HELENA, Montana — Tim Walz thinks he and Kamala Harris played it too safe last year.
He thinks they should have held more town halls. He thinks they didn’t have time to get their feet under them. And he thinks Democrats should have taken more risks and gone to more places.
“We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe,” the Minnesota governor said in an interview with POLITICO before speaking to nearly 1,000 Democrats here at the Helena fairgrounds last weekend.
Walz said the campaign’s risk-averse approach was a byproduct of the brief, 107-day campaign, because “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.” But he said, “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.”
In his assessment, “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,’” Walz continued. “I think there could have been more of that.”
“We, as a party, are more cautious” in engaging the media, both mainstream and non-traditional, Walz said. And during the 2024 campaign, he said, “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 — who rocketed from little-known governor to veepstakes cable news darling to Harris’ 90-day sidekick — is stepping back onto the national political stage, returning to the TV and podcast circuit and promising to show up in House districts where Republicans won’t hold town halls. He was an imperfect candidate himself, including a weak debate performance. And his self-reflection on Democrats’ failure and the accompanying media blitz is partly self-serving: In addition to leaving the door open to a presidential campaign in 2028, Walz may run for governor again next year.
But it is also a candid gut-check of the Harris-Walz campaign at a moment when Democrats are still struggling to reorient to a second Donald Trump term and at a loss on how to approach 2026 and 2028.
Walz’s assessment of the campaign’s missteps — which he emphasized he also “own[s]” his part in because “when you’re on the ticket and you don’t win, that’s your responsibility” — was also one shared privately in interviews with more than a half-dozen former presidential campaign staffers, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly and many of whom lamented the vice president’s campaign schedule that had her avoiding unscripted moments with the press and voters late into the fall.
“He was underutilized and that was the symptom of the larger campaign of decision paralysis and decision logjam at the top,” said one former senior Harris aide. “Could he have changed a percent in Wisconsin? Maybe. We still lose even if we win Wisconsin.”
Even so, this aide added, Walz got put “in a box,” and “we didn’t use him the way we could’ve.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said he “wished they would’ve put him out there more” because “the world seemed to want more Tim Walz, and there were times when I wish they could’ve gotten more Tim Walz.”
Walz’s self reflection comes as the Democratic Party still sorts through the wreckage of its 2024 losses, without clear leadership or an agreed-upon explanation for its damaged brand. This week, congressional Democrats, locked out of power, were mocked by members of their own party for their scattershot response to Trump’s address to Congress. And even though Trump appears to be handing Democrats political cudgels on tariffs, Democrats are still searching for a unified counterattack.
His prescription for Democrats now and in the midterms, he said, is that Democrats “should be everywhere.” Recently, he’s appeared on primarily friendly outlets, like MSNBC and the South by Southwest stage on Saturday. He’ll be featured on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new podcast, where his interview has yet to air, and he recorded a podcast with The New Yorker’s David Remnick. But his post on X promising to show up at town halls in GOP districts, a Walz aide said, has generated a big response — hundreds of messages and phone calls from county party chairs and activists, hoping to bring him to town.
In Montana, where he addressed a crowd of Democrats at a state party dinner, Walz told them that there is “no charismatic leader who is coming to save us.”
Instead, he argued — speaking from a few pages of notes and ad-libbing much of his remarks, dropping the teleprompter that he frequently used on the presidential campaign trail — “our way back out of the wilderness is sitting at each and every one of these tables,” calling out the grassroots energy that has burbled up in town halls in recent weeks as the answer to Democrats’ malaise.
It’s a convenient posture for a candidate whose own political future is an open question. He’s still undecided on whether he will run for a third term as governor, though he did pass on the open Senate seat that retiring Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) opened up last month.
For now, his line on 2028 and a presidential run of his own is that he’s “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.”
Part of why Walz was picked for the running mate job centered on his strength as a communicator, several former staffers said. He parlayed a series of viral cable news hits — including coining the label for Republicans, “weird” — plus his moderate-coded profile and progressive governing record into a compelling pitch to be Harris’ running mate. But his visibility during the veepstakes made his weekslong disappearance from the media scene in August 2024 all the more obvious.
