Eau Claire, Wisconsin
CNN
—
Backstage in a dressing room drinking a can of diet Mountain Dew as 900 people filled a theater in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on Tuesday night, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he wouldn’t be there if not for “the void.”
The void is deep for Walz, who only in the last few weeks has begun to publicly address his and Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss with what he called “the most unsatisfying ‘I Told You So’ tour in the history of politics.” He says too many Democratic leaders are still not truly grappling with how bad things are politically for them, what he believes is President Donald Trump’s march toward authoritarianism or the anger and frustration at both parties building across the country.
“Our leadership’s not going to be the charismatic DC leader or whatever. It’s going to be the person who’s reading the room the best of where these people are at,” Walz told CNN.
As many Democratic voters have moved since November from dejection, to panic, to curdling anger at party leaders who haven’t come up with a better way of fighting back, Walz’s answer is a tour of Republican House districts to listen to stories of desperation, call on Democrats to lay out a policy agenda with clearer direct benefits for voters and try to build a new sense of community that he says he hadn’t realized his party had lost so much.
Walz has not made a final decision on running for a third term as governor next year, though he feels compelled to, if only to push back on Trump. And while he said he’d feel “a sense of allegiance” to back Harris if she ran for president again in 2028, he tensed up a little as he answered, saying he didn’t think the question was quite fair. He has deflected 2028 talk of his own, saying things like he thinks the next Democratic nominee should be young enough to have hair, but people who’ve spoken to him acknowledge that running is not completely out of the question in his unexpected political journey.
That speculation is less important to him than addressing the reality of Trump.
“It’s going to get very dark,” Walz said, running through speculation that ranged from Trump soon ordering the arrest of a political opponent to trying to anoint a son as his successor in the White House.
While the administration denies it defied a judge’s order halting deportation flights to El Salvador over the weekend, the episode is proof to Walz that judges are set to be ignored and impeached going forward. Tuesday’s statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuking the president’s rhetoric on impeaching judges, without naming Trump, tells Walz that Roberts is also “scared of where things are going.”
“I’m a pretty low-key, middle of the road guy on this stuff. And I’m telling you, this is real,” Walz said. “My one skill set is to see over the horizon a little bit of what’s coming, and this is what’s coming.”
Walz was in Wisconsin not just because GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden isn’t holding town halls himself, which the governor says is proof the congressman can’t defend Trump’s actions, but because the state has a state Supreme Court election on April 1.
Both parties have rushed to nationalize the race to determine the majority make-up of the bench – the Republican posing with a giant inflatable Trump balloon over the weekend and promising to be part of the backlash to judicial pushback on Trump, the Democrats running ads featuring Trump and Elon Musk (who’s spending millions of his own money on the race) with a chainsaw.
If Democrats win in Wisconsin and then in the Virginia governor’s race in November, Walz claimed, Trump’s power will begin to erode as Republicans distance themselves. How that will happen when Trump is barely into a four-year term and already exerting executive power in unprecedented ways, and how Democrats keep their spirits up when even their chance at getting more power in the midterms is 18 months away, Walz is not sure.
“I don’t think there’s any limit to where he goes. The limit will be what the American public will put up with and when they push back,” Walz said. “This has happened everywhere when these authoritarians have come in. One day it looks like they’re absolutely infallible and in total power, and the next day they and their entire families are gone.”
What Walz is sure of is that Democrats who are counting on Trump overreaching or the pendulum just swinging back are delusional – and that it’s not enough from the Democratic leaders basing their pitches around saying that what Trump is doing is not why people voted for him or that prices still haven’t gone down.
“They’re missing the people who stayed home that don’t see us as any different. And I think just saying ‘Trump did all that,’ I don’t know if that necessarily helps us,” Walz said.
Walz says he’s also sure that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer didn’t measure up with the way he handled last week’s spending fight.
Though he wouldn’t answer if he has faith in the Senate minority leader going forward, Walz dismissed Schumer’s talking point that he knows what to do because he’s won Senate races before, including during the first Trump term.
