No governor wants to go on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” and be asked, “Do you take responsibility for failing to stop this fraud in your state?” But that’s where Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz found himself on Sunday, on the heels of a lengthy, devastating New York Times article that painted a dismal portrait of a hapless state government repeatedly taken to the cleaners by fraudsters: “More than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots” being investigated by federal prosecutors.
Though the story offers new developments, it’s a familiar one if you were paying attention in the 2024 presidential campaign. Before then-Vice President Kamala Harris selected Walz as her running mate, the public already knew about the massive pandemic-aid fraud exploiting Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future program. What the Justice Department in 2022 termed a “brazen” and “staggering” scheme steered $250 million from a federal child nutrition program to ineligible recipients.
Minnesota’s $500 million “hero pay” program for pandemic frontline workers may have resulted in hundreds of thousands of people receiving checks who were not eligible, according to the state’s Office of the Legislative Auditor. The agency’s head, Judy Randall, lamented to state legislators, “State agencies don’t necessarily approach their work with an oversight and a regulatory mindset … You can’t just trust everybody. I wish we could, but clearly, we can’t.”
Some mainstream national news organizations noted these scandals as Walz campaigned with Harris, but the overwhelming focus at the time was Walz’s folksiness and how much he could help Harris in those all-important blue wall states in the Upper Midwest. Not only did Walz fail to help Harris in Michigan or Wisconsin, he didn’t even give the Democratic ticket a boost in his home state: Harris-Walz won Minnesota by a smaller margin (4.24 percentage points) than the Joe Biden-Harris ticket did four years earlier (7.12 percentage points).
Since then, federal prosecutors have uncovered a $14 million scheme to defraud Minnesota’s Medicaid autism treatment program; the state has terminated a housing assistance program after it “suspended payment to 77 housing stabilization providers this year based on credible allegations of fraud,” according to the state’s Department of Human Services; and a new performance audit revealed a dozen findings of mismanagement in Walz’s office.
On “Meet the Press,” Walz said, “Minnesota is a generous state. Minnesota is a prosperous state, a well-run state. We’re AAA-bond rated. But that attracts criminals.” (Sixteen other states currently hold a AAA bond rating from Fitch, and none of them seems to have Minnesota’s problems.)
President Donald Trump has jumped on the story, and Walz tried to divert the “Meet the Press” grilling to a discussion of Trump’s mental stability. But what’s going on between the president’s ears doesn’t really change anything regarding how the Minnesota state government has managed taxpayer money over the past seven years.
The past year has not been kind to Walz. Kamala Harris’s recent book, “107 Days,” makes clear she was thoroughly disappointed by Walz’s performance as running mate. She describes watching him in the vice-presidential debate on TV and saying, “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”
After the debate, when Walz tells Harris that he wishes he had done better, she reassures him — but fumes in the book that she thought, in choosing Walz, she was getting an experienced politician who’d know what he was getting into. In the acknowledgments, full of effusive praise for her campaign staff, Harris writes simply, “To Tim Walz, thank you for joining me on this journey.”
Walz’s approval rating in Minnesota as governor is evenly split, as of September. But keep in mind, this is a heavily Democratic state. The gubernatorial primary isn’t until June. If you’re a Minnesota Democrat, do you really want to roll the dice on a not-so-popular guy going for a rarely pursued third term? Republicans are likely to nominate Lisa Demuth, the state’s House speaker, who’s already hitting Walz because he “let fraud run wild.”
If Walz is sweating reelection in what is traditionally one of the safest states for Democrats … maybe it’s time to conclude that he was a lousy pick as Harris’s running mate and doesn’t merit serious consideration by Democrats for their 2028 presidential nomination.
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