Schultz: Tim Walz has been a terrible governor. Would Amy Klobuchar be any different?

Star Tribune opinion editor’s note: Jim Schultz, who was a Republican candidate for Minnesota attorney general in 2022, is joining Strib Voices as a contributing columnist. His first column is below.

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The legislative session wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, and with it Tim Walz’s relevance in Minnesota politics. For that we can all be thankful.

Despite selling himself as the practical, sober and competent leader when he was elected in 2018, as governor Walz has governed from the hard left, and by fundamental measurements delivered the worst record of any governor in the state’s modern history.

Let’s start with the economy. Minnesota’s economy has not collapsed under Walz, but it has badly underperformed. Since 2018, jobs in Minnesota have grown by just 2.8%, compared with 7% nationally. Minnesota’s per-capita GDP performance has also slumped, lagging the U.S. in nine of the past 10 years. The technical term for this performance is “abysmal.”

A small portion of that spending went to schools, but education results may be Walz’s most damning failure. Test results for 2025 show only 45% of Minnesota students met grade-level math standards, and only 50% met reading standards, steep declines compared to 2018.

Public safety is no better. Walz’s failures and the resulting trauma amid the riots of 2020 will be seared into the memory of Minnesotans for a generation. Even today there is persistently higher violent crime in our state, with 170 murders in Minnesota in 2024, a 63% increase from 2018.

And then came the fraud. There is no need to recite the immensely damning numbers and the failures that led to it. It was massive incompetence — and perhaps worse — on the part of Walz and other state officials who looked the other way as taxpayer funds were looted.

It is rare to find a gubernatorial record as uniform in its failures, but Tim Walz delivered it.

This is the state of the state, a Minnesota that is not a barren hellscape, as some Republicans would suggest, but has fallen far behind under Walz. As we look forward, the presumptive DFL gubernatorial nominee, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, needs to explain how she will now be different.

Klobuchar is certainly smarter than Walz and is working hard to position herself as a moderate. But in a world in which Democratic candidates often campaign as moderates and govern very differently (see the recent examples of Tim Walz, Joe Biden and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger), exactly how will she differ from Walz and the hard-left base that currently runs the Minnesota DFL Party?

Would she reject the socialist economic agenda now driving much of the DFL? Does she support the proposed wealth tax — a 1% annual levy on assets over $10 million? Would she reject the proposed fifth-tier income tax of 10.85%, which would push Minnesota’s top rate among the highest in the nation? Would she veto tax increases of any kind, given that Minnesota already has the seventh highest state and local tax burdens in the country?

Would Klobuchar cut the bloated state budget at all? Would she reform the Paid Family and Medical Leave program, which is among the more poorly constructed pieces of legislation in the past 20 years? Would she oppose the “climate superfund” bill that would add even greater costs to the shoulders of Minnesota families?

Would she support real accountability and reform in schools and buck the education establishment that has failed to deliver the academic results to which kids are entitled?

These are not gotcha questions. They are among the central questions of the election. And although Klobuchar may eventually voice the right answers to some of them, are we really to believe that a senator who in one Congress voted 99% of the time with Biden will suddenly buck the hard left in her party?

Walz gave the hard left all it wanted, with atrocious results for the people of Minnesota. Amy Klobuchar needs to tell Minnesota, right now, exactly where she will instead say “no,” and Minnesotans will need to decide whether they believe her.