“Land of 10,000 Fleeing Residents: Why We finally Left Minnesota After 50 Years”

Originally published by The Hill

After more than 50 years of calling Minnesota home, my husband Bill and I made the heart-wrenching decision to leave our beloved state for Florida in 2023. Our story is one of disillusionment with the changing political landscape and a quest for freedom in a state that aligns with our values.

For decades, we built our lives in Minnesota. We raised seven children, ran a successful small business, and even campaigned for State House. We weathered the gradual shift towards more liberal policies. But the events of 2020 became a tipping point.

Our state’s destructive COVID-19 policies, the handling of the George Floyd riots, and the state’s aggressive promotion of the transgenderism and alternative lifestyle agenda in public schools have made our once-beloved Minnesota unrecognizable to us.

Gov. Tim Walz’s (D) handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd riots opened our eyes to how drastically Minnesota had changed. The unnecessary and scientifically unproven mandates, the fearmongering and the waste of taxpayer money were alarming.

A prime example of this waste was the $6.9 million spent on a temporary morgue that was never used and which was later sold at a $1.25 million loss. This money could have been better spent providing Minnesotans with essential health resources.

Walz’s draconian school closures resulted in profoundly detrimental effects on our children’s education and mental health. Moreover, we’ve witnessed an increasing push for LGBTQ topics in public schools, often without parental consent or involvement.

For instance, the Minnesota Department of Education’s toolkit for ensuring safe and supportive schools for transgender and gender-nonconforming students has raised concerns among many parents about age-inappropriate content and parental rights. This toolkit and similar policies are clearly being driven by a very small group of ideologues. Anyone opposing such things is increasingly without a voice.

In a last-ditch effort to make a difference, I ran for the State House of Representatives in 2022. The defeat of nearly every Republican in the Minneapolis metro area made us realize that Minnesota was no longer a place for conservative, freedom-loving, pro-life middle-class individuals like ourselves. Our once “Minnesota nice” state had transformed into an ideologically driven bastion of leftist, tax-unfriendly, government-controlled policies.