’s law against coercing women into abortions, pushing radical education and transgender policies, turning the state’s big budget surplus into a debt hole, and strangling business growth with new mandates and taxes.

The second line of criticism against Walz was less about his governing record than that there just seemed something off about the guy. Sure, this argument went, Walz is a stocky, gravel-voiced Midwesterner with thinning hair who looks and sounds nothing like your stereotypical urban coastal Democrat. He’s not, in other words, Gavin Newsom. But the guy who talked his way onto the Democratic ticket by coining the “Trump and Vance are weird” talking point, and who was touted by the pro-Democrat national political press as “America’s Dad,” struck many people as pretty weird himself, and specifically as inauthentically and performatively masculine. Walz came off as the try-hard assistant coach who wants everybody to call him “Coach,” the awkward-gesturing schoolteacher who is not actually the gun-toting, truck-driving handyman he wants to seem. In our image-conscious politics, that matters.

The third line of criticism was that Walz was a terrible administrator sitting atop a scandalous tower of fraud on the taxpayers. Our own Jim Geraghty was way out in front of this from the moment Walz’s name surfaced as a potential veep pick, and even the national press couldn’t entirely ignore it — nor could the blue-leaning Saint Paul press corps, which despite a lot of hesitancy was ultimately important in shedding light on a series of frauds plaguing Covid and welfare programs and various other boondoggles.

Well, my hat’s off to Jim. It wasn’t the extremism that did in Walz, although that played a role in Republicans retaking a share of control of the Minnesota House in 2024. At the presidential level, Walz’s record and personality didn’t matter all that much compared with the top of the ticket, although his personal inadequacy was exposed on the debate stage when he got bulldozed by JD Vance. Back home, Walz presided over a nightmare 2025, featuring a legislature paralyzed by dysfunction, the assassination of the state’s top Democratic legislator, an intra-party schism in the Minneapolis mayor’s race, and a horrific school shooting. None of this was Walz’s fault, although his weaknesses as a leader were frequently on display in his responses.

But what sealed Walz’s political fate was the scandals. Was Walz a completely inept leader who — as Jim noted — couldn’t even properly account for his own office’s routine expenditures? Was he fundamentally uninterested in fraud because, as Dominic Pino argued, giving the taxpayers’ money to Democratic constituencies is blue-state progressivism, and preventing them from defrauding the state would interfere with the efficiency of just letting the treasury get looted? Or was Walz unable to see and respond to fraud within the Somali community for reasons of woke political correctness, too afraid of charges of racism that were wielded as a defensive shield?

Maybe the simplest answer all along was yes, yes, and yes.

Minnesotans had been increasingly irate about the successive fraud scandals, which is why multiple Republican candidates have been building their campaigns against Walz around the theme. The Somali angle turned out to be a handy way to explain the scandals to a national audience. It’s an important part of the story, reflecting the same clash between Minnesota’s distinctly Scandinavian cultural heritage and the very different mores of the Somali community that is also playing out in Sweden. But it is also a mistake to think that the pervasive fraud problem under Walz was only about Somali immigrants and Somali-Americans (or even that it is solely a Minnesota issue). Walz was, to some extent, deliberately asleep at the security cameras when he was hired to be the state’s night watchman.

Finally, let us not pass by the collapse of Walz’s political fortunes without a reminder that the one and (thankfully) only personnel decision Kamala Harris made for her prospective presidential administration was to choose him as next in line for the presidency. If you needed any additional proof that Harris lacked the judgment to be president, look no further than Tim Walz.