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.
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 shyt, 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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
Great article