Summary
Former vice presidential nominee Tim Walz criticized Trump for economic chaos while taking personal responsibility for the situation during an MSNBC interview.
“We wouldn’t be in this mess if we’d have won the election — and we didn’t,” Walz told Chris Hayes. He called Trump the “worst possible business executive” and praised the Wall Street Journal’s editorial criticizing Trump’s tariff war.
Walz emphasized Democrats must offer something better, not just criticize Trump. Recently, he acknowledged a leadership void in the Democratic Party and admitted spending too much time combatting Trump’s false claims about immigrants.
Tim “Expand Israel’s Borders” Walz opinion doesn’t mean anything to me, tbh.
Honestly believe Harris had a way better chance of winning without him, with a more progressive VP.
You do know there will never be a perfect candidate, right?
Asking for one that isn’t a genocidal maniac shouldn’t be the impossible bar that you consider perfect.
I don’t know about you people, but I’m not a genocidal person, I don’t think genocide is a good thing, and I don’t believe a cult of fascists have a divine right to kill the brown people.
I don’t think it’s that big of an ask to have at least one candidate that believes the same as me in this very common notion.
I’m not a genocidal maniac either, and that’s why I abstained. To teach the DNC that they need to respect us leftists, and if they don’t appeal to us, we’ll let Trump in. And look what’s happened now. Walz has apologised, they took genocide off the platform, and Kamala is going to impeach Trump any day now. We saved democracy!
I’m glad you can support genocide and say it’s the only way to prevent genocide.
I don’t believe that’s the case and I never will.
We are fundamentally different species, divided on that thought; whether crossing an uncrossable line is okay to theoretically save yourself.
I will never be sorry for not supporting genocide, as you will never be sorry for supporting it. Neither of us will change each others minds, we can only hope that only one of our species survived this admin and the rise of the far right.
I don’t support genocide. I’m a proud Marxist-Leninist who will never vote Democrat, because I care about Gaza. And I’m not going to throw Gaza under the bus. Not for Ukraine, not for trans people, not even for the West Bank. I’ll never cross the line no matter how high the consequences are.
So, you are opposed to Russia’s attempt to do a genocide in Ukraine, and second time, right?
Yes, and I believe that I’ve helped saved Ukraine by letting Trump win. We taught the democrats a lesson, and tomorrow morning they’re going to impeach Trump and restore aid to Ukraine, because they realised they were all stupid when I didn’t vote for them.
yknow, i’m starting to realize that i think i respect the people of russia, and china, specifically those in the military, and government more than pro palestine people support/respect israelis, and im not sure how i feel about that one.
“I think Americans have had it,” Walz explained. ”… Look, I own this. We wouldn’t be in this mess if we’d have won the election ― and we didn’t.”
Good to see someone from the campaign acknowledge “getting votes” was the campaign’s entire job, and losing the election is the fault of the campaign.
I hope Walz runs in a competitive primary and gets the nomination.
But if they try to just hand a baton off, we’re gonna see the same result.
NO! NO! NO!
NOOOOOOO!
Do not nominate Tim Walz you stupid assholes. He was the blue republican addon to make the progressive Harris campaign appeal to centrists and republicans. He wanted to “expand israel’s borders”. He was elected in a district that ran straight red like the blood of the innocence for a long time before he won it, and then he lost that district during the election.
He was the blue republican addon to make the progressive Harris campaign appeal to centrists and republicans.
The what Harris campaign?
Primaries are only competitive if the people show up to them.
Primaries are only competitive if we actually have them
We did, in fact, have primaries. There were like 9 choices for the Democratic nominee in my state. Better challengers could have run but didn’t. Yes I know the DNC using funding to “encourage” or “discourage” but that doesn’t change the fact that challengers could have, and did, run in the primaries.
Nobody voted for Harris in the 2024 Democratic primary and she was still the nominee, picked by the head nerds at the DNC
That is partially true. We the voters did not vote for Harris, but the Biden delegates who the primary voters sent to the convention did.
Count the number of states where “others” were not on the ballot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries#Ballot_access
Your proof that we didn’t have primaries is to link a source that shows that not only did 48 states have a primary (I wasn’t aware that Florida and Delaware did not, so TIL, and thank you for that), but also that all of them had at least one challenger on the ballot? Show me who qualified to be on the primary ballot in their state, showed up to register for it, and was denied.
