Former Democrat vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is talking tough, even while remaining mum on his own political future.
The Minnesota governor, whose second term runs through January 2027, claims to have a strategy for his fellow Democrats: ”Bully the s–t out of” President Donald Trump.
“Maybe it’s time for us to be a little meaner, maybe it’s time for us to be a little more fierce, because we have to ferociously push back on this,” Walz said at the South Carolina Democratic Party’s convention on Saturday.
“Again, I’ll speak to my teacher colleagues in here. The thing that bothers a teacher more than anything is to watch a bully … and when it’s a child, you talk to him, and you tell him why bullying’s wrong, but when it’s an adult like Donald Trump, you bully the s–t out of him back,” he said.
Walz, a surprise choice as Democrat vice presidential nominee by the party’s presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, over more prominent contenders, such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, has been on the road often since the start of Trump’s second term in late January.
“This dude’s the last guy I want to tell us about ‘We lost our way.’ You’re the guy who lost,” Walz said of himself in his South Carolina remarks.
But he nevertheless claimed the right to advise the Democratic Party on its path forward.
“None of us can afford to shy away right now from asking the hard questions and doing the things we need to do to fix it so that we win elections,” he said.
Walz has at times admitted to the shortcomings of the Harris-Walz ticket in its attempts to appeal to the white male voting bloc.
“I also was on the ticket, quite honestly, because I could code-talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck. Doing that, that I could put them at ease. I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this,’” he said at Harvard University in April.
“You look across those swing states, with the exception of Minnesota, we didn’t get enough of those votes,” he said.
In fact, the “code talk” does not appear to have had any benefit whatsoever.
From 2020 to 2024, white male support for the Democrat presidential candidate dropped from 40% to 36%, per Catalist, a left-wing analytics firm.
Throughout the campaign, Walz made apparent attempts to appeal to male voters by speaking on his experience as a football coach, publicizing a pheasant-hunting outing, and livestreaming gameplay of the Madden NFL videogame with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
For now, it remains unclear what Walz’s next move is.
As early as March, Walz said he “would certainly consider” a 2028 presidential run “if I think I could offer something.“
Later that same month, a poll from Morning Consult showed Walz with 5% support among Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, trailing former Vice President Harris, who led the prospective survey with 36% support.
An April YouGov poll showed only 3% of Democrats viewed him as the leader of their party.
He told CNN in April that he was currently “not thinking about running in 2028” for president.
“My advice to folks is, if in this moment you’re planning for 2028, you’re going to get rolled by the people in the street,” he said. “You just have to be out there making sure you’re helping.”
Eligible to run for governor for a third term, Walz has not yet declared whether he will launch another gubernatorial run. He said in a recent interview that he would likely make that decision in July. But he has said he won’t run for the Senate seat being vacated by fellow Democrat Sen. Tina Smith.
