Tim Walz was the cat’s ass there for about a minute.
Republicans are easily gobsmacked by celebrities—no matter how minor, from Ted Nugent to Scott Baio—but Democrats, perhaps more disturbingly, are easily ensorceled by another kind of exotic specimen: a white man with a gun.
The Minnesota governor who (you may have forgotten) was on the 2024 ballot as Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick excited Democrats because he was a pheasant hunter. A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds.
Walz was an evolution of the type: In 2004, when Democrats were trying to make an everyman of Sen. John Kerry, the haughtiest New England snoot ever to mount a sailboard, they put a gun in his hands and stuffed him into a camouflage jacket. When observers noted that the aristocratic senator apparently was too good to carry his own bird, he protested that his mind was elsewhere, thinking about some regular-guy stuff: “I’m still giddy over the Red Sox,” he said. “It was hard to focus.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat and veteran who represents the Boston suburbs, talks about constantly having a rifle in his hand as a Marine and recently declared: “Selling AR-15s at Walmart to teenagers is not just dangerous, it also undermines the military ethic.” Rep. Auchincloss might be happy to know that, here in the real world, Walmart does not sell AR-15s to teenagers—or to anybody else—and hasn’t for more than a decade. Democrats can never get this stuff quite right.
Walz did not suddenly make the Harris campaign attractive to those probably imaginary rural voters just waiting for the comforting image of a white man with a gun to invite them to come on over to the party of publicly funded sex-change operations for incarcerated illegal immigrants. To the extent that Walz’s gun-toting made an impression at all, it was a poor one: Gun-rights voters did not seem him as a potential champion but as the worst thing you can be in those circles: a “Fudd,” meaning an out-of-touch dork who believes that the Second Amendment is about hunting, as though the Founding Fathers took the time to write a hobby into the Bill of Rights.
Gov. Walz, like many would-be saviors of his party, turned out to be not very good at the whole politics thing. Thanks in part to aggressive social sorting, it is possible for a modern politician to get quite far in a career without being seriously tested at the polls: Most House races are not very close, which enables the political overestimation of such figures as Beto O’Rourke, while figures such as Kamala Harris rise through the ranks in effectively single-party states such as California and become national figures without really being tempered in the fires of mass democracy. It is worth meditating on the fact that Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had been a major national figure for many years, lost the first truly competitive general election she ever contested to an amateur who had worked as a game-show host and hustler of cheap Rolex knockoffs.
But Walz should have been a little tougher—unlike Harris, he had had a couple of real fights.
Walz entered the big show in 2006 after breezing through an uncontested Democratic primary to win election to the House against a Republican incumbent. Beating an incumbent is no mean feat, even if Walz won in a swingy district that was at the time tipping away from the GOP—in a year that turned out to be a bloodbath for Republicans as voters weary of the Iraq War gave Democrats a 31-seat pickup. Walz then had another uncontested primary and a 2-to-1 win in the 2008 general before almost losing his seat in 2010. That was the pattern for his House career: comfortable wins in good Democratic years and nailbiters in other years, as in his bare, 50.3 percent reelection in 2016.
Walz wasn’t a force of nature—he was a leaf on the wind.
Since leaving the House, Walz has served as governor in a state that likes Democratic governors: Republican Tim Pawlenty did four years as Minnesota governor from 2002 to 2006, and before him you’d have to go back to the early 1990s and then the late 1970s to meet a Republican winning election to the state’s governorship.
Sen. Barry Goldwater, conceding that his Republican Party was unlikely to soon recover its formerly commanding position with black voters, advised that the GOP should “go hunting where the ducks are,” and some of those ducks were white Southern voters unhappy with the Democrats’ johnny-come-lately embrace of civil rights. The pheasant-hunting Gov. Walz got himself upside down with a different kind of racial politics, allowing himself to be mau-maued into turning a blind eye to massive corruption in welfare programs in his state over the last five years, corruption that disproportionately involved Somali Americans whose leaders threatened to denounce Walz and others as racists if they interfered with the scheme. “The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness,” reported the New York Times, which quoted the prosecutor in the case, Joseph Thompson, confirming that those charged with overseeing the program were buffaloed by the threat of being denounced as bigots: “Allegations of racism can be a reputation or career killer,” he said. The Times also referred to Ahmed Samatar, a Somali American scholar at Macalester College, who was direct: Somali refugees, coming from a culture of corruption, had an easy time looting more than $1 billion from Minnesota because the state is “so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.”
Democrats offer rural voters a white man with a gun because they think—idiotically—that this is the sort of person rural voters are going to trust. But even the American voter is not so comprehensive a nitwit as to be unable to detect, at the extremes, when he is being patronized or condescended to—or misled. Somali Americans are an important voting bloc in Minnesota, one whose leaders have learned how to weaponize goodhearted American solicitousness toward racial and religious minorities. The result was the kind of mess anybody would expect and that anybody with any guts and sense of civic duty could have prevented. Tim Walz, lacking sense and guts and (in this context at least) a sense of civic duty, has abandoned his reelection campaign—some things are too much even for Minnesota.
Because open societies require trust to function, the likely final outcome of this sorry episode is that Gov. Walz’s only meaningful legacy will be a Minnesota that is less tolerant, less open, and less geared toward keeping an eye on the weak. His political cowardice will cost Minnesota something that had been valuable.
What are the people of Minnesota going to get instead? Donald Trump has an idea, and it starts with a whole lot of white men with guns.
