Kamala Harris has named Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate for the 2024 election. It has become increasingly apparent that this was about the best choice she realistically could have made. Walz seems like a man constructed in a lab to help Democrats win a close election: a midwestern governor who not only has “Aggressively Normal Dad” vibes, as the New York Times put it, but who is also an aggressively sincere advocate for something resembling social democracy with the policy record to back it up. 

A lot of the excitement surrounding Walz right now seems to stem from the assumption that he’ll help the Harris campaign defeat Trump in November. That’s understandable, given how real and dangerous the possibility of a second Trump term has felt over the past few months. Just a month ago, some Democrats were going on the record saying that they were “resigned” to a second Trump term. At the very least, it’s a relief to see them actually trying to win. But the value of Walz goes beyond his ability to get Kamala Harris into the White House. He provides a blueprint for how she can be successful once she’s there. If she does win, she’ll face the challenge of actually governing, and she’ll need all the help she can get. If she does manage to win the presidency, current predictions suggest that in the best-case scenario, she’ll come in with a gossamer thin majority in the House and Senate with which to try to pass policy. Looking back at Walz’s domestic agenda as governor of Minnesota provides us with a sense of direction for what Democrats could accomplish nationally. 

The Biden administration was an example of how not to govern. Elected on a mandate to improve conditions in a nation being pummeled by the COVID pandemic and Trump’s failure to adequately address it, the Biden administration squandered the brief period of popularity they enjoyed in the first few months of their term, dragging their feet on filibuster reform until it was far too late. As a result, many of their policy priorities were either winnowed down (like gun reform, green energy expansion)—or completely abandoned (like maintaining the expanded child tax credit, passing the PRO Act, and protecting abortion rights nationally after the reversal of Roe v. Wade). 

Joe Biden spent much of his early presidency laboring under the delusion that Republicans would have some “epiphany” and decide to meet his party halfway to pass significant legislation, something that largely did not happen. And in the rare cases that it did, like the bipartisan infrastructure bill or the post-Uvalde gun reforms, the result was something thoroughly watered down from what Democrats had initially hoped to pass. Of course, defenders of the Biden administration at the time would tell you that Biden was at the mercy of obstinate members of his own party, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to sign onto any legislation that lacked Republican support. But as Branko Marcetic argued at the time in Jacobin, Biden had plenty of tools of coercion and persuasion he could have used to get them on board. A hypothetical President Harris will not have to deal with Manchin and Sinema obstructing her legislative agenda like Biden did—as they will both be out of the Senate. But the problem ran deeper than those two. As Sam Brodey reported for the Daily Beast, other Democrats considered Manchin and Sinema to be a “heat shield” that allowed them to avoid having to stick their own necks out to tank liberal proposals.

The lesson you could take from this is that with a slim majority, you simply have to lower your expectations for what can be accomplished. But this is not true at all. It is still possible to not only govern in such conditions but to have one of the most productive legislative sessions in recent memory. We know this because it’s exactly what Tim Walz did in Minnesota last year.

Walz didn’t achieve much during his first term as governor, for the most part because any legislative goal he attempted to achieve had to make it through a Republican-controlled legislature. In 2022, an election where both chambers were expected to lean Republican, Walz’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party surprisingly achieved a legislative trifecta for the first time since 2012 by the slimmest of margins: with a 34-33 Senate majority and just a six-vote edge in the House, a situation that gave him even less room for defections than Biden had at the beginning of his term. 

At the national level, Democrats took their narrow majority as a sign that they needed to proceed with caution and seemed to govern from a place of fear. But in Minnesota, the DFL saw their first opportunity to wield power in a decade and decided to make the most of it. 

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which had unleashed a wave of ruthless state-level abortion bans around the country, one of the Minnesota DFL’s first acts in 2023 was to codify the rights to an abortion and contraception into state law, which would make it more difficult for it to be overturned by a future state supreme court case. In a display of exceptional party discipline, the caucus weathered dozens of Republican amendments designed to weaken the bill. Two months later, the legislature passed another bill which made the state a “safe haven” for abortion seekers in the many surrounding states where it is banned or heavily restricted. Minnesota also declared itself a refuge for transgender people living in states with bans on gender-affirming care. It also banned the abusive practice of gay “conversion therapy.” 

Minnesota took steps toward a more humane criminal justice system. The legislature granted voting rights to 55,000 people with prior felony convictions, something which had been a legislative priority for attorney general Keith Ellison since he entered the legislature two decades before. Minnesota banned the practice of sentencing minors to life in prison and allowed for the possible supervised release of at least 40 people who’d been behind bars since they were children. It granted undocumented immigrants the right to obtain a driver’s license. (Republicans are currently losing their minds over this one even though this policy has allowed undocumented immigrants to more easily participate in society and has also improved road safety in general.) And Minnesota became the 23rd state in the country to legalize recreational cannabis and wiped out conviction records for 58,000 people, with more on the way. 

