Minnesota’s August 11 primaries exposed polling failures, tested party endorsements, and offered new clues about where both parties are headed in November.
The biggest loser on Minnesota’s primary night was not a candidate. It was the polls. The final KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showed Congresswoman Angie Craig with a slim two-point lead over Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan in the Democratic Senate primary, essentially a toss-up. Flanagan won by roughly twenty points, a blowout rather than a squeaker.
The polling missed something structural: the degree to which Operation Metro Surge and the killings of two American citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis had radicalized DFL primary voters and pushed the electorate left of where surveys placed it. The polls also underestimated House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who defeated both Trump-endorsed Mike Lindell and the convention’s pick, Kendall Qualls, for governor. When polling misses the direction of a landslide and the identity of a winner on the same night, the industry has a real problem to reckon with.
It is also worth asking which issues drove the outcome. Metro Surge and immigration enforcement dominated the Democratic race, while fraud claims, tied to Lindell’s history as an election denier and Justice Department monitors sent to the state, shadowed the Republican one. What is notable is what did not make headlines: affordability. With housing, grocery, and health care costs among voters’ top national concerns, the issue barely registered in Minnesota’s primary coverage, and it may reemerge as the defining theme in November.
Second, the results send a mixed message about party endorsements. Flanagan carried the DFL convention endorsement and won convincingly, while Craig skipped the convention and lost, a seeming vindication of the process. On the Republican side, the opposite happened twice: Demuth won despite being shut out of both the Trump endorsement and the convention pick, and Tafoya ran away with the Senate primary even though delegates had backed Adam Schwarze, who finished with barely 24 percent. Republicans may conclude the convention system is disconnected from primary voters and ought to be reformed. Democrats are more likely to defend a process that produced a winner, since institutions get credit when their picks succeed and blame when they do not, regardless of whether the process changed.
A third thread is what might be called the politainer effect. Tafoya’s star power, built over decades as a national sports broadcaster, gave her name recognition and fundraising capacity no rival could match. Lindell had a version of the same asset in his MyPillow fame plus Trump’s endorsement, but politainer status alone was not enough. Demuth beat him for a more prosaic reason: organization. Lindell’s campaign was thin on the ground, while Demuth built a functioning operation as the sitting House speaker. The same held on the Democratic side, where Flanagan’s organizing edge, including support from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, outpaced Craig’s; Klobuchar’s decisive, nearly uncontested win reflects the same organizational advantage incumbency provides.
Put Klobuchar and Flanagan atop the same ticket and the party sends contradictory signals about its direction. One reading is that the DFL is simply divided, with progressives pointing to Flanagan’s landslide as proof the DSA wing is ascendant, and centrists pointing to Klobuchar, one of the Senate’s most institutionally moderate Democrats, as proof the party is not lurching left. A second reading is that the party has two wings of roughly equal strength, each able to win statewide on its own terms. A third circles back to endorsement and organization: both women had the DFL apparatus behind them, suggesting structure, not ideology, decided both races. All three readings will find an audience.
Zoom out to the broader Midwest. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are three states central to any discussion of the old blue wall. In two of the three, the DSA-aligned candidate won: Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate primary and Flanagan in Minnesota’s. In Wisconsin, David Crowley defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong for governor. But the margins differ from the box scores. Michigan was a one-point nail-biter, Minnesota a landslide, Wisconsin a moderate win. Whether the blue wall is being rebuilt on progressive or centrist foundations or in three different ways in three states is an open question heading into November.
Minnesota Republicans, meanwhile, chose pragmatism over ideology, rejecting both the Trump-endorsed and convention-endorsed candidates for governor in favor of Demuth, and picking the more electable Tafoya over the convention’s Schwarze for Senate. After two decades without a statewide win, that instinct toward electability over purity is notable, though it remains a tough year given a soft economy and Trump’s sagging approval.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Minnesota shattered its non-presidential-year primary turnout record, with early voting alone far exceeding the prior midterm record. Officials attributed the surge to competitive, high-profile races, the same dynamic that scrambled the polls, while Metro Surge, in particular, pulled new and infrequent DFL voters to the polls. An electorate this engaged suggests November turnout may be just as hard to forecast as August’s was.