I’m not who posted it, but that list is either wrong or varies by county. My state is listed with a couple other candidates in various colors including green, but my actual primary ballot was Biden or nobody. (Or Trump or nobody). I just recycled it.
I don’t blame Harris or Walz. I don’t even blame Biden, the senile old fool that he so clearly is.
I blame the Americans for fucking up the most outrageously obvious binary choice in history.
Has there ever been an election so obvious? Even during Trump vs Clinton one could almost be forgiven for giving Trump the benefit of the doubt as a “political outsider”, but by 2024 we knew exactly who this fucking guy was… The fact that people today are acting surprised and outraged about all the stuff that’s been happening during Trump’s first 1.5 months is only further proof that Americans are perhaps the dumbest amnesiacs to infest the Earth.
Literally all we had to do was vote against Trump’s particular brand of fascism.
But Americans are the type of people who fail a single question true or false quiz because they forgot to write their name at the top of the page, and we deserve to suffer the consequences of our collective stupidity over and over until it is bred out of us, or until our society falls. The American people allowed this to happen–and not just Trump, but everything bad that has happened over the course of American history.
The voters deserve a lot of blame here.
You can lead a horse to water…
Any ADULT can easily see that politicians are going to be imperfect, and no single candidate is going to align 100% with your stance. Demanding that they do, or else you’ll vote for literally the worst possible option, or sit out, or vote a “protest” vote, all so that someone, somewhere will “learn” something is just fucking childish and stupid. And this will be continue to be true no matter how many times the Tone Police show up to admonish people about blaming voters. Sorry, not sorry: I blame the voters.
Tim Walz explained it the other day at SXSW.
Politicians are like teachers. If it’s Tim Walz’s job to teach kids about geography, and then test them to check if he taught well, if the outcomes of that test show that half the class passes and half fails, then the blame for that is on the teacher. The teacher could have taught differently, teaching in different styles to adequately reach out to students where they’re at in life and according to their specific learning styles. He might teach the same topic 5-6 different ways to capture as many people as possible.
The Harris-Walz campaign didn’t do that. They had terrible messaging as soon as the DNC hit. When Harris brought Walz on, there was actual progressive momentum. But then Harris bent the knee to establishment Democrats, and they lost the election.
I will not believe that it’s the voters’ fault for the election outcome. If Democrats were sober enough to realize Trump’s threat and wanted to really fire people up, they would have may the necessary changes to do so.
Harris could have aligned with 99% of what I wanted, but that 1% was OK with genocide, and that should have been a red line for anyone.
So, the alternative was little d, because that’s so much better?
The alternative in every instance is always no Democrats. We already have a right wing party, we don’t need two.
There were two viable options only.
When your two options are both right wing reactionaries, there are not two options.
Nobody demanded that Harris align 100% with their stance; they demanded that she not be an absolute pile of shit of a candidate. That distinction matters.
she was actually pretty ok? The one thing that was bad about her was the israel stance, which is like maybe 5% of the voter base that ACTUALLY cares about that enough.
So first a lot more than 5% of the Democrat voter base cares about Gaza. I won’t get into the weeds, but there.
The one thing that was bad about her was the israel stance,
No? She would’ve won at least two or three swing states if that was the case. Her economic policy (or lack thereof, more accurately) was horrible. She dedicated the final two months of her campaign almost exclusively to “Trump bad” rhetoric while not promising to do anything for her constituents. I mean this woman was asked what she’d do different from Biden economically and she said “nothing comes to mind”. Status quo politics just won’t cut it in this day and age.
So first a lot more than 5% of the Democrat voter base cares about Gaza. I won’t get into the weeds, but there.
i’m talking about the voter base that actually cares enough to influence their vote over it. I’m sure if you polled the public it;s like 90% or higher who care about it at all, like 40% support israel, 60% against israel, and like 5% of those is “fuck israel i hope it burns to the ground and that palestine re conglomerates into israel” type of people.
No? She would’ve won at least two or three swing states if that was the case. Her economic policy (or lack thereof, more accurately) was horrible.
“her economic policy was bad” bro, did you see ANYTHING that trump said? Literally an irrelevant argument. Especially now.
She dedicated the final two months of her campaign almost exclusively to “Trump bad” rhetoric while not promising to do anything for her constituents.
I remember her talking about a lot of things she and walz were going to do, that was like a pretty big deal. Was their entire plan, not all of it was great, but it existed, unlike trump.
