Humphrey Without Vietnam, but More Down-Home
Rural roots. High school social studies teacher. As coach, turned around losing high school football team and led it to state championship. Twenty-four years’ service in the state’s National Guard. Gun owner; hunts pheasants. As congressman, won historically Republican district six times. As governor, worked with the legislature and signed into law universal free breakfast and lunch program for public school students, paid sick and family leave, groundbreaking sectoral bargaining for nursing home employees, and first-in-the-nation outlawing of employers’ common practice of compelling employees to attend anti-union rants—all with just a one-vote majority in the state Senate. Coined a devastating (because accurate and simple) meme to describe Donald Trump & Co.
If you’re a Democrat who understands the need to win back some of the rural and working-class voters who’ve moved right, not to mention the need to enact major progressive populist, pro-worker, and pro-choice legislation, what’s not to like about Tim Walz?
Kamala Harris’s decision earlier today to pick the Minnesota governor as her running mate was anything but devoid of political smarts. To be sure, picking Josh Shapiro would likely have helped in the must-win state of Pennsylvania, but it might also have guaranteed the kind of heckling from those opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza (only some of whom are anti-Israel and only some of them are antisemitic, too) that had been guaranteed at all of Joe Biden’s campaign events. That would have stepped on the story of Harris’s attacks on Trump’s past, present, and future. Besides which, when you consider Walz on his own merits, he’s both programmatically and politically the candidate from central casting.
The Prospect has been chronicling the course of Minnesota’s progressivism and its leaders for a long time. In 2002, I covered Paul Wellstone’s last campaign just a few weeks before he was killed in a plane crash. In 2014, I covered the emergence of a labor-community coalition in the Twin Cities that knitted together service, retail, and construction unions with immigrant, civil rights, environmental, and pro-choice groups.
The goals of that coalition had to be put on hold for nearly a decade, however, as Republican control of one house of the state legislature continually thwarted their proposals. In 2022, however, not only was Walz re-elected as governor but the Democrats were able to cling to their narrow majority in the lower house and win a one-vote majority in the state Senate. Whereupon, as my colleague Ryan Cooper noted last year, the legislature passed and Walz signed into law new statutes that created paid sick days for nearly all workers, which will accrue at the rate of one hour per 30 hours worked up to a maximum of 48 hours; forbids noncompete agreements in labor contracts; establishes a sectoral bargaining system for nursing homes; allows teachers to negotiate class sizes; and bans “captive audience” meetings where employers force their workers to listen to anti-union propaganda. It also sets up new protections for meatpackers, construction workers, and Amazon employees. And a separate bill passed on Sunday guarantees a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers.
In other words, second-term Walz had a first hundred days almost comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1933.
Walz deserves huge credit for this—no other Democratic governor can claim a comparable level of success, much less with a one-vote majority in a legislative house—but so does the entire and very disparate Minnesota left, which had stuck together and worked together for nearly a full decade in preparation for such a day. Biden could have used that kind of unified push in his unsuccessful fight to enact his Build Back Better bill and the PRO Act, which would have effectively resurrected a pro-worker National Labor Relations Act. Walz, to be sure, wasn’t subjected to the same legislative roadblocks—the filibuster and Sens. Manchin and Sinema—that derailed Biden’s proposals.
That said, Walz is still one hell of a veepick. In the best traditions of Minnesota’s progressive populism. Humphrey without Vietnam, but more down-home.
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