Tim Walz had every intention of running for a third term as Minnesota governor until national media finally zeroed in on the state’s sprawling fraud scandal. Now, the man once seen as an ascendant weapon for Democrats hoping to recapture the white working class is so badly damaged that he has dropped his re-election bid. It’s a story with serious lessons for the Left: the heady days of “peak woke” will long prove damaging for candidates who were active during those years, especially the ones from Middle America.

Walz’s inaugural address in 2018 invoked “equity”, race, and climate change, hardly unusual for Democrats at the time but a reminder as to why he’s never won many counties outside the greater Minneapolis area. Walz leaned into the bleeding edge of progressive social causes, including transgenderism and immigration, which is why in 2024 Democrats thought his folksy packaging would make their hard-Left cultural turn more palatable.

Though the Harris-Walz ticket lost to Donald Trump and JD Vance, just a year ago the Minnesota Governor was viewed as a leader on the Left. It’s why he was said to be deciding between a third term in 2026 or a presidential bid in 2028.

All this, despite Walz’s administration dealing for years with mounting evidence of corruption on his watch. Even as the scandal’s price tag ballooned and federal prosecutors charged dozens of Somalis in Minnesota, national media largely stayed out of the story. But mainstream outlets no longer control every news cycle, so when conservatives started drawing more attention to the story, the New York Times dropped a major investigation. Weeks later, influencer Nick Shirley went viral with a controversial 40-minute video in which he visited allegedly fraudulent locations. As more and more national attention focused on genuinely outrageous details of the fraud ring perpetrated almost entirely by Somali Americans, Walz looked worse by the day.

What’s more, reports make clear this was not merely a bureaucratic failure but an ideological one. As what the Right now calls “wokeness” built to a crescendo before the 2024 election, Minnesota Democrats were fearful of sustaining public charges of racism. More than a year ago, Kayseh Magan, a member of the Somali community who previously investigated fraud in Minnesota’s Attorney General office, wrote that criminals “sought to exploit the burgeoning political power of the Somali community, and the feckless fear that establishment politicians and state agencies show when confronted with charges of racism or Islamophobia”. Federal prosecutors say race played a role in the scale of the fraud as well.

Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have expressed support for the Somali community in the wake of the heightened attention, raising mirth on the Right for their often laughable efforts to pander to a key voting bloc. This successfully illustrates a major problem for Democrats: Walz and Frey were both elected to their current offices as the party’s shift to the cultural Left accelerated, and are now caught between a rock and a hard place.

They burnished their reputations as cultural progressives when it was necessary to win primaries and stay in power, because the grassroots demanded total fealty. Now that party leaders have internalised the backlash to this rapid cultural shift and others have adapted, figures like Walz and Frey will permanently be pinned to pandemic-era politics. In their case, that involves a fraud scandal that clearly metastasised because the Somali community weaponised Democrats’ political correctness and fear of defending themselves against charges of racism. Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg are already trying to fix this problem in their own careers. Walz’s case, however, shows exactly how difficult that can be.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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