In an interview with Vox at SXSW in Austin earlier this week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reflected on his time during the presidential campaign as former Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate.
When asked if there was one thing he wish he could take back or do over, he responded: “I think I would have taken back getting myself sucked into the conversation around what was happening in Springfield, Ohio. It so struck me, like, reprehensible that they were saying this about people that I was in like a three- or four-day debate, making my case that this is not happening in Springfield, Ohio.”
He added: “Every time I was saying that we were talking about Springfield, Ohio, and immigration — we weren’t talking about other things that mattered to people. And I went down that line trying to do, I think morally the right thing.”
On President Donald Trump, he said he believes the commander-in-chief has mastered how to flood the zone “to the point where you don’t get to make your point. And it doesn’t matter if it was eating dogs and cats, because it was immigration and people were uncomfortable with immigration. And so I would, I would do that differently.”
Walz was then asked what he believes the Biden administration could have done differently for the American people. For context, the interviewer, say perhaps one of Harris’ biggest blunder was when she appeared on The View and said she would not change a single thing the Biden Administration was doing at the time.
“Yeah, he should have been out there telling us that inflation was real,” Walz said. “And this hurt. In retrospect, I think there should have been talk about sending, especially in the summer of ’23, potentially sending stimulus checks to folks to try and counter some of that and making it clear that we were fighting for them.”
He further stated that Americans always seem to resist the idea of change, but it was a change election, adding that it was happening globally, and America needed to be part of that shift.
Harris’ statement, he said, more than anything, reflected the reality that while the administration accomplished a lot and had a strong economy, it didn’t mean much to someone struggling to pay rent.
That said, he continued, to be fair to the vice president, if he had been in that position, he might have said the same thing. But as Democrats, he believes they need to do some serious soul-searching. It’s okay to criticize the people we support – actually, it’s necessary, he believes.