I mean this woman was asked what she’d do different from Biden economically and she said “nothing comes to mind”. Status quo politics just won’t cut it in this day and age.
yeah and? Biden had pretty good economic policy? Aside from the whole covid thing, but you have no choice there, unless you want a global recession, more like a depression. Again, trumps economic policy has been an utter disaster in comparison.
i’m talking about the voter base that actually cares enough to influence their vote over it.
https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling
bro, did you see ANYTHING that trump said? Literally an irrelevant argument.
Don’t move the goalposts. Here’s what you said:
she was actually pretty ok? The one thing that was bad about her was the israel stance, which is like maybe 5% of the voter base that ACTUALLY cares about that enough.
We’re talking about Harris on her own merit, not about Trump.
I remember her talking about a lot of things she and walz were going to do, that was like a pretty big deal.
Like? Give me something specific she clearly said she would do for the working class and a link of her saying it in September or October.
yeah and? Biden had pretty good economic policy? Aside from the whole covid thing, but you have no choice there, unless you want a global recession, more like a depression.
He did well on the economic recovery front, but he or example didn’t go after price gouging. His economic policies were a step in the right direction, not an end state to campaign on.
Again, trumps economic policy has been an utter disaster in comparison.
Again, that is literally not what we’re talking about.
centrists think “second worst” means “good”.
in the context between shooting yourself in the head with a 12 gauge slug, and stubbing your toe really badly. I think most people would agree with me when i say that stubbing your toe is the best option. Comparatively, a good option.
Of course if you compare it to things like, randomly finding a billion check on the ground, nothing compares to that, but that’s an unreal comparison, you literally cannot base a reference point on them.
Sample Online sample of 604 voters fielded from December 20 to January 07, 2025. Margin of Error ±4.5%
thats uh, a really small sample size. Especially for a sample that’s supposed to consist of multiple swing states. Not to mention that organization is clearly either deeply embedded into the arabic culture, or arabic itself (didn’t look that hard) obviously that’s not an issue, we have things like AIPAC here in the US, it’s just, probably very biased. Which is why they exist in the first place. That’s kind of the whole point.
Don’t move the goalposts. Here’s what you said:
What’s the other available option? Voting for jill fucking stein? Who cares what i said, the facts are plainly evident, you have one really bad choice, and one decent choice.
We’re talking about Harris on her own merit, not about Trump.
and if we’re talking about her own merit specifically, i’d say she’s still a pretty competitive candidate, the voting numbers seem to agree with me on that one.
Like? Give me something specific she clearly said she would do for the working class and a link of her saying it in September or October.
she ran for a bunch of shit, notably the child tax credit, the housing crisis, the food crisis, corporate taxes, capital gains tax, there are a number of other things, those are the ones i can remember off the top of my head.
He did well on the economic recovery front, but he or example didn’t go after price gouging. His economic policies were a step in the right direction, not an end state to campaign on.
the price gouging one im not sure on, there was only really significant price gouging of medical equipment and consumables in the early pandemic months, which was quickly shut down, as it was deemed illegal, beyond that you’re talking about things like food, which struggle with inflation, and are also affected by things other than the economy, notably the avian flu for eggs. Consume electronics have gotten more expensive in some capacities, the GPU market specifically, but that’s obviously due to AI. That’s about it, everything else is probably going to be related to inflation.
Again, that is literally not what we’re talking about.
Who else are we comparing it to? Fucking god? IS the heavenly father himself going to come down and run our government for us? What’s the frame of reference we’re holding here?
thats uh, a really small sample size.
Short answer: Learn statistics. Slightly longer answer: 604 people is more than enough for a normal distribution to appear, so if the sample size was “really small” it’d be reflected in the margin of error.
Not to mention that organization is clearly either deeply embedded into the arabic culture, or arabic itself (didn’t look that hard) obviously that’s not an issue, we have things like AIPAC here in the US, it’s just, probably very biased.
Biased towards… Palestinians’ rights? The fuck are you talking about?
What’s the other available option? Voting for jill fucking stein? Who cares what i said, the facts are plainly evident, you have one really bad choice, and one decent choice.
Uh… If you don’t care to have a conversation then you should say so from the start. If you do care to have a conversation, then what you said quite obviously fucking matters. Also you ignored everything I said to claim Harris is a “decent” choice.
and if we’re talking about her own merit specifically, i’d say she’s still a pretty competitive candidate, the voting numbers seem to agree with me on that one.
