Ramstad: With Walz out of the race, let’s get real about Minnesota’s challenges

The decision by Gov. Tim Walz to exit the 2026 campaign provides an opportunity for a deeper conversation about the direction Minnesota is going.

With Walz in the race, his Republican challengers could bang on relentlessly about the defrauding of state and federal services.

By suspending his campaign and focusing the last year of his time in office on finding fraudsters and fixing state oversight, Walz pushes the issue off the table. Perhaps not entirely, but largely.

Now candidates for state offices can talk about bigger matters, such as whether the size of Minnesota’s government and state tax levy have crimped the state’s economic growth, how taxation and government services should evolve when the state population is barely growing and whether services to the poorest Minnesotans discourage them from working or trying to lift themselves up.

Republicans and whoever succeeds Walz as the DFL candidate will be strongly tempted to avoid these issues. It’s far easier to point fingers about the defrauding of government services and say, “Shame! Do better!”

The difficult economic reality facing Minnesota, the Midwest and most northern U.S. states cannot be ignored.

These are places growing more slowly than the rest of the nation. They didn’t face the challenge posed by huge numbers of immigrants, as places closer to the Mexican border did, but they also didn’t benefit from the stimulus that all those people brought to local economies.

And Minnesota is in an extreme position. We have one of the highest rates of labor participation in the country and one of the lowest rates of unemployment. Since 2011, the state’s white population has been declining, which means that all of the state’s population growth has come from people of color, predominantly immigrants from other countries.

Seeing low population growth, Walz tried to grow the workforce by attracting people off the sidelines, such as by tackling the child care crisis that prevents some parents from working.

He even mentioned it in his spotlight moment of the 2024 campaign for the White House: the vice-presidential debate with JD Vance.

“When I go to businesses, sure, they’ll talk about taxes sometimes,” Walz said. “But they will lead with child care, and they will lead with housing, because we know the problem is, especially in a state like Minnesota — we need more workers.”

Political pundits said Walz lost that debate. He and running mate Kamala Harris lost the election, of course.

It was Vance!

Walz’s explanation of Minnesota’s worker policies prodded Vance into declaring that paid family leave — which just formally started last week in Minnesota and is thus going through a renewed moment of debate — would be pursued by Republicans in Washington.

Of course, neither Vance nor President Donald Trump have said a word about it since being elected.

And last week, under the guise of investigating fraud in Minnesota, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services froze federal child care funds to all 50 states.

“Donald Trump, and his allies in Washington and in St. Paul and online, want to make our state a colder, meaner place,” Walz said at a brief news conference on Jan. 5.

I last met Walz in January 2025, just after he’d proposed a budget for fiscal 2026-27 with some reductions in spending growth that he knew would upset his Democratic colleagues. Republicans wouldn’t put out their own budget until at least May, the governor predicted.

“Now I’m out there and they can poke on this,” Walz said about his proposal. “So I’ll just say, ‘What are you going to cut?’ Everybody says they want to cut, but the minute you say, ‘What do you want to cut?’ the special-interest groups are there to handle them.”

It turned out that Republicans didn’t propose a budget last year. They signed on with House DFLers’ budget proposal, which called for more spending than Walz proposed.

Minnesota Republicans got caught up expressing fealty to Trump’s worldview that undocumented immigrants were running amok in America. Rather than cut Minnesota’s budget, they used their political capital to insist Democrats withhold government health care services to Minnesota’s undocumented immigrants.

As I’ve said time and again, and data shows, Minnesota is not being overrun by undocumented immigrants — and neither is the state’s workforce.