There were contested primary elections for both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party for all statewide offices. 615,000 people voted for Klobuchar; 180,000 voted for Demuth. That is almost 4-1. Twice as many Minnesotan voted for Flanagan than Tafoya.
If a few more people who write things for public consumption start republishing Dane Smith’s MinnPost article, Demuth and Tafoya are only going to be able to talk about folding laundry and fishing in Stearns County to bolster their campaigns. Oh wait, Tafoya doesn’t fold laundry and Stearn County may not be the best place to fish in Minnesota. Hard data and context are missing in Minnesota’s overblown fraud furor
by Dane Smith, MinnPost August 6, 2026
This is the final piece in a MinnPost Voices series by Dane Smith called Debunking the defamation of Minnesota on various attacks, including fraud, depicting Minnesota as a failed state. Read the other installments here.
Medicaid fraud in Florida has spiraled so wildly out of control that “Dr. Oz,’’ administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, sent a five-page letter in March to state government officials requesting a response to “staggering sums and elaborate conspiracies.’’
The letter described South Florida (where President Donald Trump and many of his billionaire chums live) as “an environment of pervasive fraud,” and a primary location from which 324 defendants were charged for $14.6 billion in alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud in 2025.
In Texas, a state government inspector general recently testified that suspected improper payments and fraud from federal programs in the Lone Star State are running between $5 billion to $10 billion annually. That amount matches or exceeds the rough estimates of total improper payment and fraud per capita from government programs in the North Star State.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, a rich white couple from the Phoenix area recently pleaded guilty to filing $1.2 billion in fraudulent Medicare claims for expensive and medically unnecessary wound grafts that were applied to elderly and terminally ill patients. That total is about four times the amount involved in Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future heist, incessantly used by Trump and MAGA influencers to denigrate Somali immigrants and to paint Minnesota as the worst state for defrauding government programs.
Related: Trump administration is withholding more than $1B in Medicaid funds from California and Minnesota
None of these sputtering Minnesota bashers are calling for criminal investigations, cutting off federal funding, or issuing any public criticism whatsoever of the governors or attorneys general in Florida, Texas or Arizona — not Trump, not Dr. Oz and not Vice President and “Fraud Czar” JD Vance. Nobody in the Trump orbit is advancing the “staggering” fraud in South Florida and other red states as the most important reason to sweep all the Democratic incumbents out of office. Trump and MAGA candidates are calling for precisely these things in Minnesota.
This national context has been hard to find in the four-year media furor over defrauding state-administered federal programs in Minnesota. Stemming from the Feeding Our Future scam and smaller ones since then, fraud has overwhelmed the conversations in our political and policy world. Almost every incremental development comes with a description in the news media of fraud as a “crisis” that is “sprawling” or “massive” or “historic,” implying that Minnesota is uniquely bad. But we never see spreadsheets and state rankings with supporting data and national perspective.
Beatdown runs amok
The unparalleled partisan persecution of blue states by the Trump regime is intensifying, despite repeated rulings by lower court judges that the criminal or corruption charges against elected officials, and the withholding of federal funds, are baseless and illegal. Trump continues to attempt to shut off the flow of billions of dollars in vital healthcare and safety net funding, threatening the well-being and lives of hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans, Republicans and Democrats alike, who did nothing wrong. A massive Republican campaign messaging assault, led by Trump and eagerly pursued by Minnesota state GOP candidates, is in full swing this summer.
A few journalists in Minnesota have occasionally challenged the narrative. Outlandish estimates (by Trump) of $19 billion in fraud over five years and $9 billion (by his interim U.S. attorney) were flagged in a Minnesota Star Tribune story last December headlined, “Trump claims Minnesota lost billions to fraud. The evidence to date isn’t close.” In another analytical story almost two years ago, the Star Tribune reported that although there was “a lot” of fraud from pandemic programs administered by the state, there was no comparative data showing how Minnesota stacked up against other states on overall fraud from $5.2 trillion spent nationwide on pandemic relief.
Here’s a sentence that should be inserted in subsequent stories about fraud, especially those that pertain to political campaigns this fall: There is still no authoritative, nonpartisan and comprehensive 50-state per capita ranking of fraud waste and abuse from government programs.
I’ve been searching for such comparisons for two years. On the rankings available on a few large specific federal programs, Minnesota actually has performed better than most other states. Perhaps not as well on the relatively small school nutrition, autism and daycare programs. But even on those, we simply don’t have comprehensive and reliable state comparisons.
