After news broke that Vice President Kamala Harris had officially selected Tim Walz as her running mate, former president Trump’s campaign blasted a fundraising email warning Walz would “unleash hell on earth” with far-left policies. As Republicans scour Walz’s record for targets, the Minnesota governor’s controversial COVID-19 response is likely to resurface.
In April 2020, Walz extended an emergency stay-at-home order which lasted through mid-May — prompting then-president Trump to declare “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” on the social media platform X. A little over a month later, after easing the stay-at-home order, the Democratic governor issued an indoor mask mandate for the state.
During a Philadelphia rally Tuesday night, Walz took several shots at Trump.“Some of us are old enough to remember when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom. It turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office,” he said to the crowd. “If Trump gets a chance to return, he’s going to pick up exactly where he left off four years ago.”
Walz’s COVID directives earned applause from public health officials looking to slow down COVID-19 hospitalizations. But they sparked Republican attacks and several lawsuits over Walz’s authority, underscoring the deep partisan divide over states’ pandemic response that remains a hot-button issue in the 2024 election.
Republicans have repeatedly accused Democratic leaders of imposing stringent masking policies, social distancing rules, and remote learning requirements that impacted children’s mental health and learning. When COVID-19 cases spiked again last summer, Trump said that “COVID tyrants want to take away our Freedom” and that, if reelected, he would “use every available authority to cut federal funding to any school, college, airline or public transportation system that imposes a mask mandate or a vaccine mandate.”
Walz knew his shutdown orders and mask mandates would be unpopular, he told Politico in December 2021. But his administration chose to “make sure we were looking at all of the unintended consequences, not just from a health outcome but also social implications and the economy.”
As Walz joined the Democratic presidential ticket, Trump surrogates were also quick to bring up the anti-racism protests in Minneapolis during the first summer of the pandemic, following George Floyd’s murder. Republicans accused Walz at the time of hesitating to deploy the National Guard, resulting in millions of dollars in property damage to dozens of downtown retail and food businesses already struggling with Covid lockdown policies.
“Minnesota was ground zero for the [Black Lives Matter] riots of 2020,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote on X.
Several groups have sought to assess how Minnesota’s COVID-19 response stacks up against responses in other states. Minnesota was among the states with the lowest coronavirus death rates between February 2020 and April 2022, but still had extended periods of crowded intensive care units, according to an analysis by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation promoting health care access. (The Commonwealth Fund is a financial supporter of STAT and is not involved in any decisions about our journalism.) Still, the state ranked ninth overall on health outcomes during that time, and first for the “Plains” region.
An analysis co-authored by economists from the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and the free-market nonprofit Committee to Unleash Prosperity was less favorable. They suggested that states with the most restrictive COVID-19 shutdowns did not see significantly improved health outcomes during the pandemic. Minnesota scored a ‘C’ rating in their assessment, grading higher than many other Democrat-led states.
