Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on why he lost in 2024, Joe Rogan and how Democrats should respond to Trump

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told a crowd of Democrats in Wisconsin on Tuesday night that he doesn’t have all the answers.

But in a town-hall-style meeting — Walz’s third in five days — he still spent more than an hour attempting to address questions and concerns from about 900 participants, who showed up to ask about everything from health care benefits and the federal workforce to what can Democrats do now that they’ve lost power in Washington, D.C.

The second-term governor and former vice presidential nominee is positioning himself as a voice for the Democratic Party during the second Trump administration, and he hasn’t ruled out a run for president himself in 2028.

“We have to take this like you do cleaning the house or whatever, one chunk at a time,” Walz said.

Here are edited excerpts of his responses to questions from reporters and attendees at the town hall:

“I’m not going to whistle past the graveyard and tell you things are fine. ... I’m also having the most unsatisfactory ‘I told you so’ tour in the history of the world.”

“I think they want somebody to accept responsibility, and look, I was part of a team. I’m not second-guessing anybody. I’m stating the obvious, we didn’t win.”

“I don’t need to be on the ticket but what I do need to be a part of is helping to win this. ... I was on that ticket for a reason and I think it still resonates. And I think the Democratic Party is doing some soul searching here. I don’t think we’ve delivered our policies in a way that’s aggressive enough.”

“I’m probably the guy in America to be talking to because I was kind of on the ticket to be that guy [who could talk to working-class voters] and we weren’t able to do it in all those places. … Trump creates a sense of community, a sense of something around him. Whether it’s good, bad, it’s there.”

“I think there are some concrete things we can do, tell our history right, focus on labor unions, improve the middle class, pass legislation that strengthens Social Security and Medicaid, honor public servants that are doing the work and that starts to have an impact.”

“I don’t think we would have won if we’d gone on Joe Rogan, but we probably wouldn’t have gotten beat any worse.”

“I’ve been advocating a shadow government type of thing. Every day there’s a press conference opposite them. How in God’s name, Wisconsin, did we let Sean Duffy off the hook for planes crashing? How? We need to have shadow secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is actually smart and does his job.”

“Recruit the linguists, recruit the folks that understand this. … In the last couple weeks of the election I was in Pennsylvania and North Carolina and in the countryside I saw a sign that was split in half: ‘Trump good, Kamala bad. Trump safety, Kamala, crime.’ I said, ‘Jesus, are we first-graders, what the hell?’ It worked. It worked. They did it. They made it simple.”