Related: Here’s what’s really happening with child care fraud in Minnesota
With street crime rates declining, the disastrous ICE invasion and the Iran War proving unpopular, with gas and other prices rising, and with Minnesota showing up near the top in national rankings on quality of life, Republican candidates working off Trump’s playbook are putting all their marbles on fraud as the most important reason for voters to turn the state over to MAGA policies and candidates.
The right-wing Center of the American Experiment in Minnesota has been staging a travelling road show this summer with a partisan and ideological spin on fraud. All this unfounded defamation and a media echo chamber appears to be working. A recent KSTP Survey/USA poll found that 23% of Minnesotans now think fraud is the most important issue facing the state and another 59% think it is a major issue.
Alarm doesn’t add up
Here’s the obligatory disclaimer. The Feeding Our Future fraud and copycat schemes in autism and other human service programs were terrible and inexcusable. Oversight was lax and slow. These failures stained Minnesota’s deserved reputation as a well-run state, with decades of high marks for effective and efficient state and local governments.
The way that fraudsters played their race card in 2021 as state employees raised red flags has damaged both the racial equity cause and public support for economic security safety net programs. And the fraud fracas obscures the fact that almost all human service dollars are flowing to real people in need and are saving and improving millions of lives in Minnesota every single day. Overreaction to the fraud and Trump’s likely illegal federal withholding of funds (but not in Florida, Texas or Arizona) is shortening lives and inflicting deep pain on too many people.
High levels of human service spending are not the problem. For decades, Minnesota has distinguished itself as a generous state that does more than most to equalize opportunity and provide economic security for all its people. We spend more of our own money to match federal human service and economic security programs than other states. This strategy pays off in one of the nation’s lowest poverty rates and numerous reports and rankings that put Minnesota near the top in conditions for working people and for affordability of necessities. But it also means a larger amount from which to steal or overcharge.
While news consumers clutch their pearls and gasp at figures in the millions for every major fraud indictment, they never see the context that Minnesota administers about $30 billion a year in federal and state funds for health care and economic security, mostly for children, the elderly and low-income families. That comes to about $150 billion over a five-year period.
If fraud reaches $1 billion over that period, that would be less than 1% of the total disbursed. And that’s a much smaller percentage than losses to runaway levels of fraud being reported in the private sector. U.S. businesses reported losing the equivalent of 9.8% of their revenue to fraud, a significant increase from 6.7% in 2024, according to the American Banker website. More on that later.
Related: Fraud: What if we treat for-profits the same as nonprofits when they get public money?
Here’s another way to get a handle on how Minnesota might compare on total fraud from government programs to the nation as a whole.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2024 estimated annual total national fraud from federal programs at $233 billion to $521 billion per year for each of the five years from 2018 through 2022.
That’s a wide range, so let’s split the difference and assume the total is halfway in between, at $377 billion annually. Minnesota has about 1.7% of the U.S. population, so if Minnesota were perfectly average in fraud, our proportional annual amount of fraud in each of those five years would be $6.7 billion, or $33.5 billion in aggregate for the five years. The total for which we have convictions or indictments amounts to about $500 million, or $100 million in each of those five years. If our grand total reached the preposterous claim by Trump of $19 billion in Minnesota fraud, that would still be considerably less than our proportional share of $33.5 billion in the GAO’s mid-range estimate of total national fraud.
One factor that might place Minnesota better-than-average in recent years is its superior performance on some other areas of human service spending that are much larger than the relatively modest pandemic school nutrition program that funded Feeding Our Future.
Related: Woman at center of sprawling Minnesota fraud case gets nearly 42-year prison sentence
For instance, several state media organizations reported way back in 2023 that Minnesota outperformed the nation in preventing overpayments from the pandemic unemployment benefit program, which dispensed almost $1 trillion nationally. That’s 10 times larger than the school meals program. Minnesota’s rate of overpayment was 2% on pandemic unemployment, while states like Florida and Tennessee were reporting error rates of 40% and the national average was 18%.
Minnesota also has been beating the national average and many red states on overpayments for Medicaid, the largest federal program administered by states, about $1 trillion nationally. (Improper payments include both fraudulent and non-fraudulent activity.) Minnesota’s most recent error rate was 2%, one of the lowest in the nation, compared with 6% nationally and 7% in Florida, 8% in Ohio and more than 20% in Wyoming and South Carolina, all red states.
