It might be hard to believe but there are sane people in Minnesota. And between the Somali fraud scandal and the anarchists in Minneapolis, there might just be enough of them to turn the blue state red in November’s election.
“Some of us look at what we’re seeing in our state government’s executive branch leadership and wonder if a sanity test needs to start to happen pretty quick,” State Sen. Steve Drazkowski, a Republican who represents southeast Minnesota’s 20th Senate District, told me this week on The Vicki McKenna Show.
Drazkowski and several of his Senate Republican colleagues authored a bill last year that would define Trump Derangement Syndrome as a mental illness. They describe the disorder as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump.”
It’s hard to argue that the Marxist meltdown in the Twin Cities over the past several weeks isn’t an intense bout of TDS, assisted and funded by many out-of-state sufferers. And the liberals in power, particularly scandal-plagued Gov. Tim Walz, have stoked the flames of madness — ceding Minneapolis to anarchists.
Republicans remain hopeful Minnesota’s long blue fever will break at the polls in this year’s midterms.
‘Enabling Criminals’
They haven’t won a statewide race in two decades, but the GOP is painting Minnesota’s ruling Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) as a party of fraud and lawlessness. The message has been resonating.
“Every Democrat in Minnesota has spent years enabling criminals who stole our tax dollars, with still no meaningful accountability and no end in sight to the billions in fraud that still plagues nearly every government program imaginable thanks to 16 years of Democrat control,” Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, a one of a long list of Republican candidates for governor (including the “MyPillowGuy”), wrote on X.
Minnesota Republican Party Chairman Alex Plechash told MinnPost earlier this month that having Walz on the top of the ballot helps Republicans, but he quickly added, “I hope that isn’t so much help that the Democratic Party reconsiders things.” The same day Walz dropped his re-election bid.
The two-term liberal, part of the Democrats’ presidential dream team badly beaten by Trump and Vice President JD Vance in 2024, said he will instead focus his time on the ongoing investigations into sweeping fraud in the state’s welfare programs that occurred on his watch.
‘On its Heels’
Minnesota’s Legislature is very much in play for Republicans. Democrats kept two seats they were expected to win in Tuesday’s special elections, bringing the Minnesota House back to a 67-67 tie. In the Senate, the DFL holds a razor-thin 34-33 majority.
As MinnPost’s Matthew Blake reported earlier this month, about 20 percent of Senate seats are considered at least somewhat competitive, based on past elections. In the House, about 10 percent of the contested races are competitive. DFLers, Blake said, are running against Trump. Republicans are campaigning on the controlling party’s fiscally disastrous record, particularly the billions of dollars stolen from taxpayers.
But in recent weeks the focus has curiously shifted from Minnesota’s sweeping fraud problems to the “civil unrest” in the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Protesters and leftist disruption agents have descended on the city following the fatal shootings of two agitators by federal immigration law enforcement officers. The propaganda press, which identifies as the “mainstream media,” has trained its collective camera on the chaos — nearly to the exclusion of an embarrassing fraud scandal. Lost in the Twin Cities insanity is the fact that Walz and the cities’ far-left mayors have refused to cooperate with Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agents, including barring local police from assisting ICE.
Minneapolis’ Dem-friendly Star Tribune discounts the GOP’s optimism. “Republicans in Minnesota were bullish about their election chances. Then ICE arrived,” declared the news outlet’s headline this week. The piece asserts Republicans had been “riding a wave of momentum with fraud dominating the state’s political dialogue. Now the party is on its heels.” The Washington Post and others echoed the assessment.
It’s a premature obituary, to be sure. The Democrats’ chaos-by-design tactics in the Twin Cities didn’t play well in red and purple Minnesota after Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Walz looked the other way during the Black Lives Matter insurrection of 2020.
Hardball?
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar appears poised to jump into the gubernatorial race. The far-left Democrat recently said she would vote to defund the Department of Homeland Security.
The Dem Party appears to be pushing that kind of hardball strategy as a new poll shows a majority of Americans souring on ICE (do you think that might have something to do with the wall-to-wall, one-sided coverage of ICE operations by Trump-hating corporate media?).
That strategy could be playing with fire.
Eighty percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents continue to support the work federal immigration law enforcers are doing, according to the New York Times/ Sienna poll. And about half of those polled continue to back Trump’s deportation policies, according to the poll.
As of August, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats by about 140,000 voters in Minnesota, according to the Voter Independent Project. Unaffiliated voters made up about 28 percent of the state’s approximately 3.63 million voters. As always, turning out voters is the name of the game, particularly infrequent voters for Republicans in a traditionally tough midterm election.
November is a lifetime away in politics. Much is subject to change, like voter sentiment on immigration law enforcement and the state of their personal economies — ever the no. 1 issue on most Americans’ minds.
‘Orgy of Spending’
Republicans could feast on the policy failures of the DFL, particularly on the talking point that could come back to bite progressives: Affordability.
The DFL’s big-government spending binge is projected to raise property taxes by nearly $1 billion this year, a 7 percent increase, according to the the state Department of Revenue. That comes out to $655 more for a family of four. That’s not affordable. Liberals have proposed higher taxes to pay for the growth in government programs, including a bumped up “rate to be determined” top tier for higher-earning Minnesotans.
As the Steele County Republicans put it, the DFL-controlled government took a projected $17 billion budget surplus and embarked on an “orgy of spending” in the 2023 session. Paid family and medical leave. Universal school meals. Healthcare insurance for some 40,000 illegal immigrants. The $72 billion, two-year budget was packed with a veritable liberal wish list of expensive new programs, leaving taxpayers on the hook to make up the inevitable gap when the surpluses fade.
And the surpluses are fading. Budget projections point to a looming $3 billion deficit. That’s thanks in large part to the rapid growth in MinnesotaCare’s subsidized insurance for illegal aliens, the cost exploding from a projected $196 million over four years to an estimated $550 million.
“It turns out that when you offer something for nothing, especially when that something is free health care, it becomes very popular,” Republican State Rep. Paul Torkelson said in April last year. “The number of illegal immigrants participating in this program has more than doubled expectations, and it’s only been available for less than two years.”
‘They Hate Chaos More’
The big-government tab is coming due just as Congress and multiple federal agencies investigate a multi-billion welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota that has cast a big shadow over Walz’s tenure in the governor’s office.
Richard Carlbom, chairman of the Minnesota DFL, claims the party has made life more affordable for Minnesotans.
“People need to see a DFL party that is out there working alongside them and pushing back against this president,” Carlbom told MinnPost.
Minnesota voters are seeing what they saw in the long, hot summer of 2020, when radicals smashed, burned, and looted their way through Minneapolis to the tune of $500 million in damages. Those riotous times are still fresh in a lot Minnesotans’ minds, and voters remember liberal leaders failing to stop the madness. Those memories — and the extreme cost of living under leftist rule — could haunt leftist candidates outside of the blue maelstrom of the Minneapolis metro in November.
Of course, never underestimate the power of the Republican Party to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. If they run lousy candidates, as they are wont to do, conservative voters will stay home. Weenies and weasels need not apply.
Chris Madel, a Republican candidate for governor, announced this week that he was dropping out of the race because he doesn’t care for the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of immigration enforcement in his state.
“I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so,” the squish said in a video posted to X. NBC News and other corporate outlets seized on Madel’s departure to push the left’s ultimate narrative of Open borders good, immigration enforcement bad.
But as Sohrab Ahmari writes at Unherd, “Americans may not appreciate law-enforcement overreach, but they hate chaos even more.” We’ll see what voters have to say about it at the polls this November.
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