Walz admits he & Harris played 'too safe' during 2024 presidential campaign against Trump

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who was the running mate of former US Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 US presidential elections, said that the duo was “too safe” during the race. In an interview with Politico, Walz emphasised that Democrats should learn from US President Donald Trump’s win to come back stronger in the 2028 polls.

“We shouldn’t have been playing this thing so safe,” the Minnesota Governor told Politico, emphasising that they should have held more in-person events around the US. During the initial stages of Harris’s campaign, Walz was seen as one of the Democratic Party’s most effective messengers against Trump and Vance in 2024. He was best known for his frequent description of the Republican firebrands as “weird”.

While speaking about the election loss , Walz noted that he and Harris were also hampered by the shortened length of their campaign. It is pertinent to note that Harris effectively became the official Democratic party nominee on August 5 , just three months before the elections. The first female Vice President was put to the forefront after former US President Joe Biden quit his re-election bid following concerns over his old age and mental acuity.

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Walz laments the abbreviated time frame

During his conversation with Politico, Walz emphasised that the short time frame also limited the number 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. “[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," he added.

The Minnesota governor ultimately said that 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.”

He said that one lesson Democrats can learn from the election loss is that the party should be “more cautious” in regard to engaging with mainstream and non-traditional media. “In football parlance, we were in a prevent defence [a strategy whereby a team focuses on a gritty defence, rather than attacking], to not lose – when we never had anything to lose, because I don’t think we were ever ahead," he said.

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The duo lost to Trump by 312 electoral college votes to 226. They lost the national vote by about 1.5 per cent votes. Meanwhile, Republicans managed to win both houses of Congress, giving Trump the trifecta he has been desiring for years. Walz admitted that 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”.

When asked whether the former high school football coach would take part in the 2028 Democratic primary race, Walz said that 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.”