Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz admitted he can sometimes be a “train wreck” because he speaks “from the heart.”
Walz told New York Magazine in an interview published Monday that the Democratic Party is too “timid.” The former vice presidential pick’s comments come as his party grapples with its brutal losses in the 2024 election cycle and struggles to rebuild its brand in a way that resonates with voters.
“I think we’re cautious by nature,” Walz told the outlet. “And look, I said this and I told the vice president, I said I know my strengths and weaknesses. I said about 90% of the time, I can be really good, but about 10% of the time, I can be a train wreck because I’m speaking from the heart, like a teacher sitting in a teachers lounge or a laborer sitting at the break table.”
“I thought they would choose the district attorney and the teacher over the hedge-fund manager and the billionaire,” Walz added.
The Minnesota governor also claimed the Democratic Party has not been “aspirational” enough in its approach to communicating with voters.
“I don’t — look, the folks who voted for Trump are going to vote for Trump,” Walz told the outlet. “My biggest concern are the folks who stayed home. And that goes back to this idea of what the Democratic Party is, who’s standing with us, and ‘Who do I identify more with?’ Maybe we’re not aspirational.”
“I heard this from someone who said, ‘With Democratic go-to messages, basically to Black men, these Democratic politicians led with ‘We restored felon voting rights,’ and the Black men said, ‘But we’re not felons, we’re MBAs looking for capital,’” Walz added. “The restoration of felon voting rights is important — I did that in Minnesota — but it’s not aspirational. With Donald Trump, everything’s gold plated and he’s hanging around with these stars, and I don’t know if we do enough of that.”
The former vice presidential nominee also claimed in the interview that former Vice President Kamala Harris did not get an opportunity to be “bold” during her failed presidential campaign.
“Well, I won’t critique the campaign,” Walz told the outlet. “They need to do what they need to do, but I don’t think Vice President Harris got to be bold. We were dealing with a short runway. That was that one election. I think it would be foolish for us to take a ton of lessons from that because this has been going on for several cycles, certainly since 2016, that we are really struggling to broaden our appeal and energize folks.”
Walz ran alongside Harris in their failed 2024 bid for the White House. Both have been floated as potential contenders in the 2028 presidential race, while the governor told The New Yorker in a March 2 interview that he’d consider launching a 2028 White House bid if the conditions and his “skill set” were right.
The left-wing governor is currently hosting a tour of town halls targeting voters in red districts across the U.S. He notably claimed during a March 27 town hall event that his party has gotten into its current “mess” because it let Republicans “define the issue” on key policies such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and immigration.
While a host of recent polls have shown that many voters disapprove of the Democratic Party and House Democrats’ leadership, several surveys have revealed that Americans largely approve of how President Donald Trump is handling his role as president thus far in his second term. Relatedly, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin wrote in a Feb. 18 memo that voters “now see the Republicans as the party of the working class and Democrats as the party of the elites.”
Walz’s office did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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