Summary
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has criticized the Harris-Walz 2024 presidential campaign for playing it too “safe,” saying they should have held more in-person events and town halls.
In a Politico interview, Walz—known for labeling Trump and Vance as “weird”—blamed their cautious approach partly on the abbreviated 107-day campaign timeline after Harris became the nominee in August.
Using football terminology, he said Democrats were in a “prevent defense” when “we never had anything to lose, because I don’t think we were ever ahead.”
While acknowledging his share of responsibility for the loss, Walz is returning to the national spotlight and didn’t rule out a 2028 presidential run, saying, “I’m not saying no.”
If by safe you mean ignoring your constituents and only listening to your wealthy contemporaries. Then yes you were too safe.
If you read the article, that’s EXACTLY what he means. They told him the reason for this is that they could avoid “Having any public gaffees”
The idea is that by just not being Trump they were “Ahead”, and any public misstep would put Trump in the lead.
Walz now believes he and Harris were “never ahead” and it was arrogance that lead to them thinking they were the “Default Choice” for America
Democrat politicians should level with you all. Politicians need a tremendous amount of money to stay viable. They can only answer you their donors and they get donors only if they can accomplish their goals which they do with the support of their constituents. They don’t just support their constituents out of feel good stuff. Republicans give them a free pass to do whatever they want. So they get lots of donors. The left groups do not do they don’t get donors. We’re fucked.
Look into how many call centers are around Washington. They’re all call centers for the different politicians. They’re calling donors 24/7 trying to get more funding. All the time. The Reason leftist do not get anywhere, we don’t generate money
Look into how many call centers are around Washington. They’re all call centers for the different politicians. They’re calling donors 24/7 trying to get more funding. All the time. The Reason leftist do not get anywhere, we don’t generate money
Well yeah, most of them refuse to take corporate money and SuperPAC donations. They don’t do insider trading when in office because they have consistent morals and ethics.
Also helps when they corporations who own the media refuse to cover you and your wins, and then pay for the milquetoast candidates who won’t tax them to win more.
The DNC is pretty much always playing it too safe…
People really need to accept that the Democratic Party is the conservative party in the US. The Republican Party is the nationalist, authoritarian party. The US does not have a major progressive party.
The democratic party is a coalition. It has wings that range from progressive to conservative. The reason they play it safe is because candidates need to be palatable to enough of the constituents to pass their primaries. This is also why local democratic parties are much more likely to have more cohesion.
I understand they need to have a broad appeal to different groups, moreso than republicans do, but they could easily achieve that same broad appeal by actually fighting for the working class and not doing things like steamrolling Bernie. The out of touch nature of current leadership is effectively neutering the party.
It would be a good thing long term for progressives to finally split from dems IMHO, though I wish we would have a ranked choice type system in place beforehand, but either way it needs to happen.
The reason they play it safe
Hows that working out?
They represent who votes for them.
Wanna change? Vote in the primaries. Hell, run in the primaries.
Wanna change? Vote in the primaries. Hell, run in the primaries.
Oof, got some bad news about those primaries…
No shit. I didn’t feel like I was voting for progressives. It left like I was voting for “not Trump.” You could have put a piece of corn-bread at the podium and I would have voted for it instead of Trump. But still. I didn’t vote for them because I just loved what they had to say… Because they weren’t for changing anything. They wanted to keep the status quo where it was. They were only listening to their wealthy donors. It was sad to watch.
What an absolute fucking champ-
While acknowledging his share of responsibility for the loss, Walz is returning to the national spotlight and didn’t rule out a 2028 presidential run, saying, “I’m not saying no.”
Both of those things are such music to my ears (although ofc we should all know that it was Harris’s brother-in-law Uber exec lawyer who muzzled Walz and deserves that blame that Walz is selflessly taking on here).
Sadly I’m not even sure the US will exist by 2028.
I agree, Walz, start being unsafe. Show us what we want to see in a candidate.
Or, ya know, actually BE what we what in a candidate.
