Even though he hasn’t be implicated in the child care scandal* guess it is too much a distraction. As a MN resident, all I hope is that the My Pillow guy doesn’t win. MN is fairly blue, but we did elect Jesse Ventura so there is a history of oddball candidates winning…
Brian
* and no widespread Somali involvement
Hopefully Klobuchar jumps in and carries on the blue mantle.
Done in by a fake video. This is sad.
It brings to mind how a few goofy pictures knocked Al Franken from his Senate seat. There was nothing there in either case (comparatively), but members of one party knows when its time to step out, while the other party would certainly fight this “fake news” and create another meaningless shitstorm about their opponent over something else. Perhaps an email server, or a laptop, or a swiftboat.
I listen to Minnesota Public Radio, when they broke into their regular 8:00 AM news this morning with the announcement, then only a few minutes old. They didn’t sound that surprised, since they already had someone in the studio to speak about the Walz campaign in a later segment. But when Klobuchar’s name got mentioned, they got pretty excited. If anything, the video, fake as it is, came much too early. It should have been the week before the election, not eleven months before.
As far as I can tell, this truly is fake news. I’m having trouble figuring out where the “scandal” is, given an investigation that concluded the day care centers were operating as expected.
There is probably a swap here. Klobuchar will run for governor and easily win and Walz may run for her Senate seat and win. For her, it’s a step closer to running for President and for Walz it’s a way to keep in the game.
Being a Minnesota progressive I’d say Walz did an outstanding job handling Covid, but a very bad job in dealing with the George Floyd riots and the recent fraud scandals. He is very unpopular in the rural areas and with the recent fraud publicity he has lost enough urban support that he’d likely not get re-elected anyway.
I wondered if Lieutenant Gvnr. Flanagan may run instead. Do lieutenant governors ever gain enough experience to make good governors? Maybe they just lack recognition; tho California’s is running, no one in my family and neighborhood has ever heard of her.
What fake video?
Surely, it’s enough experience than all of the candidates who aren’t lieutenant governors? I mean, that’s still a high enough position that you’re going to have other political experience before that. If a state senator, say, runs for governor, and picks another state senator for their running mate, why wouldn’t the other state senator be able to later make their own run at the top of the ticket?
Al Franken was accused of inappropriately sexual behavior by eight women, most of them Democratic staffers, volunteers, and supporters.
My quite liberal/progressive Minnesota brother was pissed that Walz was breaking tradition and trying for a third term.
From his substack essay on it:
—not because I don’t like him. I happily voted for him both times for governor and was glad he won. I also happily voted for him for Vice President and was sad he lost .
—but because:
Minnesota has a proud tradition of NO ONE being granted a third consecutive term as governor and of NO ONE trying for a third consecutive term. It has ALWAYS been understood that NO ONE in Minnesota is entitled to hold the reins of executive power for more than 8 consecutive years. And we didn’t even need to put a law in place to confirm that understanding because NO ONE in Minnesota had the hubris to believe they were that exceptional, that irreplaceable . . . well, not until now.
What has Walz done to establish that he should be the first exception to this wonderful 160+ year tradition? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And don’t tell me he needs to run because there is no acceptable alternative. If that is the case—and I don’t believe it is the case—it could only be because he made it so. He has always known we have never elected anyone to a third consecutive term and that no one ever ran for one. Hell, part of his pitch to be Harris’ running mate was that he had no remaining political ambitions after his current term as governor. So if there is no viable DFL (that is ‘Democratic Farmer Labor’ party for you non-Minnesotans) alternative to Walz for the 2026 election, it is only because he (abetted by the DFL) abjectly failed to allow for viable alternatives despite knowing that history. HOW DOES THAT FAILURE QUALIFY HIM FOR A THIRD TERM?
During Walz’ tenure, we have gone from a $16 billion surplus to a projected $3 billion deficit. I know it is not all (or maybe even primarily) his fault, but if voters want to take out their ire for that on someone, he will be the only target on the ballot .
During Walz’ tenure, departments for which he is responsible disbursed (at a minimum) hundreds of millions of dollars based on fraudulent (in many cases facially unbelievable) invoices. Again, maybe Walz should not be held primarily responsible for that huge theft of taxpayer dollars*, but he literally will be the only person on the ballot voters CAN hold responsible. Voters who want to send a message can only do so by not voting at all (if they can’t stomach the GOP candidate) or by voting for the GOP candidate.*
Is this true?
Re last post, based on multiple news reports I have seen, it is true that there are scandals involving government program fraud in Minnesota, and a lot of them involve Somalis. And it is a bigger series of frauds than in most – possibly all – other states of similar population.
There were federal indictments handed down in the Biden administration, with investigations ongoing when Trump took office.
There is something similar in Mississippi, and most or all of the defendants are white native Americans.
But as for the specific day care centers that supposedly had no children in them, that was fake right wing news.
Part of the real fraud is because of reduced oversight during the COVID peak.
Expect lots of additional fraud because of Trump cutting back on fraud investigators, and because he likes to pardon, or grant clemency to, favored fraudsters. Example:
The dogs that seem not to be barking (to this Hoosier) are Liberals praising Walz to the skies, saying he definitely, absolutely should have been governor a third time and it will be a great loss if he isn’t. OTOH, there is some grousing about Republicans unfairly using the fraud scandals against him, which isn’t close to the same thing.
It’s just a basic fact of politics that, if bad things happen on your watch, you get blamed for them and tainted by them. Walz seems to have had a pretty good run, all things told, and the end of his political career, to my eye, fits in the “that’s life” category.