After he was selected in early August, Harris wasn’t yet doing interviews, and aides didn’t want Walz to get out ahead of her, several former campaign aides said. Harris and Walz would not appear together for their joint interview with CNN until three weeks later. Even into October, The Washington Post described him as a “surprisingly bubble-wrapped campaigner.”
“By the time they finally let him do anything at all, it’s like 20 days left, and he’s doing four states a day, and there’s only so much you could do,” a former Harris campaign staffer said. “It was too short.”
There were also efforts to curb some of his signature lines, including casting Trump and Republicans as “weird,” which slipped out of Walz’s speeches.
“He was encouraged to stop focusing on the ‘weird’ criticism,” said another former Harris aide. “I think it is fair to ask whether, even if ‘weird’ wasn’t quite right, his instinct about how to approach Trump, to make him seem small, and a huckster, wasn’t closer to correct than the more self-serious tone that may have made us sound too in defense of the status quo.”
A third former Harris staffer also echoed that Walz “wasn’t utilized the way he should’ve been,” and he “should’ve been used more like [then-Sen. JD] Vance was, who was everywhere all the time.”
But other former staffers argued that Walz, especially after his debate, did appear on a range of mainstream and non-traditional media. He played Madden on Twitch with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). He went pheasant hunting with Outside Magazine. He talked football with Rich Eisen, appeared on the “Smartless” and “We Can Do Hard Things” podcasts. He frequently called digital influencers during his traditional call time, usually reserved for donors and elected officials.
Walz also faced the national media’s scrutiny for the first time, which unearthed his own gaffes and misstatements. For example, he “misspoke” when he described handling weapons “in war,” the Harris campaign said at the time, as Republicans dug into his military record. He also “misspoke” when he misleadingly claimed he’d been in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
“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,” said a fourth former Harris staffer. “I don’t look back on that campaign and think that the way we used Walz was a critical error.”
A former elected official, also granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly, said that the governor “messed up, but was immediately up front about it,” referring to his past misstatements, adding that the Harris campaign “didn’t do enough to punch back” in Walz’s defense.
In a statement, a Harris adviser granted anonymity to speak candidly, said: “In the shortest presidential campaign in modern history, Vice President Harris and Governor Walz put forward a vision of the future that prioritized the health, safety and prosperity of the American people. She is proud to have chosen Governor Walz as her running mate and earned the vote of 75 million Americans.”
One of the toughest moments for Walz came ahead of the debate, according to several former campaign staffers, who described him as “in his own head” and “super nervous.” These staffers said there was a deep sense that Walz did not “want to let down the ticket” with his performance, a concern that he conveyed to Harris during his running mate interviews. Ultimately, the staffers saw Walz’s debate performance as net-neutral, but other Democrats were more critical.
“It looked as if Vance was the conductor and Walz was following the script,” said David Axelrod, a longtime Democratic strategist and a former top adviser to President Barack Obama’s campaigns. “I don’t think that was the reason they lost, but that was not helpful either.”
But Walz’s three-month trek through national politics didn’t put him off the experience, two people close to Walz said.
“To be able to travel the country and connect with so many people, he talks about it a lot,” one of those people, a Minnesota Democratic operative, said.
Back in Montana, the sense that the Harris-Walz campaign had left something on the table last year extended to those who watched him from the audience. Andrea Davis, the mayor of Missoula, said that “when I heard his speech at the DNC convention, I was like, ‘Where has this guy been?’”
For some in the crowd, who are already thinking ahead to 2028, of “the whole coterie of folks who might do it, I don’t see a better candidate than Walz,” said Raph Graybill, who ran for Montana lieutenant governor in 2024.
“You need people who are good on their feet, who know what they’re talking about, who don’t need a giant briefing book with a bunch of talking points to be able to say, ‘here’s how my values apply to this question,’” Graybill said. “What I really like about Tim Walz is that he’s that kind of guy.”
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