Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Walz Watch 2028: Country-Crossing Guv Urges Dems to Get "Meaner"
Does Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz want to be president? The 2024 Democratic VP nom is making headlines—from the the New York Times to the Washington Post—that suggest, yes, the 61-year-old politician might be eyeballing the top of the ticket in 2028.
Walz spoke Friday at a South Carolina fish fry hosted by Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), and he insisted that his party "be honest" about “stray[ing] from our North Star” of helping the working class or risk becoming "roadkill." “Maybe it’s time for us to be a little meaner,” Walz said in Columbia. “When it’s a bully like Donald Trump, you bully the shit out of him.” Said ex-Gov. Jim Hodges (D-SC) of Walz and fellow attendee Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD): “They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t interested” in running for president.
By Sunday, Walz found himself at the California Democratic Party convention in Anaheim, where he yet again teed off on his party's recent failures. “The party of the working class lost a big chunk of the working class... Some of it is our own doing,” he told convention goers. “That last election was a primal scream on so many fronts." Walz bragged about his progressive Ws back home, including child-tax credits, free school lunches, and labor protections—union members are the "real VIPs," he pandered, per Politico.
Walz hasn't exactly been shy about teasing his potential presidential ambitions. Back in March, his longform conversation on the New Yorker's podcast sounded very much like someone testing the top-of-ticket waters, as did his rousing keynote address last month for U of M Law School grads. Hey, wouldn't be tough to at least top Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale's '84 performance.
MN Fortune 500s Take Pounding in New Rankings
Fortune returned today with the one thing people know about the biz mag, which is, of course, its annual tally of the country's 500 biggest corporations. This year 18 Minnesota companies made the list, up one from last year.
Health-care ghoul UnitedHealth Group (No. 3, +1 from '24) charted highest, followed by Target (No. 41, -4), U.S. Bankcorp (No. 105, +2), Best Buy (No. 108, -8), CHS (No. 115, -18), and 3M (No. 174, -40). Those nosediving placements were kind of a theme among Minnesota-based firms; General Mills (No. 216, -13), Land O' Lakes (No. 262, -17), and Xcel Energy (No. 319, -17) all experienced double-digit plunges. The newcomer? 3M health-care spinoff Sloventum (No. 462), whose name has been described by Racket—a Minneapolis-based media company that yet again failed to crack the top 500—as "dumb." Nationally, Walmart came in at No. 1, with Amazon, our beloved UHG, Apple, and CVS Health coming up the rear.
You can read about many of these corporate neighbors in Racket's recent feature on whether or not they were accountable with financial pledges made in George Floyd's name.
Uh Oh: Strib Offers Buyouts to Workers
In the godforsaken, death-rattling journalism industry, buyouts are often viewed as a precursor to layoffs. Publisher Steve Grove insists that's not about to happen at Star Tribune Media Co., but on Monday workers were met with emails offering $10,000 buyouts. To qualify, interested employees must exceed 65 when they combine years of employment with their age. It's unclear how many positions will be culled via the buyouts.
"Every media company in the country is going through tremendous transformation right now in the face of unprecedented challenges and new opportunities. We’re no different," Grove writes in an email to staffers obtained by the Minnesota Reformer. "If we’re going to come out stronger, we need to own our future. That means bringing our workforce into a new era and making space to bring new talents and skills into the company to help us survive and thrive."
Grove, who worked for Google before helming Minnesota's Department of Employment and Economic Development, was introduced in 2023 as a tech-bro wunderkind. Following a conflicty-looking rebrand (it's now the Minnesota Star Tribune) and multimillion website rebuild (entire glitchy ghost sections now exist), it seems the newspaper exec will have to navigate his 157-year company through some seriously choppy waters—in between book-tour engagements. For $15-$20, you can celebrate Grove's memoir, How I Found Myself in the Midwest, an extracurricular project that "blindsided" the newsroom, at the Parkway Theater later this month.
Wolves Watch: Where Will Future Arena Go?
Your Minnesota Timberwolves ended their extremely fun 2024-25 campaign on a down note, losing in the Western Conference Finals for a second consecutive year. (Any longtime Wolves fan with a halfway decent memory will remind you that those are champagne-ass problems.) Writes The Athletic's Jon Krawczynski of new majority ownership duo Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez...
They plan to be much more aggressive with their investment on the business side of the operations, including formulating plans for a new arena, team sources told The Athletic. The partners have openly stated their firm commitment to keeping the team in Minnesota, and team sources reiterated that is the long-term vision for a team that is booming in popularity locally, thanks to their playoff runs the last two seasons.
With nothing concrete to go off of, much less the actual concrete bound for a determined future arena, we turn our attention toward Reddit. That's where an ambitious Redditor submitted their detailed portfolio of potential replacement sites for Target Center, the NBA's second-oldest arena with a tiny footprint that'd make rebuilding tricky. Our poster suggestions some eye-catching and far-flung cites, from the downtown's HERC facility to nearby St. Paul's Allianz Field to out by the damn Mall of America in Bloomington. The grabbiest candidate to us: The ol' Kmart location off Lake Street—how wild would that be?!
With the disclaimer that we're at the stage of everyone talking out of their tuchuses, please sound off with blaring confidence and certainty in the comments.