IMO the problem is, they falsely assume everyone wants what the republicans are selling, and their biggest flaw is that they are pollarizing. That’s why they always start introducing as much republican lite things into their policies.
They don’t understand, that by doing that, they are effectively telling the american people that the republicans are right. IE say the republican party on immigration etc… is lock em up in the fastest way, forget about humanity and ship them out as fast as possible, fuck due process these people are dangerous and destroying everything.
Democrats: Well I can back you on making sure we get them out as soon as we can, but I think we can do it without human rights violations.
They don’t realize… that effectively to the outside observer going off of both of those policies they are hearing “both parties agree these people are dangerous and ruining everything, one wants to get rid of them as fast as possible, the other wants to prioritize us not hurting them over preventing them from harming us”.
Maybe they should have held primaries and let Americans choose who they wanted to be for the Democratic candidate. Harris was never going to win no matter how she campaigned.
Maybe they should have held primaries and let Americans choose who they wanted to be for the Democratic candidate.
“bUt YoU hAd OnE wItH bIdEn!! StOp MaKiNg ExCuSeS fOr YoU nOt VoTiNg!!”
If they had focused their campaign on helping the middle class, helping the poor, and acknowledged that Palestinians are people too, they would have a chance.
If they focused on environmental issues and the rights of individuals they would have had a chance.
If they had called Trump a criminal, because he is, at every stop, they would have had a chance.
If they did all of those things, and meant it, they would have won!
Instead they tried to appeal to business owners, Republicans who don’t like Trump, and people with money. That’s not what Democrats want. That’s not who Democrats are. That, is why they lost.
If they had focused their campaign on helping the middle class
I agree with most of that except this. They basically ONLY focused on the middle class. All the tax break incentives were great. But they never offered a damn thing for the working class. And that’s who they SHOULD have focused on.
That’s not who Democrats are.
unfortunately, yes, it is
“the middle class” does not exist, they should focus on helping the homeless, jobless and working class.
Not only that, but they stuck to the corporate response on nearly every single question. They almost never went off script and it was just so fucking obvious and robotic. And for me, Tim’s complete lack of consideration for truth and evidence on its face and in a vacuum was nothing less than trumpian. In RL, I lie about being an OIF Veteran. At first it was shame, guilt, and self destructive tendencies but I’ve been to a LOT of therapy and I’m living better. But during that time I realized that there were others who would speak a bit more “freely” about things they may have done. If they assume you know nothing about the military then they can say whatever they want. Hearing someone mince words about their service is fairly common and IMHO - innocuous. It’s a nothing burger of exaggeration. Had Tim just admitted what was clearly on video and just said, “I was using more colorful language to affect the crowd, my bad.” I would have honestly commended him.
Instead, they lied. About the most mundane shit imaginable.
This and/or healthcare for all, and it wouldnt have even been close, they would have won easily
if he’d stuck to calling them weird and attacking them, maybe it wouldn’t have been useless. but they dropped that, tried to buddy up with the fascists, and brought on insane endorsements like fucking liz cheney.
if they’d run sanders/walz, even late after biden convinced even party leadership that he couldn’t win, they would have crushed that shit with historic numbers.
if they had let a palestinian talk, or given the most mild ‘please tone down the genocide shit’ they might’ve had a chance.
it was like they were trying to lose at every step. truly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
They should have stuck with the “they’re weird”. And they definitely shouldn’t have tried courting Republican voters. All that yielded was pushing away Dem voters and Republican voters aren’t going to vote for Dems, they will just not show up for Trump. They shouldn’t have constantly called them a danger and threat because we’ve been saying that for years, and at some point people stop listening. Instead, they should have leaned into the “they’re weird” and the weird things they want to do. Making them sound like an existential threat, even if they are, just sounds like someone yelling the sky is falling, and people ignore it. But we’ve already seen how they can’t handle being mocked. So mock them. Belittle them, make them out to be the buffoons they are.
One problem the DNC has is that they keep throwing boring ass lawyers into a game that isn’t about law. It’s about being a face the country knows to run the government.
