Voters get lied to. That’s the premise of a new American Thinker column by Jay Tucker, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise. Campaigns, Tucker writes, routinely describe candidates in ways that are “often untrue or deceptive,” and most Americans say they want the truth about the people asking for their votes — right up until reality catches up with them.
The piece, published October 16, 2026, isn’t really a horse-race analysis. It’s a set of tests. Tucker argues that the candidates worth voting for are the ones who consistently tell the truth and who speak up when they see something unwise or illegal. The problem, in his telling, is that voters often don’t know the truth because they won’t spend the time to find it.
The Minnesota case study
To make the argument concrete, Tucker turns to Minnesota. He asks whether Sen. Amy Klobuchar — now running for governor — and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan — now running for the U.S. Senate — ever challenged either Biden administration immigration policy or the sanctuary policies of the Walz/Flanagan administration. His answer is blunt: no, they didn’t. Instead, he writes, they “marched along” as conditions deteriorated.
That silence, Tucker argues, is disqualifying. He invokes the Department of Homeland Security’s familiar public-awareness slogan — “If you see something, say something” — and notes that the directive and the duty to use common sense apply to everyone, not just officials whose districts happen to be affected. In his view, Klobuchar and Flanagan failed to say something “loudly, clearly, consistently, and attentively,” and that failure, he writes, insults the immigration legacies of John F. Kennedy and Minnesota’s own Hubert Humphrey.
Tucker reaches back into that history to bolster his point. He notes that Kennedy was concerned enough about immigration to write A Nation of Immigrants, expanded and republished after his death, and that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 barred communist immigration. Later amendments, he writes, continued to deny entry to applicants whose ideology conflicts with constitutional principles or who pose an unacceptable security risk. He cites Humphrey’s words on one anti-communist bill — that it was meant “to remove any doubt” about where Democrats and liberals stood on communism.
Fraud, warnings, and a committee report
From immigration, Tucker pivots to public fraud. He writes that voters nationwide are waking up to rampant fraud in government social welfare programs, and that some federal and state officials knew about so-called red flag warnings and did nothing. He points to TSA officials who have disclosed that suitcases stuffed with millions in cash were regularly found at airports and allowed onto flights bound for foreign countries — reports, he says, that were ignored until recently.
The centerpiece of this section is the Minnesota fraud story, which Tucker describes as an almost daily national headline. He quotes at length from the June 2026 Executive Summary of the Staff Report by the majority of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which said the committee launched its investigation in December 2025 into fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs. The report concluded that senior state officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, knew about widespread fraud in federally funded programs for years, had the authority to stop payments and ban fraudulent providers, and repeatedly failed to act. The result, per the report, was that billions in taxpayer dollars potentially went to fraudulent actors — funds the report says likely financed international terrorist networks — while vulnerable people were harmed and whistleblowers were ignored or retaliated against.
Tucker also highlights a passage from page 92 of the final report describing a recording of a meeting between Ellison — now running for re-election — and suspected fraudsters. In that recording, according to the report as quoted by Tucker, Ellison assures them, “Of course, I am here to help,” and says, “Let’s go fight these people” — referring, in Tucker’s reading, to the agencies investigating the fraud.
The cost of not speaking up
The column then ties the silence of Klobuchar, Flanagan, and other Democratic candidates to the May 2020 riots in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Tucker notes that the Walz/Flanagan administration confirmed property damage in Minnesota exceeded $500 million — a figure he translates into physical terms, saying the state lost triple the dollar value of its tallest building, the 57-story IDS Center.
Nationally, he cites one estimate that insured losses from the riots may reach or exceed $2 billion, which would make them the most expensive in U.S. history, before adding that uninsured losses would push the figure higher. He writes that many conclude the Walz/Flanagan failures delayed deployment of the Minnesota National Guard, contributing to much of the property loss, including the MPD 3rd Precinct building.
Another study, Tucker says, put the annual national cost of failing to enforce the law at $150.7 billion. To make that number tangible, he converts it using 2024 assessed valuations: roughly 900 IDS Centers, or an average of 18 such buildings per state every year. For voters worried about affordability, he writes, the causation isn’t hard to find.
The takeaway
The column ends where it began — with scrutiny. Investigating a candidate’s reality, Tucker argues, reveals whether that candidate and the people endorsing them can be trusted. Those who aren’t qualified, he concludes, should be eliminated from voter consideration, and he places the Minnesota candidates he named squarely in that category.
Whether readers accept Tucker’s conclusions or not, the underlying advice is hard to argue with: sort through the campaign messaging, and decide for yourself who has earned your vote. His final line is a reminder of what he thinks is at stake — the ability to speak our minds, which he calls crucial to the republic we cherish.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/who-is-worthy-of-your-vote/