Republicans are salivating over Tim Walz’s document, claiming the Minnesota governor is badly out of step with America. However as is so typically the case, the GOP is engaged in projection: Walz’s imaginative and prescient could be very widespread. It is Republicans who’re out of contact.
Minutes after Kamala Harris’ marketing campaign introduced Walz as her operating mate on the Democratic ticket, Donald Trump’s marketing campaign launched a press release smearing him as a “radical leftist” and “dangerously liberal extremist” who “has spent his governorship trying to reshape Minnesota in the image of [California].”
“This is a radical human being who comes from the far-left wing of the Democrat Party,” Trump operating mate JD Vance echoed in Michigan this previous Wednesday. It’s a caricature that Republican strategists are publicly salivating over, with one telling Politico final Tuesday, “That guy has done so much stuff [as governor], he’s just going to be a gift to the battleground states.”
However polling reveals Individuals very a lot need legal guidelines like these Walz handed in Minnesota.
Walz was a marksman within the Military Nationwide Guard and hunts pheasants to today. As just lately as 2016, the Nationwide Rifle Affiliation awarded him an “A” grade. However following the Las Vegas bloodbath in 2017, Walz donated his marketing campaign contributions from the NRA to a veterans’ charity and endorsed common background checks on gun patrons.
“The world’s changed. I’ve changed,” he mentioned following the bloodbath at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Excessive College in Parkland, Florida, just a few months earlier than he gained the governorship in 2018.
After Democrats took majorities within the Minnesota legislature in 2022 for the primary time in a decade, he signed new legal guidelines selling gun security. One measure requires background checks for all personal firearm gross sales. One other permits the police to quickly take firearms from folks suspected of harming themselves or others, also called a crimson flag regulation.
The NRA could have slapped Walz with an “F” in 2018, however these insurance policies are overwhelmingly widespread. Amongst registered voters, 87% assist background checks and 80% assist crimson flag legal guidelines, in line with an April 2023 ballot from Beacon Analysis and Shaw & Firm Analysis on behalf of Fox Information.
Within the wake of the Supreme Courtroom eliminating the federal proper to abortion in 2022, Walz enacted a regulation defending entry to abortion and contraception, the latter of which Justice Clarence Thomas recommended shouldn’t be broadly authorized. Nonetheless, latest polling from Navigator Analysis reveals Thomas is wildly out of step with the American public: 81% of voters assist defending entry to contraception. And 63% of Individuals need abortion to be authorized in all or most circumstances, with solely 8% considering it must be unlawful in all circumstances, in line with Pew Analysis Middle.
Walz additionally signed payments to implement common paid household and medical depart (80% of registered voters assist it), present free breakfast and lunch to all public faculty college students (74% of probably voters assist it), and legalize leisure marijuana (70% of Individuals assist it).
In 2023, he authorized a regulation that can present free tuition to the state’s public schools for college students from households incomes $80,000 or much less a yr, one other widespread coverage. A June 2019 ballot from Gallup discovered that 63% of Individuals wish to present free tuition to state schools for college students from low- or middle-income households.
Walz even confronted down the precise’s trans-panic tradition struggle, signing a invoice to guard gender-affirming look after minors. Maybe surprisingly, regardless of the nation’s polarization, Gallup discovered in Might that 61% of Individuals oppose banning minors from receiving such care. Solely 36% endorse such a ban.
Walz has been governor for six years, and Republicans will little question strive their finest to weaponize his document in opposition to him. However the majority of Walz’s constituents have been glad to this point with what he’s carried out in workplace. His job approval score amongst Minnesota’s voters has stayed above 51% for the reason that agency SurveyUSA started to ballot it in December 2021. The newest survey discovered Walz having fun with his finest favorability but, with 56% approving of him and solely 40% disapproving—a web approval of 16 share factors.
Republican leaders could attempt to peg him as an extremist or radical. However to this point, to voters, he’s only a commonsense man attempting to present them what they need.