You need charisma, you need to appeal to people, and you need to be human. Obama did this perfectly. Bill Clinton had it in him. Biden at least had such a long record in politics he could wing it his first term. I don’t know how he managed to win, but he did.
Clinton, while being a lawyer, had already been the governor of Arkansas. Meaning he had the experience being that executive. He could convince people to work beyond their own interests. Al Gore, we all know, won the 2000 presidential election, but the supreme court let everything get fucked up.
Kerry? Never stood a chance. Hilary? No chance. Kamala? As much as we needed her to win, she was unappealing to stupid people.
Lawyers, by nature of their career, have to read and understand the most boring ass shit and then convince others that the boring ass text supports their side of the case. That means a lot of them are boring people.
You wanna know why Walz is popular? He fucking loves football. He can connect to highschool students. IDK about you, but if you’ve ever met high schoolers, they aren’t the brightest, and bored easily. He’s progressive, but he won’t shove it in someone’s face to be more righteous. Not many people can do that.
To win an election, you have to excite people. Trump, despite his rhetoric clearly being terrifying, was, unfortunately, exciting.
Obama covered both lawyer and entertaining. He also had an appeal similar to Reagan, confident and comforting during uncertain times. The conservative media made politics entertaining, now we have entertainers as politicians and I can’t get on board with that
It’s not something we are going to change anytime soon. Far too many people to change to counter that.
Instead, we need candidates like Walz, who have a brain on their shoulders, and have a way to excite outside of putting on a show.
Bernie Sanders was another example of it. AoC is as well.
I mean, I agree with you, but this is also a huge problem. This is why you have someone who pretended to be a successful businessman on TV as a president now. I really miss the days when boring but competent people could run a country.
It’s far easier to have a better candidate than change how 80 million people think.
Is this a problem of how people think, or is it a problem of what sells views in newspapers (and that media companies are too rich)?
Boring yet competent people don’t get elected in a country with mass media. They just don’t get coverage, so people don’t know they’re there.
As example, look at the first televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon. Kennedy was young and inexperienced, but let them put makeup on him for the debate. Nixon had more experience but looked like a sweaty mess on TV. This helped Kennedy a lot.
Biden won because he wasn’t trump. Simple as that.
This is pretty much all true. Except for…
One problem the DNC has is that they keep throwing boring ass lawyers into a game that isn’t about law
The DNC wasn’t making the decisions. The Harris campaign was.
Kerry? Never stood a chance. Hilary? No chance. Kamala? As much as we needed her to win, she was unappealing to stupid people.
Somewhat true. But Hillary could have won if she had simply mixed in a few bearded Biker types in the background crowd as prominently as all the Muslim women. But these candidates were the mistakes of the voters, not the DNC.
To win an election, you have to excite people. Trump, despite his rhetoric clearly being terrifying, was, unfortunately, exciting.
I change the channel whenever Traitorapist Trump talks so that he never gets a full sentence out. Still do. I don’t want to hear one more lie.
But you and I aren’t the person Trump is trying to excite.
It’s the 25% of Americans that equate critical thought with torture. That is the chunk of people you can’t reason with. So you have to have a way for them to care at all. Unloading garbage nonsense that has the occasional inflammatory rhetoric is exciting.
Talking about football? Not exciting to me, but these 25% of Americans? You better bet your ass they like it. They like beer and they like the idea of not having to worry about finances as well.
Unloading garbage nonsense that has the occasional inflammatory rhetoric is exciting.
Oh I agree that the #1 problem is that Harris needed to use way more aggressive rhetoric against Traitorapist Trump.
They should have leaned left harder instead of engaging in a futile attempt to sway conservatives.
Part of the problem was not saying the word Fascist enough
And the Dems are, mostly, still too safe. They need to start fighting while they still have a chance of stopping the insanity.
Step 1: Schumer needs to step down.
But they wore pink shirts and held up tiny auction bid signs!
Not all of them.
True! Just the wild and crazy ones!
The “radical left,” per FOX “News,” ladies and gentlemen.
Not just Chuck but the whole leadership of the Democrat party needs to go.