“There’s a danger – and I would argue I did it maybe during the campaign – of fighting the last battle instead of the next one,” Walz said. “This is a whole different opponent fighting a whole different battle. And all of our past history that tells us how we should have approached this, I don’t think holds true.”
The House GOP campaign arm taunting Walz ahead of his Eau Claire stop and Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita challenging him to a fight on X aren’t the only skeptics.
Several Democratic operatives associated with candidates who did better than the presidential ticket last year told CNN they are annoyed and confused by Walz’s assessment that most Trump 2024 voters are lost causes for Democrats. Some feel the same way about his tour, arguing that he’s bringing a kind of politics that didn’t work and is already of the past to parts of the country where Democrats are only going to win by creating distance.
But in a measure of how much even disgruntled Democrats still personally like Walz, several told CNN they didn’t want to go public with those concerns.
“Progressive donors and consultants loved the Coach Walz persona, but it didn’t actually land with the rural voters and men it was designed to win over. I think it looked like a performance trying to distract from the Biden record he and Harris never distanced themselves from,” one House Democrat who won in a district Trump carried told CNN. “There were Democrats who won over Trump voters to win their races and will again in the future, but Tim, it’s time for you to go home. This red district tourism is giving all the wrong signals to the voters you lost.”
Rebecca Cooke, the top Democratic prospect who has already announced a repeat run against Van Orden for next year, did not attend Tuesday’s event in her district.
But a Walz advisor told CNN that the governor has already received over 1,000 invitations for more appearances.
Only two Harris-Walz camo hunter’s caps, which the campaign had been so proud to unveil the night he was picked for the ticket, were visible in the crowd in Wisconsin.
Four-and-a-half months after he came within about 230,000 votes in three battleground states of being elected vice president, Walz doesn’t even have a super PAC to handle logistics or costs, leaving aides on their off hours coordinating with staff at state parties for what he’ll be doing and where.
As much as clips of Walz’s best quips so far have raced around dejected Democrats – one from Eau Claire where he said he’d added Tesla to the stock market app on his iPhone so he could get “a little boost” from watching the share price go down (he also suggested owners pulling the ‘T’ emblems off with dental floss), drawing an almost immediate response from Musk on X – there is no greater plan in play. Hundreds of people are showing up to see him at each stop, with several telling CNN after he finished in Eau Claire that their impression of him had improved, but he isn’t even taking down their contact information, as most politicians who are keeping their options open tend to do.
Part of the story of the 2024 campaign is how Harris picked Walz in large part for how much she liked his public demeanor, then because the new people around her running the campaign worried he’d overshadow her, that guy effectively disappeared.
But it’s the pre-running mate Walz who has been showing up at these town halls, ripping Musk as “a dipshit,” digging in deep on the relevance of Department of Education or Veterans Affairs programs for special needs, coming up with a line that Democrats should take back the Gadsden flag to tell Republicans to stop treading on them and responding with both sympathy and rage to a woman in Eau Claire who told him she’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the age of 51: “We need to ask your member of Congress here why he doesn’t care about this woman’s health.”
Walz says now he should have been doing events all through last fall. He says he offered, but was told no, and in his bewildered daze, he decided to be a team player.
Walz knew they lost early on election night. Sitting around a table in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel that he had walked into thinking he’d be leaving as the vice president-elect, he could feel the mood shift among his staff as soon as the Virginia results started coming in soft for Harris.
They wanted to fly back that night. Gwen Walz, the governor’s wife, told CNN that one of the things that sticks with her is that the Harris-Walz logo was already off the charter plane by the time they got to the airport.
These days, Walz said that thinking they were going to win “feels like an unforgivable sin.”
“I’m a little bit jaded now, knowing how tough this is because of that,” he said, then hearing the noise of the crowd waiting inside, said, “We’ll see how these folks are.”
After he finished his hour on stage by asking the crowd to call out ideas for standing up to Trump, Walz participated in a line of photos – not backstage with donors, but with whoever from the crowd wanted to wait to climb up the stairs to be with him.
Asked what he saw of where those folks were, Walz said that it felt like “a little group therapy session of what they wanted to see out of Democratic leadership,” adding, “and look, it’s good for me too, because I’ve seen the energy still out there.”