What voting numbers? The ones where she lost all seven swing states? Also I quite distinctly remember a whole lot of “hold your nose and vote for her”, which isn’t what you say about a “pretty competitive” candidate.
she ran for a bunch of shit, notably the child tax credit, the housing crisis, the food crisis, corporate taxes, capital gains tax, there are a number of other things, those are the ones i can remember off the top of my head.
Quotes for those things from September or October?
the price gouging one im not sure on,
Again, the fuck are you talking about? Grocery price gouging during recessions is a widespread and documented phenomenon, and if you don’t understand that then you really are in no position to discuss the November election, because you don’t understand the people’s grievances that Harris failed to address.
What’s the frame of reference we’re holding here?
“Good” doesn’t need a frame of reference; it’s an absolute judgement. “Better” is a relative judgement that does require a frame if reference. Most people can judge whether something is good without being offered a specific frame of reference, and to most people a candidate that doesn’t even acknowledge a problem exists (again, “nothing comes to mind”) is not good.
Defeated Democratic candidate: accepts responsibility in the lightest possible way
Liberal fanboy: Noooo, it’s not your fault, it’s the children who were wrong!
I didn’t say Walz, Kamala, Biden or the Democratic Party in general have no blame.
I agree, I’m also happy that people like Walz seem to want to give people a better option, making a protest vote even less appealing.
Any ADULT can easily see that politicians are going to be imperfect
The best I can do is fall for blatant Russian propaganda and then get mad when someone calls me out on it.
It sure is convenient how all criticism comers from russians so you can ignore it.
Kind of like anyone that finds faults with other leftists is a “centrist”, right?
Don’t you have voters to blame for your party’s decades of complete incompetence?
I blame the voters.
It means you never have to listen or change in any way, so of course you do.
LOL, I am a voter. Are you under the impression that I have any direct influence over the Democratic Party? 🤣
LOL, I am a voter. Are you under the impression that I have any direct influence over the Democratic Party?
According to your comment, voters are to blame, not the infallible holy party. So good work electing trump. It’s all your fault.
Meanwhile Democrats are lining up Rham Emanuel and Gavin Newsom to run. Lol
No one lines up anyone. Stop spreading agitprop.
I imagine it’ll be a pretty large primary cohort this season. If you want to run, feel free to run, too. There is no cabal.
If you want to run, feel free to run,
Peak lib delusion. This disconnect from reality is a big part of why y’all lose.
honestly, if walz had been managed competently, I think he’d have been a pretty good folksy VP candidate. especially if he’d kept up on the ‘weeeeird’ stuff.
harris was just a terrible idea, and she didn’t even push her strengths. it’s like she, and the people who put her there, were all trying to lose.
The “Weeeeird” stuff would have knocked Trump right out of the park.
without the genocide and harris’ being simultaneously a woman of color (alienating fascists), a cop (alienating anyone with a conscience), and an arrogant symbol of the establishment that let it get so bad? yeah, fine red mist. it was a really good strategy. and they just stopped it, probably because a wealthy donor said it made them uncomfortable.
The correct answer to that is “It bothers Trump and Trump makes Americans uncomfortable.”
All the democrats had to do was field a white male opponent against Trump who can be charming and give good speeches. Instead they put up a biracial woman, who the fuck amongst the democrats thought that America was ready for a biracial woman president, like did they do zero pooling to figure out what the people wanted, aren’t politicians supposed to know the pulse of the nation, it’s literally their job to serve the citizens of the country. They should have made Bernie or even Walz the presidential candidate and Kamal could have been the VP
The “she lost because she’s a woman of color” talking point is just an excuse to shut out AOC in 2028.
You think voters can’t be sexist or racist?
I think they can be both. They’re called republicans and appealing to them is why harris lost.
I don’t think they’re as prevalent as democrats are making them out to be. And I think that they’re overstating the problem as an excuse to shut out AOC.
I disagree Mr. Walz. Had Biden not sat on his hands after being given the power of god by the supreme court - we wouldn’t be in this mess today.
Shit if Biden had engaged with the 25th amendment in good faith and we’d had President Harris for a year already it would have been totally different.
You don’t even need to go to the SCOTUS decision. Would have been enough for Biden to order his DOJ to immediately arrest and imprison Trump, in the same way that Trump is currently arresting and imprisoning American residents. We’ve done far worse to people suspected of espionage for far less.
I’m still baffled Joe is a free man, must be a consequence of having lots of money.
There’s no money to be made by either Trump or President Musk, so why bother with arresting him?
Just existing as an alternate to chaos should have been enough.