The entire party needs to go. Let it burn and be replaced by a workers party that represents us.
Let it burn and be replaced by a workers party that represents us.
That went horribly wrong in Russia. It turned out Lenin and Stalin didn’t represent anybody besides themselves. And their main targets weren’t people on the right, it was the other 2 socialist parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks.
Liberals know as much about communism, and workers rights as Republicans. None
While I agree, here’s what I worry about. Even if the leadership is replaced, the culture of the Democrats is to listen to consultants, voter panels etc. It’s commendable to take voters wishes into account, but what most voters want is a leader, not a listener.
Example: during the campaign voter panels talked about inflation and immigration whereas healthcare was ranked at the bottom. Therefore Democrats did not talk about healthcare.
But this is really a chicken and egg story. If nobody talks about healthcare, voters feel that healthcare is not on the ballot, and so they won’t mention the topic in voter panels. Luigi showed (once again) that healthcare in the US is fucked and that many people in fact care deeply about the topic. I am almost sure that Harris would have done better had she made healthcare the central issue of her campaign. The moral is that as long as Democrats are following, rather than leading, they will continue to lose elections.
They need to lead, but they also need to not just be reactionary. They should absolutely listen to what us voters are saying. But they should also be looking at the overall situation, and trying to understand why voters are not super stoked about how things are going instead of insisting “the economy is fine”. And then, maybe, I dunno, do some real, honest root cause analysis, and come up with some fucking creative solutions.
And by “they”, I mean the congresspersons themselves. Not an intern. Not a consultant. Not a lobbyist. The person who was elected. Do the work. Do your fucking job.
Step 2: pelosi needs to retire.
Reducing Democrats in Congress is the opposite of progress. We should be recalling Republican congresspeople that don’t represent their constituents, or we’ll be waiting until November 2026 for our next chance to flip seats.
https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/recall-of-state-officials
People vote for Republicans because if you think Democrats are never going to do anything to help you, you might as well vote for the party that will lower your taxes. There’s real problems with that logic, but it is true that Dems put serving corporations ahead of serving the people.
Trump and the GOP raised taxes on most middle class income groups in 2017, according to the official congressional JCT analysis.
We’re talking politics, not objective reality.
Still playing safe? They’re playing it even safer than before, and they have even less to lose. I don’t understand what they don’t get. They need to go on offense. Now is the time for it if ever. They literally have no power, so just make noise and make sure everything happening is loud and people know who’s doing it.
The dem leadership is absolutely too safe. The only ones saying what should be said are the ones that have no power.
Step 2: ditto Jeffries
Step 3: AOC and Bernie need to take their place.
They were too far right. They pursued the “moderate republican” vote and lost spectacularly.
It is a politically suicidal idea. But they just can’t stop themselves. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is what they do best.
That was what they thought the “safe” thing to do was. “Decorum” and “reaching across the isle”. All that “when they go low, we go high!” shit, in the face of actual Nazis.
More like “when they get votes, we go bye”
Democrats think they’re in a fairy tale, still asleep having the American dream. It’s all offices with rich histories and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades in their world. Their campaign donors are “good proud American businessmen (and WOMEN!) who show the world that evil communism isn’t the answer and only centrist cooperation can achieve freedom!”
It’s why they thought they’re could win by having a brat summer. They thought “we’re clearly the good guys, the ones who like civil rights, hell we’re running a half black, half Indian woman!”
And now that they fucking lost their answer is “wear pink and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ on the house floor” when the ONLY ONE OF THEM to stand up to Trump, in the most minor of ways mind you, is censured - and fucking 10 OF THEM VOTED FOR IT! YOU WEAK, INEFFECTUAL ASSHOLES!
Decorum and traditional norms will not save you now. Get out and speak truth to power. Shit all over them on the news. EASY QUOTES THAT GO VIRAL. Vote as a bloc against everything they try to do. Filibuster, stall, use procedure against then whenever you can. BE FUCKING BULLIES for your cause, because they sure as shit have been doing it to you for 50 FUCKING YEARS. The SAME GODDAMN GUY WITH NIXON is running around dressed like a CARTOON VILLAIN who ties women to train tracks and is still RATFUCKING YOU
god DAMMIT if I’d have known that the majority of adults in this world were so goddamn stupid I’d have made much different decisions in my life
You mean touting the endorsement of war criminal Dick Cheney wasn’t a good thing?
