Tim Walz’s career is ending. Democrats should see a silver lining.
If you missed it: The Minnesota governor announced on Monday that he was ending his campaign for re-election, capping a rise and fall that began when he was picked as Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024. Walz said his decision would allow him to “focus on the work,” to address the mushrooming scandal over social services fraud in the state without the distraction of a campaign. Unspoken was the political consideration: The fraud scandal has so deeply tainted his reputation that a campaign for a third term would be a slog.
But this is about more than Walz or his individual career — and it’s a key example of an issue on which Democrats need to resist temptation and take the right lessons. Here are four takeaways from Walz’s exit and the still-moving scandal.
1) Walz had a glass jaw
To start off, Walz’s political career is almost certainly over. A little over a year ago, he was a potential vice president. Six months ago, he seemed likely to be the state’s first three-term governor and even a potential 2028 contender. Now, in a year, he’ll be a private citizen.
On one level, Walz’s fate is proof of the difficulty of running for a third term as governor. There’s a reason I noted this trend in November. After seven years in office, the potential for unforeseen problems rises significantly, and voters can tire of even the most popular political figures. In fact, Minnesotans had already soured on Walz before the fraud scandal exploded this Fall — polls mid-last year found his approval rating at its lowest point ever. Walz’s decision is a testament to the perils of trying to overstay your welcome.
On another level, his struggle to contain the fraud scandal underscores something a lot of Democrats are still a little bit in denial of: Walz has repeatedly wilted when subjected to close scrutiny. To begin with, his credentials as a progressive warrior were always more complicated than either his boosters or detractors claimed. In Congress, he was a reliably pro-Israel vote, attended an AIPAC conference, and voted to approve the Keystone pipeline. He also voted with Republicans to hold President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, in contempt of Congress, an effort the Congressional Black Caucus and Nancy Pelosi publicly attributed to racism. He opposes the Green New Deal and, as governor, signed a substantial increase in police funding and vetoed labor protections for rideshare drivers.
While he was probably still the best choice for Harris’s running mate — balancing out her coastal image — his impact on her campaign, too, was more mixed than many would like to admit. On the trail, he displayed a repeated tendency to exaggerate, or outright embellish, crucial details of his background. That included: claiming that he and his wife had used IVF to conceive a child (they used IUI, a distinctly different procedure), claiming to be present in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre (he got there months later), and claiming that he “carried in war” “weapons of war” (he simply hadn’t). Later, his debate performance arguably gave JD Vance the clearest victory for any VP candidate since Joe Biden in 2012 (Harris even knocked him for it in her book).
2) The scandal is legitimate. And it was not created by right-wing media
The basic truth: This story is a big deal, and Walz’s decision should not be looked at simply as a “win” for MAGA forces. Here, it is crucial to make a distinction between the fraud scandal itself and the exaggerations, falsehoods, and bigotries of some conservatives.
Contrary to many claims on the right (and some wishful thinking on the left), coverage of the scandal originated not from the conservative press but from mainstream media. Local news outlets have been all over welfare fraud in the state as far back as 2013, and they’ve been on this particular story for years now. In fact, this has been a key problem for Walz. I looked into it and, over the past month, a majority of the front pages of the Minnesota Star Tribune — the largest paper in the state — featured the fraud story.
A selection of local front pages the last few weeks.
There is substantial evidence that this is an unusually notable scandal, both because of the amount of money stolen and the way the perpetrators breached the government’s defenses. The criminals allegedly stole money intended for a variety of public welfare programs, including money allocated for childcare, children with autism, people battling addiction, and children at risk of hunger. The effort was systemic and, in some cases, cartoonishly cynical: per New York Times reporting, some perpetrators even weaponized claims of racism to cow state bureaucrats into keeping the money flowing. Federal prosecutors say the amount stolen could ultimately be around $9 billion. To use just one metric, that would make it enough to eliminate Minnesota’s looming budget deficit several times over.
