Walz called out Trump for COVID-19 response. How effective was Walz in Minnesota?

Gov. Tim Walz often argued during the pandemic that critics of his COVID-19 response had strong incentives to follow his advice about wearing masks and getting vaccinated so they could reduce their odds of getting sick or dying.

“If you think I’ve gotten this wrong,” he said in May 2021, “get the vaccine to make sure you’re around next November and then you can cast that vote.”

Minnesota re-elected Walz one year later, though by that point COVID-19 barely rated as an election issue; polls showed only 1% of voters considered the pandemic response a top concern.

The topic has made a political comeback, though, now that Walz is Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in November’s presidential election. The governor invited the attention, stating in campaign speeches that Donald Trump “froze” as president in 2020 in response to the pandemic and contrasting the disjointed federal response to his state’s efforts.

So how well did Minnesota endure the pandemic, relative to other states? It depends on who does the analysis.

Politico in 2021 rated Minnesota as the fifth-most effective state, because it achieved relatively fewer COVID deaths with restrictions that only caused modest harm to its economic and education systems. The Council on Foreign Relations by comparison last year ranked Minnesota 33rd, because its low death rate was partly due to its healthier and younger population — and because the state’s usually impressive student test scores dropped after months of school closures and remote learning.

Minnesota undoubtedly took more aggressive measures than others to protect people, issuing a sweeping stay-at-home order in March 2020 to delay the spread of COVID-19 so that hospitals could increase their capacities, and then a four-week order that started in November that year to delay a second wave of illnesses until vaccine was available. The foreign relations research ranked Minnesota 18th in its use of mandates to protect Minnesotans, and found it particularly aggressive in limiting access to restaurants and fitness clubs.

Walz put himself in the center of it all.

Frequent media events at the start of the pandemic made him a household name, even among apolitical Minnesotans who had little else to do but tune in amid school and business closures and restrictions on social gatherings.

Walz then made numerous public appearances in 2021 to promote COVID-19 vaccinations, welcoming the first doses of vaccine when they arrived at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, unveiling the state’s Mall of America pop-up clinic, getting his own shot alongside former Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty, and appearing at the Minnesota Zoo to promote free passes, fishing licenses and other vaccine incentives.

The governor responded personally when Hennepin Healthcare had dire needs, said Jennifer Decubellis, who took charge of the safety-net health care provider in Minneapolis at the start of the pandemic. She credited Walz for making the tough choice to suspend non-emergency surgeries in spring 2020 to preserve hospital supplies and for creating an equitable rationing system in early 2021 so health care providers wouldn’t fight over limited vaccines.

The governor also helped secure a deployment of military doctors and nurses in late 2021 when her hospital was overwhelmed.

“That extra boost of help got us through,” Decubellis said.

Walz’s leadership during the pandemic may have aided his selection as the VP candidate, said Larry Jacobs, a University of Minnesota political science expert. His work with governors regionally to standardize COVID-19 responses led to his election as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. And that made him a presence at the White House this year, and an influencer over whether President Joe Biden should pursue a second term.

“His visibility rose,” Jacobs said.

Walz’s accusations that Trump “froze” stemmed from complaints he made quietly in 2020, when the president left states and hospitals to compete for supplies of masks, tests and other supplies. The governor sidestepped some supply problems by reaching an in-state deal with Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota to increase COVID-19 testing capacity and connecting with Vice President Mike Pence when he felt ghosted by the president.

The federal response wasn’t perfect after President Joe Biden took charge, Walz said in a prior interview, as he recalled one errant delivery of vaccine doses intended for Minnesota that went to another state. But he said he at least he didn’t have to worry about offending Trump any longer and having criticisms come back on Minnesota and its access to pandemic resources.

“I never took the fight publicly,” he said in a 2021 interview. “I really did believe that there would be potential negative retribution.”

Walz based his initial pandemic strategy on his close study of COVID-19 worldwide. While some authoritarian governments in Asia were slowing the spread with stern measures, he said he knew they wouldn’t be tolerated in the U.S. His primary goal of protecting Minnesota hospital resources stemmed from the early crisis in Italy, where people died because hospitals didn’t have enough ventilators on hand to help them breathe.

State health commissioner Jan Malcolm said the governor was always weighing the potential protective benefits of stay-at-home restrictions vs. their societal and economic harms, and heavily relied on epidemiology data to make choices that he believed would help Minnesotans.

“He knew the data as well as we knew the data,” she said. “That was challenging because he was up at 5 in the morning reading stuff that I hadn’t seen yet.”

His use of the data, though, upset some critics such as Kevin Roche, author of the Healthy Skeptic blog, who said the governor could be “unusually forceful” in persuading the public with sketchy statistics. Researchers at the University of Minnesota created a predictive model that assessed how much restrictions could reduce COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, but it was never supposed to estimate actual pandemic losses. And it was based on overestimates from China about COVID-19′s severity.

Walz nonetheless used the model’s death estimates to build support for his first stay-at-home order.

“If we just let this thing run its course and did nothing, upwards of 74,000 people could be killed by this,” he told the public in March 2020. The stay-at-home measures, he added, would cut the toll to around 50,000.

Four years later, the state has tallied 16,119 COVID-19 deaths. Roche said that high-profile miss created mistrust later when Walz urged people to wear masks and seek vaccines. Roche also recalled how the governor claimed that all COVID-19 victims on one particularly deadly day were unvaccinated. Reports later showed some had received shots.

“His way to get people to stay at home and get them to do this and not do that was to scare the hell out of them,” Roche said.

Republican lawmakers also blamed Walz for allowing hospitals to transfer COVID-19 patients to nursing homes, where they presented risks to elderly and vulnerable residents. Malcolm countered that there was no evidence of any transferred patients infecting residents, who were kept separate and were more at risk from their own nurses or visitors. Walz also was criticized for mandating mask-wearing, even though he imposed that requirement later than many governors and repealed it early in spring 2022. Malcolm disagreed with the early repeal, but said that Walz was always conscious of the limits of mandates and their potential economic and societal costs.

“He started talking early on about public buy-in,” she recalled. “He would say, just like in a military kind of analogy, ‘We can’t hold the line. We’ve got to stop with the mandates, you know, and just try to give people the best information and advice about how to manage their own risks.’”

Jacobs said the pandemic responses of the Walz and Trump administrations could get relitigated during the campaign, but won’t be a dominant issue in November because Walz won’t remain in the spotlight. His visibility for two weeks has been remarkable for a vice presidential candidate, Jacobs said, but Walz will fade to a background role in support of Harris and her agenda.

“This is the apex of Walz’s public attention,” he said.