Former vice-presidential candidate claims pair should have held more in-person events around the US
Tim Walz has said that he and Kamala Harris were too “safe” during their 2024 election campaign, with the former vice-presidential candidate claiming they should have held more in-person events around the US.
“We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe,” Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in an interview with Politico, as Democrats seek to learn the lessons of Donald Trump’s win in November, which has sent the party into the political wilderness.
Walz, who was widely seen as one of the Democratic party’s most effective messengers against Trump and Vance in 2024, becoming best-known for his frequent description of the pair as “weird”, also said he and Harris had been hampered by the shortened length of their campaign.
Harris effectively became the official Democratic party nominee on 5 August, just three months before the election, and Walz said that the abbreviated time frame limited the amount of risks the campaign was able to take.
“These are things you might have been able to get your sea legs, if you will, 18 months out, where the stakes were a lot lower,” Walz said.
He added: “[But] after you lose, you have to go back and assess where everything was at, and I think that is one area, that is one area we should think about.”
Walz’s verdict was that he and Harris should have spent more time directly engaging with Americans, as they sprinted through their 107-day campaign.
“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,’” he told Politico. “I think there could have been more of that.”
Walz has been returning to the national spotlight of late, conducting more TV appearances and last week headlining a fundraising event in front of 1,000 Democrats in his home state. His use of social media, and folksy appearances in TV interviews, were praised during the early party of the 2024 campaign, and Walz suggested he and Harris could have done more.
He told Politico that Democrats “as a party are more cautious” in engaging with mainstream and non-traditional media. The former high school football coach added: “In football parlance, we were in a prevent defense [a strategy whereby a team focuses on a gritty defense, rather than attacking], to not lose – when we never had anything to lose, because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”
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Harris and Walz lost to Trump by 312 electoral college votes to 226, losing in the national vote by about 1.5%. Republicans also won both houses of Congress. Walz said he bears some of the blame for the loss, because “when you’re on the ticket and you don’t win, that’s your responsibility”.
The 2028 Democratic presidential primary is expected to be extremely crowded, with Democrats boasting several high-profile governors, and Walz, who is yet to decide whether he will run for a third term as Minnesota governor, was coy about whether he would run, telling Politico he was “not saying no”.
“I’m staying on the playing field to try and help because we have to win,” Walz said. “And 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.”
