Tim Walz was once hailed as the Democrats’ crafty solution to their problem with young men, now he’s announced his exit from political life. Kamala Harris was in a rush to pick a vice president after Joe Biden left the race in July 2024. As she later wrote in her memoir last year, she thought picking Pete Buttigieg – the fluent and crisp former transport secretary – was too risky because he was gay, and she couldn’t stand the thought of governor Josh Shapiro thinking he was actually co-president. So they trotted out a white man who coached football, hunted deer, fixed up his own truck and wore camo gear. It was identity politics applied to the question of how to win over the white working-class vote. What could go wrong? Unsurprisingly to everyone but the Democratic elite, it did not work out.
Few were aware of governor Walz as a national figure before Harris gave him the call. His ascension came on the back of memes: Walz catapulted into the race after a clip went viral of him calling Trump and his acolytes “weird”. He struggled on the campaign trail, tripping over false statements he’d made about visiting China during the Tiananmen Square protests and carrying weapons in war. JD Vance outsmarted him in the debate as well-intentioned Walz seemed more interested in building bridges with his opposite number than landing blows. The entire time, he seemed too nice for the gutter fight at hand, too naïve to really understand how his enemy saw the world.
It was ultimately fraud that led to Walz’s downfall. In Minnesota, where he serves as governor, the origins of the scandal can be traced back to the pandemic. In 2020, it was on his watch that officials at the Minnesota Department of Education, tasked with administering a programme designed to feed vulnerable children, found themselves inundated with applications to open new feeding sites. Doubts soon emerged over the credibility of a number of invoices. Feeding Our Future, the non-profit organisation that became the scheme’s largest provider, responded forcefully. With many of its staff of Somali heritage, the group warned the state agency in an email that any failure to swiftly approve applications from “minority-owned businesses” would prompt a lawsuit alleging racism – claims it said would be “splashed across the news”.
In March 2024, Feeding Our Future was found to have stolen approximately $250m from the public purse. Federal prosecutors say that 59 individuals have so far been convicted in connection with the scheme, and that more than $1bn of taxpayers’ money has been taken across three related frauds now under investigation. Trump has already leapt at the opportunity to send in Ice to the state and stop federal funding.
It was a narrative tailor-made to portray Democrats as cynical elites, more concerned with channelling public funds to immigrants than with helping those already in the country. The offences themselves are quite different, but the broader themes – allegations of a cover-up and officials fearful of being branded racist – echo elements of Britain’s grooming gang scandal.
Walz has now said he will not seek a third term as governor, arguing that this will allow him to continue bearing down on the fraud. His departure serves as a capstone to the Harris era, which was marked by symbolism over substance and by a zeal for progressive causes that eclipsed pledges to rebalance the economy. The notion that ethnic voting blocs can simply be assembled into a winning coalition by fielding politicians with the requisite skin colour has been put out to pasture.
Democrats, meanwhile, remain at a loss as to how they might reconnect with young men. Walz himself often looked confused. The belief that decency alone was sufficient for leadership in an age of coarse and brutal politics was a comforting fiction – and one to which he clung until the end.
[Further reading: Kamala Harris cares too much about being nice]
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