Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) is reflecting on his and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in last year’s presidential election, and he said he thinks Democrats should have been bolder in their campaign to hold onto the White House.
“We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe,” Walz, 60, told Politico in a recent interview from Montana. “I think we probably should have just rolled the dice and done the town halls, where [voters] may say, ‘You’re full of shit, I don’t believe in you.” … I think there could have been more of that.”
Walz, who was a member of Congress before he became governor in 2019, was tapped to become Harris’s 2024 running mate in August — just two weeks into an accelerated campaign overhaul that followed then-President Biden’s decision to drop out of the race. Harris, with Biden’s backing, quickly moved to the top of the ticket with fewer than four months to campaign, becoming the first Black woman to run as a major party’s presidential nominee.
“In football parlance, we were in a prevent defense to not lose when we never had anything to lose because I don’t think we were ever ahead,” Walz, a former high school football coach, said.
In a previous interview — his first after their loss, Walz told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow he was still “soul-searching.”
He hasn’t ruled out a potential top-of-ticket presidential campaign in the future and reiterated what he told The New Yorker in an interview last week.
“I will always say this, I will do everything in my power [to help], and as I said, with the vice presidency, if that was me, then I’ll do the job,” Walz told Politico.
He also is leaving the door open to a third gubernatorial term in Minnesota next year, but he won’t seek an opening U.S. Senate seat.
He’s been making the rounds on cable television, podcasts and other media outlets to discuss his and the party’s future after President Trump’s return to the White House and the sweeping changes the new administration has made to international policy and the federal workforce.
“I’m staying on the playing field to try and help because we have to win,” Walz said.
Walz acknowledged his role in the Democrats’ loss last year.
“When you’re on the ticket and you don’t win, that’s your responsibility,” he said.
But other Democrats close to the campaign lamented that Walz didn’t have a chance for a bigger role.
“He was underutilized and that was the symptom of the larger campaign of decision paralysis and decision logjam at the top,” one former senior Harris aide told Politico.
Democratic critics at the time accused Harris of picking a “safe” option in Walz, who was not widely known, was from the Midwest and had displayed a folksy, pithy public persona as a campaign surrogate. But his specific critique in the Politico piece is that Democrats were trying to.
But Walz has called the experience “the honor and privilege of my life” and continues to address the Democratic Party’s future.
With a concerted effort among Republicans to avoid town hall meetings and backlash from the threat of deep cuts to federal programs in the Trump administration, the Minnesota governor has offered to hold sessions with their constituents.
“If your Republican representative won’t meet with you because their agenda is so unpopular, maybe a Democrat will,” Walz said in a post on the social platform X last week. “Hell, maybe I will.”
_________
THE HILL