Minnesota also has been ranking better than the national average in recent years in the food stamp error rate (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, overpayment). In 2022, 2023 and 2024, Minnesota beat the national average and most other states in the SNAP overpayment rate, with a rate in 2024 of 6.3%, compared with 9% nationally. Trump administration officials recently reported that the overpayment rate for Minnesota was slightly above the national average in 2025, and he now is attempting to withhold billions of dollars in SNAP funding for Minnesota and mostly blue states.
While Trump and MAGA influencers strain to depict the Feeding Our Future fraud with public corruption, there is zero evidence that elected officials or state employees benefitted from the fraudulent payments. Minnesota ranked near the bottom (46th) on the Cato Institute’s recent ranking of Public Corruption by State, and it usually ranks near the top or above average on most other measures of financial management and good government.
One more important note: Minnesota consistently ranks near the top among the states as a net donor of tax dollars to the federal government, sending about $44 billion more in federal taxes than we get back in benefits, according to the website USA Facts.
All these millions, billions and trillions are mostly very rough and speculative estimates, combining actual fraud with error rates and overpayments that come under the heading “waste and abuse,” and are not likely criminally fraudulent. But working through the per capita arithmetic confirms what a few lonely voices have tried to suggest as the fraud frenzy swirls. Minnesota likely is not an outlier on fraud, waste and abuse of public taxpayer dollars.
Voices for context
Against the hysteria, a few expert national voices have tried to offer facts that dispute the panicky narrative. This content is easy to find online, but not in local news coverage.
An April 2026 article in Governing magazine, published by the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, argued that there is no significant difference between red states and blue states like Minnesota on fraud from government programs. The author is Donald F. Kettl, a prolific writer of books about federalism, and a professor at the LBJ School at the University of Texas, Austin.
Taking aim at extravagant falsehoods perpetrated in Minnesota by MAGA You Tube propagandist Nick Shirley, Kettl explained how accusers are conflating error rates and program susceptibility to actual fraud. Kettl said blue states with large urban areas tend to have higher rates of food stamp fraud, but red states have higher fraud rates for the exponentially larger Medicare and Medicaid programs, as evidenced by Dr. Oz’s recent letter to Florida officials. Kettl concluded: “Fraud is an equal opportunity scourge across red and blue states. … If Vance takes his role as Fraud Czar seriously, he will have to take out as many allies as opponents.” So far, that is not happening.
Another thorough takedown of the assault on Minnesota was published by Real Clear Politics (a national right-leaning national polling and news aggregator) in February, as the ICE surge was devastating the Twin Cities. That article, entitled “Minnesota Fraud and the Arithmetic of Alarm” was authored by Jonathan N. Badger, a professor at St. John’s College in Maryland.
Badger offered the standard disclaimer that Feeding Our Future was deplorable and appeared to be the largest case of fraud in the relatively small pandemic-era school meals program. But larger statistical context indicates that fraud convictions overall in Minnesota are “modest by national standards,’’ Badger wrote.
Trump’s Justice Department honchos have thrown out undocumented allegations of “billions” by dishonestly fudging the difference between “confirmed fraud and estimated exposure [to fraud] … not findings of fraud in any legal sense,” Badger wrote. “This distinction matters because Minnesota’s experience, when placed in national context, looks strikingly ordinary.”
Related: ‘It is a political fight and it is horrible’: How a plan to stop Medicaid fraud brought panic to healthcare patients and providers
Noting recent announcements of multibillion-dollar indictments in Florida, Texas and Mississippi, Badger noted: “None of these cases has prompted the claim that those states are uniquely or categorically incapable of administering public programs.’’ And he concluded: “Measured against other states, Minnesota is not an outlier. Measured against the numbers invoked in political debate, the confirmed fraud of the past two years is relatively small. Recognizing these facts does not excuse wrongdoing. It restores proportion. And in public discussion of public institutions, proportion is not a luxury — it is a civic necessity.”
