A trip through Walz’s home state of Minnesota reveals widespread confusion about what Walz believes and who he is.
A trip through Walz’s home state of Minnesota reveals widespread confusion about what Walz believes and who he is.
Greater Minnesota — Bjorn Olson thought he knew Tim Walz. Not anymore.
As Olson’s congressman, Walz wrote him a letter of recommendation to West Point and paid for his aunt to travel to Texas to visit her son, who had just returned injured from combat in Iraq. Congressman Walz was widely considered to be a warmhearted, folksy moderate who could represent conservative sensibilities while signing off on bipartisan progressive measures that the socially conscious citizens of the state saw as reasonable.
Olson and Walz both taught in the state’s schools, both served in the Army in a reserve capacity, and both represented an agrarian region that prioritizes civility and Christian charity — Olson as a state representative and Walz as a U.S. congressman.
Walz was elected governor in 2018 with the support of many Republicans who saw him the same way Olson once did.
“We thought him to be the same NRA-endorsed fiscal and social conservative,” Olson said.
By 2022, those voters did not feel the same way, with most returning to straight-ballot Republican support following the closed-churches and open-liquor-store lockdowns and riotous unrest of Walz’s first term.
“I don’t know what Walz believes in,” says Olson, contemplating the Walz of 2024.
Walz and his handlers are trying to return to those folksy, rural roots — never mind his leftward lurch in the governor’s mansion.
As the Harris campaign takes pains to advertise, there’s some reason to believe Walz is a country boy at heart. He owns a restored 1979 International Harvester Scout. He owns and can hold a shotgun, and he wears camouflage. The man attends church.
But it’s one thing to own and partake in the trappings of folksiness and another to live it, so I drove over to Minnesota to see whether Walz’s neighbors are buying the branding.
Working in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist during Walz’s time in the legislature, former Republican congressman Vin Weber recalls getting on well enough with Walz. Back then, Walz was a proponent of gun rights to such an extent that an NRA rep once dubbed him his “favorite Dem in Congress” and wished for more like him. Now, he and Kamala have promised to implement universal background checks and a so-called assault-weapons ban, and he claims that Second Amendment advocates are okay with “weapons of war being in our schools.”
Sitting with a view of Green Lake in Spicer, Minn., I expressed my admiration for Weber’s state, finding it much healthier and tidier than other blue Midwestern states such as Illinois and Michigan. Yes, he agreed, it’s a fine place, though he worried that the state’s leftward lurch in the past two years, with the three branches of the government captured by contemporary progressivism, would quickly put the Land of 10,000 Lakes in the same financial and social straits as the others, noting that while many Americans think of Minnesota as a rural state, it’s actually second only to Illinois in the Midwest when it comes to urbanization, with 70 percent of its population residing in metros.
Walz’s political shift, going from a congressman in a conservative district to a left-wing gubernatorial candidate and now a vice-presidential nominee, seemed as much a matter of constituency as one of personal beliefs.
Weber pointed to business registration and private-sector returns being down while Walz and the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) spent an almost $19 billion budget surplus while imposing new taxes to promote programs that will have Minnesota running significant deficits unless even more taxes are raised. “We are going to enact our entire agenda” was what the DFL promised when securing power, and that’s precisely what it did. Walz and his cohort then traveled to the White House to share how they went about shoving their agenda through.
Walz’s social agenda has been one of the most extreme in the United States. In 2023, he issued an executive order protecting mutilation in the name of “gender-affirming care.” This can include taking children from their parents if the state deems it necessary, called “temporary emergency jurisdiction.” Further, his administration altered Minnesota abortion law so that abortionists would no longer need to provide lifesaving care in the case of a failed abortion. Now, the doctor need only provide minimal “comfort care” until the child expires.
Walz’s home church, Pilgrim Lutheran in Saint Paul, might offer some helpful context in tracking his journey from moderate congressman to culture-warring veep candidate. As early as 2015, Pilgrim Lutheran was hanging Pride flags in its sanctuary and, during 2020, held anti-racism workshops referencing resources such as the works of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Robin DiAngelo. As governor, Walz was at that time genuflecting before racial-justice activists and refusing to call in the National Guard to restore order until blocks of the Twin Cities had been ransacked.
The former mayor of Twin City township Columbia Heights, Donna Schmitt, and her husband, John, experienced the consequences of Walz’s inaction firsthand — and they ended up leaving the city because of it, starting a new life in the town of Kandiyohi. During the Floyd upheaval, the couple were critical of the demonstrations, and their home’s address became known to the protesters and their activist abettors; it came to pass that John felt it necessary to sleep armed in the first-floor bedroom facing the street while insisting that his wife sleep upstairs as far from the windows as possible for fear of Molotov cocktails and home invasion.
Looking back at the torched remains of Minneapolis’s Third Precinct, it’s easier to remember just how anarchic the city was during that period. John, who did 15 years for the Teamsters before they disappeared his pension through mismanagement and graft, and then worked 25 for GE, said what would become a theme with Minnesotans when asked about Walz: “I don’t know who he is,” meaning, they don’t know which Walz is the real one, the moderate congressman or the progressive bull. Is he actually folksy? “No, I wouldn’t say so.”
Walz’s former district felt betrayed by a man they had come to see as a conservative Democrat who was no longer moored by anything other than a desire to procure and maintain power. Olson is confident that Walz “will change who he is to become who he wants to be” and that Walz will not be satisfied with the vice presidency. After all, he’s climbed from a classroom to Congress to the governor’s mansion, and he’s altered himself to fit the form that will allow that progression to continue.
So, is Walz folksy? Olson thought not, not if folksy means “neighbors helping each other or strangers on the side of the road” and something one does “because it’s the right thing to do” regardless of whether it advances one’s station.
After traveling the state and speaking with all manner of Minnesotans, I am certain of this: Nobody quite knows, or will say, who exactly Tim Walz is. Why did he change his views from rural common sense to cosmopolitan progressivism? Was it the work of his wife and daughter, as some folks insinuate, or was it simply raw political calculation?
Is Walz folksy? The good Catholics, Lutherans, and Evangelicals of the North Star State are leery of gainsaying entirely his rustic bona fides — but they’re certainly concerned that he could be nothing more than a leftist facsimile of the real deal.