Anti-ICE rioters plunged Minneapolis into chaos once again in the early hours of today. That followed Wednesday night’s assault on a pair of FBI vehicles that saw rioters —  including a member of the Latin Kings gang, per government sources — seizing documents and weapons. Protests had intensified in the wake of two ICE shootings in the city in the space of a week — one fatal, the other injuring a man in the leg after he attacked agents with a shovel.

All this raises the question: is the Left trying to push Minneapolis into the sort of the quasi-permanent chaos which characterized Seattle and Portland during the 2020 George Floyd unrest? And do elected Democrats truly appreciate the electoral danger that this poses to them in this year’s midterms and beyond?

As it is, progressives seem to have the immediate upper hand when it comes to polling on ICE’s actions in Minneapolis. A YouGov poll this week found that Democratic-leaning and Independent respondents tend to view Renee Good’s fatal shooting by an ICE agent as unjustified; a not-insignificant minority of Republican respondents agree. A Quinnipiac poll found similar results.

Even before the shooting, ICE’s gruff theatrics were beginning to sour Americans on the agency. That might be a testament to the fickleness of the voters who sided with Donald Trump in 2024 expecting mass deportations without reckoning with what reversing Joe Biden’s massive wave of unvetted newcomers would entail. On strictly political grounds, the Minneapolis drama could benefit Democrats, but the rioting Left is robbing them of the advantage. Americans may not appreciate law-enforcement overreach, but they hate chaos even more.

That should’ve been the lesson taken from the events of 2020. In the immediate wake of George Floyd’s death, public opinion lay overwhelmingly with the victim, by even more lopsided margins than in the Good case. But then came the nightly attacks by Antifa militants on a federal courthouse in Portland, barely repelled by security forces. That’s not to mention the creation of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, in Seattle: a small blocked-off part of the city ruled by would-be Leftist utopians that soon descended into crime and disorder and was eventually dismantled.

Elected Democrats called it a “summer of love” and began to go along with radical demands such as defunding police forces. They soon came to regret this stance, as even African-American communities told pollsters that they wanted the same level of policing in their neighborhoods — if not more. In a matter of months, the #Defund movement became an albatross around the necks of Democrats, who couldn’t shake it off fast enough.

As a result, blue-city progressives still struggle to assure voters that they support basic law and order. The issue was arguably Zohran Mamdani’s weakest point when running for mayor of New York City; he overcame it won the election in part by pledging to retain Jessica Tisch, his predecessor’s hard-hitting anti-crime NYPD commissioner.

If images of chaos continue to spill out of Minneapolis, and the city comes to define the national perception of Democrats in 2026, that may prove costly for the party in the midterms and beyond. Indeed, it might remind voters of why they embraced Trump in 2024.

Avoiding that outcome starts by reining in Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has touted the possibility of the state national guard confronting federal agents and even drawn irresponsible Civil War parallels. At fault, too, is Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who has deployed local cops not to quell the rioting but to defend street fighters — who he has called “heroes” — from federal law enforcement. It might not be obvious in the immediate wake of a contentious shooting, but down the path trodden by Walz and Frey lies Democratic defeat.

---

Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

---