'Little surprised': Tim Walz delivers his first remarks after Kamala Harris's election loss to Donald Trump

In his first television interview after the results of the US Elections, Minnesota Governor and Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in the 2024 race Tim Walz said that he was “a little surprised” by the results of the November 5 polls. He claimed that the support they were receiving during rallies didn’t make him feel like Harris would lose the battle to President-elect Donald Trump.

“It felt like at the rallies, at the things I was going to, the shops I was going in, that the momentum was going our way,” the Minnesota governor told KSTP, one of his state’s news outlets, in an interview published on Thursday. So, yeah, I was a little surprised. I thought we had a positive message, and I thought the country was ready for that," he added.

Walz insisted that “history will write” if Harris made a mistake choosing him as the running mate before Trump and Ohio Senator JD Vance clinched the victory. “Are there things you could have done differently? Since we lost, the answer is obviously yes,” Walz remarked. “On this one, I did the best I could," he added.

Walz recalls the morning he received the news

During the interview, Walz recalled the “frantic” morning he received the news that he would be Harris’s VP pick for the 2024 presidential race. He mentioned that the vice president called him on August 6, asking him to serve as her second in command if she were to be elected.

He also shared a humorous moment with Harris when they went to Philadelphia to attend their first rally together at Temple University. “She turns to me and she says: ‘Well, let’s not screw this up,’” Walz recalled. “And we went out there.” Walz’s nomination initially generated solid buzz for the Democratic party with his midwestern, former high school football coach persona charming the country.

He also garnered a lot of attention when he perturbed Trump by labelling him and his allies as “weird”. However, Walz’s popularity and presence soon started to fade in the Harris campaign after the VP adopted more conventional strategies in the final phase of the presidential race.

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Ultimately, Harris ended up losing the electoral college to Trump by a 312-226 margin. She also lost the popular vote against the Republican firebrand. While looking back at his performance in the race, Walz said that he “certainly got to see America’ during his failed run. However, he insisted that he is now prepared to focus on his state of Minnesota. “It was a privilege to do that,” Walz said. “Coming back here now and having the privilege to do this work feels really good,” he concluded.