The Minnesota legislature also entered government with a large budget surplus that they put to fantastic use. One of their biggest goals was to tackle child poverty, which had doubled nationally in 2022 after the U.S. Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire. If you know about any of the Minnesota legislature’s policy accomplishments, it’s that they passed free breakfast and lunch for all public school children. But Minnesota also passed its own sizable child tax credit that is expected to cut child poverty in the state by a third and has already benefited nearly half a million children. Minnesota introduced the “North Star Promise,” which guarantees free tuition at public colleges for students from families who make less than $80,000 per year. The state has poured huge investments into education, affordable housing, public infrastructure, and green energy. 

And Minnesota became perhaps the nation’s most progressive state for workers. Last June, it passed a package of policies, including 12 weeks of paid family leave and 12 weeks of paid medical leave. And against furious objections from business interests, it introduced numerous new workplace protections: it banned non-compete clauses in employee contracts, prevented employers from holding “captive audience” union-busting meetings, allowed teachers’ unions to bargain over educator-to-student ratios in their classrooms, and introduced new regulations on the conditions of work in Amazon warehouses and meatpacking plants. Last month, a new $15 minimum wage took effect. 

At the same time, neighboring red states were going hog wild enacting right-wing policies: banning abortion, cracking down on the freedoms of LGBTQ people, and gutting labor protections and welfare spending. This created a sense among Minnesota Democrats that their power was ephemeral and needed to be used to its fullest potential to prevent future backsliding.

Journalist Peter Callaghan, who has covered the legislative session extensively for MinnPost, described their attitude as follows in an interview with Democracy Now!:

They pretty much decided a couple of things. One, they had four years, meaning they could lose the House in two years, but they couldn’t lose the Governor’s Office or the state Senate until '26. So, whatever they passed could stay in place for these four years — it's harder to rescind things than it is to pass things — and that they were going to make a list and check it off as they went.

This was not just a figurative list, but a literal one that Walz kept in his office.

It’s clear that Walz’s attitude towards governing is fundamentally opposite to that of the national party and a lot of other state level Democratic governments who tend to err on the side of caution at the risk of jeopardizing their electability. As he put it in an interview with the Washington Post, “I thought this would be a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it should be viewed that way. And I've always said you don't win elections to bank political capital. You win elections to burn the capital to improve lives.” House Majority Leader Jamie Long told the Post that in 2013, the last time Democrats held a legislative majority, they “passed a lot of really good things” but got hung up on how various policies might “affect them electorally.” She said, “There were many things they decided not to do because they figured, ‘Well, we should win our reelections and then we’ll come back and do all those things next time.” Of course, “next time” never came, and the DFL did not hold such an opportunity again until 2023.

On one level, the benefit of passing these policies speaks for itself: they are likely to improve a lot of people’s lives. But they have also generated a sense of possibility about what more can be achieved and that is generating enthusiasm for political participation. As Sarah Jaffe recently chronicled in a piece for In These Times, the last few years have seen an explosion of activism under the so-called “Minnesota Model”: 

It’s a process that has built up over years, as a small group stacked up wins and more and more groups joined them. […] The Minnesota Model has yielded gain after gain: free school meals and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; getting Amazon to negotiate with workers for the first time; a $15 minimum wage (with proposals to bring it up to $20); so many union contracts it’s hard to count, for janitors and tenants and teachers.…

 

[T]hat alliance changed the face of Minnesota politics, bringing about the Democratic trifecta that passed policies statewide that were goals for members of the alignment.

And while Minnesota’s legislative blizzard was framed as something done with the expectation that lawmakers would soon lose power, this might not happen. Nationwide, Democrats, who failed to pass much of their professed agenda during the years 2021-2024, are still polling better than Republicans on the generic ballot, and at least one pollster projects them to hold onto the House in Minnesota. If people will vote for a party that delivered only a sliver of its professed agenda, imagine what accomplishing many things that make people’s lives better could do! 

Walz’s extensive list of accomplishments as Minnesota governor has led the media to brand him as a darling of the "progressive" movement. (Republicans have, of course, attempted to brand him as a "socialist" and "Marxist," which is nonsense.) It’s understandable how the veepstakes discourse led to his association with the left. He was surely the preferred candidate for most left-wing pundits and activists over other choices like Josh Shapiro or Mark Kelly, who seemed determined to alienate them. But if you look at the policies that Walz actually passed, most of them are things national Democrats say they want to do, like protecting reproductive rights, raising the minimum wage, expanding childcare credits, and bolstering unions. What makes Walz “progressive” is not that his goals are more ambitious than the national party, but that he’s actually accomplished them instead of spending his time in power making excuses for why promises couldn’t be kept.

It speaks to how little we’ve come to expect from the Democratic Party—both at the national level and in other states—that Minnesota’s legislative session is seen as such a departure from what is normal. But if the Democrats have power after 2024, there’s a good chance that the circumstances will look something like what Walz stepped into in Minnesota. They have an obligation to learn from what that state has been doing right. Walz seems to be an exceptional talent for a lot of reasons. But I think the single most important thing is that he understands the importance of taking action while you have the opportunity.

Let’s hope he can impart some of that wisdom on the rest of his party.