Could have even been worse, they could have made his daughter the vp pick
No excuse for the DNC, but I think seeking the “moderate Republicans” is a condition of their big donors. Every time the Democrats lose, since Reagan won, they move right because they think they lost because they weren’t conservative enough. And despite all polling that suggests otherwise, they keep doing it.
In general, they would get more money and power if they won, so why do they keep shooting themselves in the foot every fucking time? In my mind, even if you factor in that they don’t give a shit about the common people and are motivated by money, it only makes sense if they are being manipulated by their big donors to do this stupid shit.
They get far more money being the foil of leftist movements by making themselves the only option for anything less far right than the conservatives and then paying lip service to the left while continuing to support moderate conservative policy.
Every time the Democrats lose, since Reagan won, they move right because they think they lost because they weren’t conservative enough.
That was true thru Obama but it stopped with Biden. Biden was the most progressive president since LBJ, even though Dem voters could have chosen even more progressive candidates.
Harris’s husband and brother in law steered Harris right into defeat. She shouldnt have trusted a word those two idiots said.
See that’s funny because every single left leaning moderate I know (including myself) thinks they were/are way too left and they need to “come back towards center” so to speak.
For people even sorta in the middle both parties appear to be playing a game where they sprint as fast as they can towards extremism and most people aren’t down with that.
They don’t need to try and court moderate Republicans. They need to gain back the moderate lefties they lost over the last 10+ years.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/24/politics/democratic-party-left-liberal-q-poll/index.html
I know that Lemmy has very different views on the topic, but you guys are the extreme left. So of course you find the Democrats trying to go back towards getting moderate vote again as the “wrong move”. Unfortunately you guys (I am speaking broadly at the general political leanings of Lemmy I know you guys arent all far left) are the minority of the total political spectrum these days.
Hey I’m curious, what do you think about the Democrats is “too far left”? Like actual policies because the article you linked lists 4 positions that aren’t a part of the parties platform and never have been.
I was really curious. Hopefully they will come back.
They did and are refusing to answer. They’re just a conservative that’s larping as a Democrat for internet points.
If you’re a ‘left leaning moderate’ that thinks the democrats are too left, you’re right-wing. The democratic party in the US is a center-right party.
My political stances didn’t change. I was firmly left in ~2012 and now you guys call me right wing. Who moved?
You do know the American political compass is special among political compasses, right? Compared to Europe (or even Canada), our definition of “moderate” is their equivalent of “conservative”. Likewise, our “left” is “center”.
Wishing the already-not-left Democratic Party starts shifting even more right is wishing for a two-party system where the options are conservatism and fascism.
I’m not talking about a global scale. I’m just talking about the US and how those terms are used here.
I’m not touching that broader conversation about political scales globally.
Here in the US both parties have been running in opposite directions and in most people’s eyes the left has been running faster. Hence the article. One of many that found similar data when polling americans. Most Americans are somewhere in the middle and that is crux of the issue.
Yeah, no.
The only thing that has shifted left in the Democratic Party is the public’s perception of them. They intentionally fuck over actual leftists (aka progressives) within their party while offering up milquetoast policies that look progressive on paper but are either completely toothless or designed to benefit to their corporate lobbyists first and foremost.
They’re a conservative party who used rainbow capitalism to masquerade as the comparatively left-wing alternative to the Republican Party. The reality is that every election cycle in the past two decades, they’re promising more “liberal” ideas while acting more conservative. Do you know who had a record number of deportations under their administration? It’s not Trump. It’s not Obama. It’s Biden.
Anybody that thinks the Democratic Party is sliding any direction other than right is either right-wing and arguing in bad faith, an anti-“woke” moron like Elon Musk, or consuming too much Fox News.
