Months after a disastrous election cycle for Democrats and as the party is still searching for a new message to try and sway voters, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) is coming to grips with the Harris-Walz campaign’s failures, lamenting how cautious they were in engaging with the media and urging a grassroots approach in the future.
In an interview with Politico, Walz suggested that while the Harris campaign’s strategy of largely shying away from the media may have been because of how little time they had after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race fourth months before the election, they “should have just rolled the dice and done the town halls.”
“We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe,” he said, adding, “I think we probably should have just rolled the dice and done the town halls, where [voters] may say, ‘You’re full of s***, I don’t believe in you.’ I think there could have been more of that.”
The Minnesota governor also said that while the Democratic Party is more “cautious” in how they engage with the press, they should have abandoned this approach since “I don’t think we were ever ahead.”
“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 said.
However, while some former Harris aides agreed with Walz’s assessment and said the campaign put him “in a box” and “didn’t use him the way we could’ve,” other staffers were critical of the media appearances he did make, most notably on the vice presidential debate stage where he stumbled throughout and botched questions about his travel to China.
“This was a guy who definitely was embarrassed by his flubs, didn’t handle them well, and seemed like there was a never-ending supply of them, so that was part of the issue of getting him out there everywhere,” a former Harris staffer said. “I don’t look back on that campaign and think that the way we used Walz was a critical error.”
Former Harris-Walz campaign staffers also revealed that ahead of the debate with now-Vice President JD Vance, Walz was “in his own head,” “super nervous,” and didn’t “want to let down the ticket.”
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Walz’s assessment of what went wrong for Democrats in 2024 comes as he is weighing a presidential run of his own in 2028. Speaking on that speculation, he told Politico he’s “not saying no” in terms of a run for president.
“I’m staying on the playing field to try and help because we have to win. And I will always say this, I will do everything in my power, and as I said, with the vice presidency, if that was me, then I’ll do the job,” Walz added.
