The GOP's Losing Message: America And Minnesota Are Terrible, No Good Places

Minnesota Reformer

August 19, 2024

Republicans are back on their heels now that they’re the ones supporting a candidate who seems to be losing his mind, insofar as there was anything there to begin with.

They’re settling on a curious argument for people claiming to be patriots: America sucks. What with the childless cat ladies running things. (Former President Donald Trump: “We’re a nation in decline.”) And with Gov. Tim Walz on the Democratic ticket, the same goes for the North Star State.

Trump is calling Minnesota a “very failed state.” U.S. Rep Tom Emmer, Edina’s favorite son and the House minority whip, had this to say: “Tim Walz is a left-wing radical who has turned Minnesota into a liberal wasteland.”

I considered this as I picked up my son at a flag football camp this week — the cost: $0, thanks to St. Paul’s community education program — and we rode my bike home on a quiet, tree-lined street. A number of the houses were getting new roofs and otherwise spiffed up, and the flowers had exploded in color. It was 80 degrees and sunny.

I’m not a Minnesota jingoist. I jokingly tell people I’ll leave the day after my youngest graduates high school. (I need more hills, perhaps an ocean.)

But I’ve lived in New England, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Washington and Oregon, Chicago and Las Vegas. Other than the South, that’s a decent representation of America. I’d rather raise a family here than any of those places, and it’s not even close.

Among Midwestern states, we live longer, healthier lives here. We have higher wages. We boast low unemployment and among the highest labor participation rates in the nation. We’re better educated, thanks to good schools — for many, but not all children — and a robust public and private higher education system. In the Twin Cities, we’re never more than a 10-minute walk from a park, while our state park system is equally great. We support the arts, as well as our terrible sports franchises.

To be sure, Minnesota is not perfect; if it were, there’d be no need for a publication like Minnesota Reformer. The yawning gap between rich and poor and Black and white is distressing — in income, health, education. Our children’s chances of success are too dependent on the zip code they’re raised in and the income of their parents. A handful of neighborhoods need public safety help. And, Reformer reporting in recent months has shown that elected officials should husband our tax dollars better.

But Republicans who allege Minnesota is a “liberal hellhole” should know that these claims will likely keep alive their nearly two-decade losing streak in statewide races.

It’s not plausible to a majority of Minnesotans, who are intimately familiar with their quality of life because they help make it happen every day with their hard work, volunteerism and civic engagement — also nation-leading. And you betcha they are subtly smug about all this to their friends and family in other places.

The Olympiad has been a particularly ill-suited time to be hating on America and Minnesota.

If American women were their own country, they would be third in the medal count. When St. Paul’s own Suni Lee — the first Hmong-American Olympian — got off the plane, who was waiting for her? Sen. Amy Klobuchar, natch, but also Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who will become America’s first Indigenous governor if Walz is elected vice president — a hugely symbolic event for our state given the history of atrocities against Indigenous people.

A few hours after my son and I watched Steph Curry score four 3-pointers in about two minutes to win the gold medal over the French, I went to Vinai, the new restaurant of Hmong-American chef Yia Vang. As Sharyn Jackson recently reported for the Star Tribune, it’s named after the refugee camp in Thailand where he was born and spent the first four years of his life. The infant mortality rate in the camp was one in three.

Jackson describes Vang’s culinary journey on his way from — and then to — Vinai, “washing dishes in a country club to jobs around the Twin Cities as a fishmonger and a pie maker, eventually opening his first food trailer outside Sociable Cider Werks in northeast Minneapolis” and then Union Hmong Kitchen and finally Vinai.

Vang’s pursuit of excellence and our ability to absorb new ideas from new Americans — that’s America and Minnesota at their best.

The abomination of the Vietnam War is inconsolable, irredeemable. But some Americans — and some Minnesotans in particular — did what they could for our Hmong allies, which is a solemn obligation of those with the means to do so.

Thanks to refugees from southeast Asia and then east Africa, Minnesota is far more diverse than 20 or 40 years ago, which has presented certain challenges, but we’re all mostly better for it.

So yeah I love my adopted home state — and the nation my ancestors came to with what I can only guess was little more than hope and an aching to be free.

Keep betting against America and Minnesota, and you’ll keep losing.

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..