New York Has Never Had a Tim Walz

Not in modern times, at least

New York has the reputation of a liberal state run amok—or, for the Fox obsessives, it is a hive of radical socialism. If Ron DeSantis has made Florida a “free state” and a laboratory of culturally conservative governance and grievance, New York must be its opposite. Proud conservatives in the Sunshine State, Marxists up north.

Except, of course, the self-identified socialists are not in charge of New York. Not of New York State, and not of New York City. Since 2019, progressive Democrats have gained much more clout in the state legislature, especially in the State Senate. Their greatest run of lawmaking came in the first year they entered Albany, when they were able to pass stronger tenant protections, laws to combat climate change, reforms that included the partial end of cash bail, and tuition assistance and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. They were able to modernize, to a degree, New York’s retrograde election laws. They increased funding for public schools across the state.

Minnesota, simultaneously, had its own burst of progressive lawmaking under their governor, Tim Walz. Like New York, a Democratic trifecta had come to power in Minnesota. Though the majorities in the Minnesota legislature were narrower, Walz and lawmakers there were no less effective. In short order, Walz created a state-run program to provide paid and family medical leave to workers, also granted driver’s licenses to the undocumented, toughened (in New York fashion) gun control laws, legalized marijuana (New York would do this in 2021), restored the voting rights of felons, and gave free meals to all public schoolchildren. Walz was also able to ban noncompete clauses, something New York never did, and the momentum for progressive lawmaking never really ebbed, even with the onset of the pandemic.

This was because Walz, despite his centrism in Congress, governed as a left-populist.

No such creature—not in modern times, anyway—has ever led New York State for any significant amount of time.