“We Don’t Know How Long We Have”: Minnesota Democrats Are Passing as Many Progressive Laws as They Can

As soon as Minnesota Democrats secured both the governorship and majorities in the state House and Senate last November, Tim Walz huddled with his party leaders to map out an aggressive agenda. During his first term as governor, Walz had struggled with a divided state government; this time, the now 59-year-old former Congress member was intent on not letting the hard-won political trifecta go to waste. “We’ve seen that our politics has been one of ‘what can’t be done,’” Walz said in an interview with Vanity Fair—that was about to change. Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman said Democrats’ attitude headed into 2023 was “LFG”—“let’s fucking go.”

In January, Democrats pinned two giant poster boards emblazoned with the party’s top 30 bills to a wall in Democrats’ state House caucus room. They played DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” anytime a lawmaker checked off a bill on the list that had passed. In the past six months, they reinforced the constitutional right to abortion in the state; legalized recreational marijuana; created a paid family and medical leave program; expanded gun control regulations—including broadening background checks and enacting a red flag law—restored voting rights to formerly incarcerated felons; made school breakfast and lunch free for all students in kindergarten through 12th grade; set a 100% carbon-free standard to be met by utility companies by 2040; protected the rights of unionized workers; increased taxes on corporations and high investment earners; and protected transgender individuals and gender-affirming care. It’s been a tour de force for progressive legislation, particularly in the face of growing conservative extremism in Republican-led states.

“I’ve got a fellow governor who thinks that a rainbow on a shirt at Target is an existential threat to our country, while at the same time fully ignored COVID and the deaths that it caused,” Walz said, apparently referencing South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. “That’s not good governance.”

Minnesota does lay claim to progressive giants like Paul Wellstone and Hubert Humphrey; it’s also voted for the Democratic nominee in every presidential election since 1976. But Minnesota can be purplish in hue. Hillary Clinton barely eked out a victory over Donald Trump in the state in 2016, winning Minnesota by less than two percentage points. The Trump team targeted the state as a juicy potential pickup in the candidate’s face-off with Joe Biden in 2020 (though Trump fell quite short). While Minnesota Democrats largely expected to hold on to the governor’s mansion and the majority in the House, state Republicans experienced a surprise upset with the loss of the Senate. The potential expiration date of their trifecta is top of mind for Democrats. With a six-seat majority in the House and just a one-seat majority in the Senate, Minnesota Democrats not only have a slim margin of error to get things passed—but also know they could lose their standing as soon as the next cycle. “We don’t know how long we have. We’ve got the majority right now. We know this is a delicate set of circumstances in Minnesota. We’ve only had one other Democratic trifecta in the last 20 years,” Hortman said.

Aided by a massive budget surplus of $17.5 billion and existing legislation that was drafted by Democrats but left on ice in the previously divided government, Minnesota has emerged as a somewhat unlikely progressive haven, arguably eclipsing other states that also have Democratic trifectas—like California, New York, and Michigan, among others—in sheer volume of progressive legislation passed this past session. It is a particularly impressive feat given the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. “We had no vote to spare,” said Kari Dziedzic, the Majority Leader of the Minnesota Senate, reflecting on her party’s one vote majority. But she added, “We had a clear vision and goal.”

This ambitious agenda has unsurprisingly drawn criticism from Republican state lawmakers. “It’s less transparent for the public. Our staff, both partisan and nonpartisan, everyone is feeling that pressure. And I don’t know that that is good,” House minority leader Lisa Demuth told the Star Tribune, regarding the legislative pace. “We need to always pause and do the right thing rather than just the fast thing.”

Hortman dismissed the criticism; the pace was by design. “You can get into a political environment where, if you give your opponents enough time, they can turn you into a piñata in public and beat the crap outta you for everything that you do,” she said. “We wanted the early wins to create momentum for more wins.” Plus, Republican-led majorities in other states clearly aren’t slowing down; states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Montana appear almost in competition to pass the most draconian antiabortion legislation, limitations on trans health care, and conservative agendas on public education, among other red meat policies.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who previously served in the Minnesota state House, echoed the sentiment. “We also learned a key lesson from the last time we had a trifecta and from Republican obstruction since then: that when you have power, use it,” she told VF. “We in the DFL [Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party] did not want to go back to our constituents and have to make excuses for why we didn’t act when we had both chambers of the statehouse and the governorship, and did not want to let fear of Republican smears stop us from governing.”

Omar described a unified effort between Democrats from the top of the ticket on down to flip seats in 2022. “I think it’s important for folks to know that these victories did not happen overnight. The new ‘Minnesota Miracle’ was the result of decades of work we’ve been doing to make it easier to vote in Minnesota than almost anywhere else in the country,” Omar said, adding that Democrats in states such as New York and California—where the party lost seats in 2022—should look to Minnesota as an example for future elections. “You have to understand when you are running that your adversaries are clear. Your adversaries are never those within your party,” Omar added. “The country in some ways is divided, but I think that Minnesota here had an opportunity,” Dziedzic said.

As for whether Walz is worried there will be backlash, he is not. “I’m not worried about that. If you do good policies, good politics will follow,” Walz said. “Good luck running next year to repeal meals for kids in schools. Good luck running on a six-week abortion ban like North Dakota just did. And good luck telling [voters], ‘We want to make it easier to get guns in schools.’”

As for Republicans, though, they “should be worried that they have no agenda,” he added. “You can't just run on fear and failure.”