Tim Walz’s powerful speech to California Dems: ‘Nobody votes for roadkill’
He ran alongside Kamala Harris for a historic — but unsuccessful — 107-day presidential campaign, so Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz acknowledged to California’s Democratic leaders, delegates and activists that he’s “the last person to lecture” on what the Democratic Party should do now.
But Walz said one Georgia voter was spot on when he told a political researcher recently that the party is like “a deer in the headlights.”
“You see the car coming at you, but you go ahead and stand there and you get hit by it anyway,” Walz told California Democrats at the party’s state convention in Anaheim Saturday. “That’s a review of our party by someone who likes us!”
Democrats are floundering for a way forward after losing the White House and both chambers of Congress to Republicans last year.
Even in California, where Democrats hold a supermajority in the legislature, about 2 million voters stayed home in 2024, and Trump gained ground in nearly every single county.
“The Democratic Party, the party of the working class, lost a big chunk of the working class,” Walz said. “We lost to a grifter billionaire giving tax cuts to his grifter billionaire buddies.”
The Minnesota governor believes it’s because Democrats talk about big ideas but don’t deliver tangible results, which leads voters to believe the party is “either incapable of getting big things done, or we truly don’t care.”
For Democrats in one of the most liberal states in the nation, the speech served both as a rousing pep talk and a warning about the party’s future.
“We have to have confidence to get the basic stuff done like helping folks find meaningful work that pays a living wage so they can buy a home in a safe neighborhood and send their kids to good public schools,” Walz said. “Somewhere we strayed from our North Star.”
Walz had plenty of examples to point to from his own state about delivering for working people and families: the highest child tax credit in the nation, free school meals for every public school student and 12 weeks of paid family leave.
California also offers many of those things, yet the state’s high cost of living is more acutely becoming an urgent issue for its Democratic leaders to address. Elected Democrats agree it’s a problem, but other than speeding up the permitting and review process for new housing, they can’t seem to agree on what to do.
Like many party leaders, Walz has spent time since his election loss trying to sift through what exactly caused such a precipitous defeat. After holding town halls in Republican districts in places like Texas, Oklahoma and Ohio, Walz’s takeaway is that “politics isn’t left and right anymore.”
“(Voters) are judging people on their willingness to stand up and fight,” he said, returning to the analogy of the deer frozen in place as a car barrels toward it.
“There’s a good reason for that. Nobody votes for roadkill.”