Yet another fresh take was offered in a commentary in The Hill, entitled, “The war on fraud is really a war on the poor,” by Sara Sternberg Greene, a Duke University sociologist and legal scholar. Generating panic about welfare fraud, especially by racial minorities, has been a tactic for conservative administrations for decades. Much larger fraud by corporations and affluent people is shrugged off as the cost of doing business and settled in administrative actions or civil courts, Greene noted.
A Georgetown University study recently estimated that fraud committed by low-income beneficiaries (poor people) is negligible, making up less than 2% of reported healthcare fraud convictions. The vast majority of monetary loss is perpetrated by healthcare providers, medical suppliers and managed care organizations.
Still other voices in recent weeks are also discovering that Republicans in the Minnesota House and Senate, each of which has been under GOP control off and on the past two decades, bear some of the blame for cutting oversight budgets and removing safeguards. A detailed timeline of behind-the-scenes Republican legislative actions is documented in the “The Politics Chicks” Substack blog. And an equally lengthy and chart-filled chronology was published recently by David Schultz in the online Minneapolis Times, entitled “The Long Road to Crisis: How Minnesota’s Bipartisan Retreat from Oversight Created Today’s Fraud Problems.”
The bigger heist in the private sector
Team Trump’s demonization of Minnesota Somalis and immigrants of color as the face of fraud in our nation is not only unfair, it is hypocritical to the core. Trump himself is the only president ever actually convicted of fraud, on 34 counts for falsifying business records to obtain lower interest on loans. The proliferating scandals involving his use of presidential power to enrich himself and to pardon fraudsters who have donated money to him or his campaign are unprecedented in White House history. Most recently, the New York Times and other media are reporting that buyers of his bitcoin have lost $3.8 billion while he and his family profited by $1.4 billion. Some of his pardons of wealthy fraudsters have wiped out judicial restitution orders to fraud victims, to the tune of at least $2 billion.
Every minute of public attention that can be focused on Somali fraud in Minnesota diverts attention from fraud that actually qualifies as public corruption. But it also deflects from a much larger and metastasizing fraud that directly plunders the wallets and bank accounts of Minnesotans and Americans every hour of the day. This is the theft happening in the private sector, to consumers and to small and large businesses, sometimes perpetrated by businesses and large corporations, which increasingly seems helpless in stopping the scourge.
Related: Vance demands DOJ conduct criminal fraud probe of Walz, Ellison after release of committee report
This declaration from the Global Fraud Summit in 2024 captures the scale and scope of a problem that experts agree is much worse in the United States than in other nations, exacerbated by the dizzying transformation of our lives by high-tech internet technology:
“Fraud against individuals and businesses has grown rapidly to become one of the most prevalent crimes globally and is an organized transnational threat. In some countries, it is the most common crime type that citizens experience. Fraudsters operate at scale, exploiting telecommunications networks, cyberspace and a population that spends an increasing amount of time online.”
A recent report from the Social Market Foundation in the U.K. found that the United States has the worst fraud problem among the world’s most affluent democracies. A survey of 15 countries found that between 2021 and 2023, 31% of adults in the U.S. reported falling victim to fraud, compared with 18% in the U.K. and just 8% in Japan, which had the lowest reported incidence of fraud.
And while some estimates for fraud from government programs might be in the range of 3% to 5% of total expenditures, the percentage losses to businesses and consumers appear to be greater. The bottom-line dollar amount dwarfs public sector fraud for the simple reason that the private sector is at least twice the size of the public sector in the United States.
The types of private sector fraud are endless and growing fast. A short list: impostor scams, phishing and vishing, investment and cryptocurrency schemes (such as Trump’s bitcoin), online shopping and delivery cons, credit card fraud through unauthorized charges and skimming, elderly financial exploitation, business email compromise, invoice and procurement swindles, financial statement manipulation (the fraud for which Trump has been convicted), insurance fraud, romance frauds, and contractor and home repair scams. (I got nailed to the tune of $2,000 by one of these last summer).
Add to these an expanding dark gray area of legal but shady and unfair business practices: bloatware and adware, junk fees, deceptive advertising, snake-oil miracle cures in the diet and supplemental medicine game, and the enormous expansion of private equity firms that are exempt from the disclosure rules for publicly traded companies. And we can’t overlook all the ways businesses and wealthy people are constantly cheating each other. A messy scandal involving accusations of fraud against a chief financial officer by the Davis brothers, some of Minnesota’s wealthiest CEOs and largest Trump donors, is just one example.