The guy who tried that and failed is telling you it wasn’t enough.
Genocide is not an order worth supporting.
Cool so now we have the same genocide but everything else is worse too? Awesome. Love it.
Turns out holding back the things that work (like calling fascists “weird”) while not breaking with some of Biden’s unpopular policies was a terrible idea… who would’ve thought? At least Walz is honest enough to admit it. I doubt the DNC will let the social democrats like Walz or Bernie take the lead though… establishment dems would rather stand by and praise Reagan while Trump dismantles the constitution.
“Weird” alienated voters. It’s an example of bad messaging that the dems doubled down on that made them lose.
They lacked a platform that promised anything but more of the same that Americans were tired of. They needed to present something new and hopeful, not just lob an insult that much of America identifies with. A suite of policies to help the working class attracts votes to your side. Calling your opponents weird attracts votes to the weird anti-establishment.
Weird plays into the republican’s hands, and it annoys the hell out of me how the dems decided to throw the election to focus on petty insults that come off as compliments to most observers.
A part of the problem is that they didn’t hold back on broken and alienating messaging like “weird”. They should have focused on talking about what they can do for the people.
No, weird was a successful offensive attack on Republicans that was both popular and was great at making them get flustered and double down on their weirdness (which is itself an incredibly charitable way to describe their fascist policies)
Other messaging that was very popular
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/harris-poll-positive-message-8-8/
https://blueprint-research.com/polling/distance-biden-ads-message-test-10-15/
Progressive policies that a majority of Americans support
Democrats’ Working-Class Failures, Analysis Finds, Are ‘Why Trump Beat Harris’
2024 Post-Election Report: A retrospective and longitudinal data analysis on why Trump beat Harris
How Trump and Harris Voters See America’s Role in the World
Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college
Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, but not the unpopular ones
Here Are 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind
Finding common ground: 109 national policy proposals with bipartisan support
Progressive Policies Are Popular Policies
Tim Walz’s Progressive Policies Popular With Republicans in Swing States
Just because it flustered republicans doesn’t mean it didn’t alienate voters.
I agree with the rest of your message listing progressive policies that the majority of Americans support. That’s the winning strategy.
Where’s the proof that it alienated voters? The vox article has evidence voters received it positively
It alienated me and others like me that identify as weird.
You can’t win the left while shit talking non-hegemonic personalities and preferences.
You don’t find Republican policies that dehumanize immigrants, attack women’s rights, and demonize LGBT rights weird? To put it as nicely as possible, fascist policies are weird
Why are you proposing that we be as nice as possible to fascists?
Bernie’s chances of running are pretty much up and over. He’s like 83. The time to have gotten him in was definitely 2016, but the DNC wanted Clinton and that got them to lose. 2020, he lost again because everyone tone deaf wanted Biden because they believed “well, he was around Obama during his two terms, he should be in because he’ll just continue what Obama built!”. They only got lucky to have won 2020 with Biden, just lucky.
I cannot see Bernie Sanders ever running again.
he lost again because everyone tone deaf wanted Biden because they believed “well, he was around Obama during his two terms, he should be in because he’ll just continue what Obama built!”.
An article I read about this talked about how DNC-funded advertising discredited Bernie not by attacking his actual policies, but via a message of “his promises are good, and you may like them, but how many voters out there won’t vote for a scary socialist?”. I think that’s ultimately what did him in; it’s impossible to make a reasonable person hate the stuff Bernie was promising (unless they think it’s gonna placate the proletariat and make them lose the will to seize the means of production or some shit), but it is possible to convince them that some unspecified “many people” wouldn’t vote for him and therefore he’d lose the election.
Props to him for taking ownership of it. It means a lot even if it isn’t fully his fault.
Imagine Trump, or any other billionaire, saying something like this. Can’t do it? Me neither.
You played it too safe and used your son as a prop
No, we’d be “GAmBlIng wItH wOrLd waR THree!”
finally! I hate when peope are always blaming trump or maga or republicans for this shit when its been the democrats every time. reagans deregulation and tax cuts, bush juniors war on terror, trumps total idiocy. ALL DEMOCRATS! We need to stop fighting the republicans and work with them against our common enemy.
Republicans ARE our common enemy, at this point… Democrats have been an “enemy of my enemy” scenario for decades now, but they are LITERALLY the lesser of two evils. Howsabout we get rid of this BS two-party system that’s allowed the Overton window to go so far right? Maybe start there, not "work with cuntservatives.