All of this is more than enough to make it a story worthy of attention and critique. But that is, of course, not where many on the right stopped. Federal prosecutors have repeatedly said, for example, that there is no evidence that public money has been funneled to Somali terrorist groups. That has been a frequent claim of many conservative commentators, including conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley, whose video documenting his visits to several daycares went viral in December. In a way, that video encapsulates the complexity of navigating this whole story. At one point, he claims that concern about fraud “does not make you racist [or] Islamophobic” — a very true statement, but one that comes after multiple descriptions of Somalis as “very, very violent people.” Several other aspects of the video fail basic scrutiny, including a repeated mix-up of Medicare and Medicaid and Shirley’s claim that the scandal represents “potentially the largest fraud scandal in U.S. history” (not even close).
It is certainly true that the conservative media ecosystem fanned the story in the past few weeks. Shirley’s video on December 26th helped lead to an exploding search interest.
Google search data about the scandal the past two months.
Obviously, a great deal of interest has been fueled by the ethnicity of the perpetrators — 78 of the 86 people indicted thus far are either Somali or Somali Americans. The Trump administration in particular, has done its best to make the story an issue of immigration.
But this is not a Haitians-eating-cats-and-dogs story. There is basic, undisputed truth here. And, as I mentioned above, mainstream media has taken the lead in reporting on and documenting it. So what people have found when they searched were, largely, legitimate stories written by credible journalists. That conservatives helped fuel interest in those pieces is not a reason to dismiss the issue itself. If anything, it ought to make liberals, ostensibly those most interested in seeing government function well, all the more keen to demonstrate equal concern.
3) Liberals should care about this more than conservatives
There are a number of important pieces of context here. Investigations into this scheme began in 2021, under the Biden Justice Department. Minnesota has been battling the fraud of public benefits for years, even preceding Walz’s governorship. The spark for many of these schemes seems to have been COVID, when trillions of federal relief dollars were unleashed. All over the country, in red states and blue, huge amounts of that money ended up in fraudsters' hands. Multiple independent reviews have found the Trump administration was historically poor at detecting fraud and abuse in initial relief programs. Some of the COVID-era programs with the most abuse were those heralded as bipartisan achievements of moderate legislators, like the Paycheck Protection Program.
And yet, to dismiss the story as a MAGA smear is to stick your head in the sand.
Minnesota boasts the most generous welfare state in the continental U.S.; only Hawaii and Alaska provide more in public benefits, and, because of their geographic status, they are in unique situations. The state is reliably blue and largely run by Democrats, who have significantly expanded the state government's power and role in public life in recent years. It is led by a nationally recognized figure, someone the party recently tried to make the second most powerful person in the country. Now, it is the locus of one of the most prominent public fraud scandals in recent memory, the details of which read like a parody of Democratic-led states. It would not be unfair for ordinary people, especially the working class voters who have drifted from Democrats in recent years, to view the saga as an indictment of government’s ability to deliver a better life for them. Anyone who is interested in Americans regaining faith in their government’s capacity to do good things, and in the Democratic Party’s ability to enact that, ought to be deeply concerned by the scandal and the message it sends to the electorate.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is one of several Democrats, from centrists to leftists, who have identified the importance of this issue over the past year. He put it well in a June 2025 interview: "Language around bureaucracy, inefficiency, waste, even quality of life — we've allowed this language to be seen as if it is of a right-wing concern, when in fact this should be the most paramount left-wing concern."
It may not be the worst thing for Democrats to receive — or send — a message that, to allow a scandal like this to unfold on your watch means an end to your career as a Democrat.
4) The governor-to-senator pipeline is reversing
It appears likely that Sen. Amy Klobuchar will replace Walz as Democrats’ candidate for governor this year. This would have a couple of ramifications. For starters, it would likely remove Klobuchar herself from the 2028 conversation; it would simply be very difficult to ask voters to elect her senator in 2024, governor in 2026, and then turn around and mount a presidential or vice presidential campaign in 2028. Back home, a Klobuchar-led ticket would almost certainly be a big boost for Minnesota Democrats’ in November: She is consistently one of the best electoral performers in the country, and would likely have long coattails.
Most interesting of all, however, is this: a Klobuchar-for-governor campaign would cap a notable trend this year. For years, it was far more likely that a governor would seek to join the U.S. Senate than that a senator would try to become a governor. In the 21st century, 10 sitting governors have run for Senate, while only six sitting senators have run for governor. This year, that has changed.
There are a number of reasons for this. No doubt one of the biggest is the legitimately miserable experience of being in Congress right now. As Walz has learned, though, greener pastures can be elusive.
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