Instead of leaping to the aid of consumers and business fraud victims, Trump and his Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought, architect of Project 2025, are systematically dismantling the federal capacity for oversight and regulation of both the private sector and federal agencies. Among sources that track this dismantling of accountability include the “Reg Tracker” at the Brookings Institution and the website American Oversight.
Related: After fraud, the state must rebuild trust, not just enforce compliance
Minnesota, in contrast to Trump’s federal government, actually has forged ahead of the nation with new anti-fraud accountability controls, including the creation of an Inspector General’s office and beefing up surveillance in the Attorney General’s office and elsewhere in state government. Ironically, Feeding Our Future may have put Minnesota well ahead of other states in vigilance, investigation and prosecution of fraud and improper payments.
Here’s a crucial difference between fraud from government programs and private sector and consumer fraud and how the latter is a worse and more immediate threat, especially for those of us of modest means.
Stealing from our government’s common pot is bad because it increases the national debt and puts additional pressures on government budgets and taxpayers. But it doesn’t directly prevent people from getting their entitlements and benefits, nor do they lose money from their wallets and bank accounts. Kids from low-income families in Minnesota got their meals from public school programs during the pandemic and Feeding Our Future did not take food out of their mouths or money from other individuals.
Consumer fraud and other forms of private-sector chicanery render their victims immediately and directly poorer, sometimes wiping out everything they have. The scams itemized above rob hundreds of millions of dollars every day from people and businesses at every income level, but the impact is especially hard on the elderly, middle-incomes and below.
The entire issue of AARP’s 46-page March/April bulletin, headlined Fraud 2026, was devoted to helping seniors avoid scams from the private sector. AARP also has been a leading voice opposing Trump’s veiled plans to privatize the Social Security system and put its vast funds in the hands of billionaire Wall Street investors.
The MAGA purveyors of fraud panic will be on warp drive in coming weeks, and Trump’s minions in the Justice Department will be overhyping new developments. Our media desperately need to provide context and proportion. And conscientious Minnesotans who want to preserve and advance our state’s best qualities need to aggressively fight back as Election Day approaches.
On social media and in conversations with others, we can respond vigorously with facts and context presented here and link to other contextual analysis (see the accompanying “Minnesota fraud panic: Key facts and U.S. context“). We must emphasize all the ways our state government already is responding. And we can point to all the campaign issues that are more important in our lives than fraud from social services.
Related: Data centers in Minnesota: The next big election issue
For instance: The Trump administration’s all-out effort to interfere with our elections and suppress the vote in Minnesota. A continuing brutal deportation of tens of thousands of our immigrant workers and neighbors. Affordability for healthcare, housing and other necessities. Deepening rural stress from tariffs and loss of hospitals and medical providers as corporations consolidate health services. Gun violence and easy availability of military-grade weapons designed for mass killing. Mental health and addiction scourges.
Threats to our workforce from artificial intelligence and to our communities from data centers. Racial disparities in education outcomes. Climate change and the reversal of progress toward renewable energy. Ever-widening economic inequality between billionaires and 1 percenters and the rest of us who actually need human services. Another futile forever war and a deepening quagmire in the Middle East. Also, rampant fraud on consumers and businesses and wrongdoing by wealthy elites and corporations.
We can maintain hope that Minnesota voters will come to their senses and recover a sense of proportion on the fraud frenzy. But we are up against hundreds of millions of dollars in conservative campaign messaging, abetted by Supreme Court decisions that are removing all limits for billionaire donors. The message will be that poor immigrants and people of color are our biggest problem, never mind all the ways that our economic oligarchy redistributes the wealth we all help produce toward their own bank accounts.
Thomas Frank, author of the prophetic book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” summed it up well 20 years ago: “The trick is to [marshal] all the resentment people naturally feel toward those who dominate their lives, but then to redirect those feelings away from the centers of economic power and toward liberals, feminists, and other convenient scapegoats [add Somalis and immigrants of color here]. The result is a perpetual-motion machine of political anger.”
Dane Smith is a retired St. Paul resident, a former government and politics reporter for the Minnesota Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and a former president of a progressive policy research and advocacy organization. He is a frequent writer of public policy commentary and the author of MinnPost’s “Reappraising Minnesota” series, published in 2023-24.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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