CNN
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Tim Walz is headed back out on the road – this time, for a tour of House districts represented by Republicans who have stopped holding in-person town halls amid the raucous receptions some of their colleagues have gotten across the country.
The Minnesota governor and 2024 vice presidential candidate will start on Friday in Iowa, in the district represented by Rep. Zach Nunn, then head across the border to Nebraska, for the district represented by Rep. Don Bacon – both of whom won tight races for re-election last year. Walz’s team is already planning stops in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ohio for the coming weeks, with more stops expected to be added.
Given his national profile after his time on the Democratic ticket last year, Walz said he felt obligated to step up.
“There was just a primal scream of folks recognizing what’s going on with the Trump administration, their authoritarian tendencies, and what they viewed was a lack of a proper response from their representatives,” he told CNN on Wednesday. “It was about these Republican representatives recognizing this stuff’s really unpopular, so they’re going to quit the town halls. These folks need to be heard. They need to be heard, and to be candid with you, Democratic leadership needs to hear them.”
Walz’s plans started with a post last week on X, responding to House Republican leaders who advised their colleagues to stop holding town halls. Republicans have accused those town halls of being packed with paid activists – though those making such accusations haven’t provided any evidence or explanations of why Democratic members’ town halls have also been packed.
Walz said he’d been overwhelmed by the response to that tweet, and his staff has been sifting through what an aide told CNN was hundreds of invitations from local party leaders and candidates asking him to come. He said he found that response reassuring after he and Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump and JD Vance.
“I always feared that they would become apathetic after this last election and just check out, but they are not doing that,” Walz said.
Other than independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has taken two swings of his own through the Midwest in the past month, no major Democratic leaders have been stepping forward with similar kinds of public events. Walz chalked that up in part to his party “trying to find our feet,” but the situation clearly frustrates him.
“I’m going to tell them that it doesn’t have to be this way,” he said, referencing the Trump administration’s moves to dismantle the Department of Education as a prime example. “I’m going to say ways that they can mobilize to fight back, ways that I think are the most effective ways. And I fully expect them to tell me ways that they’re looking for.”
As the Tea Party rose through a different set of town hall protests in the 2010 election cycle, Walz was a congressman in a tight district running for a third term. He won, but that experience was a rough one, he said, and he warned Republicans now to ignore what’s happening at their own peril.
“I’m a catalyst to provide them a megaphone to lift up their voice. And I think that’s what people are looking for,” he said. “I understand now my responsibility. I have a little more of a national voice, so I should bring it to them, and I’m going to basically be handing the megaphone to them.”
But he said when Democrats are “just being a foil to Trump, we are not crossing into that space we need to, to have them believe us, to know what we stand for.”
After going deliberately quiet in the months after the campaign – following a largely low-profile role as running mate that sources say was designed by the Harris campaign leadership – Walz has been stepping out more in recent weeks.
Many expect Walz to run for a third term as governor next year, and he downplayed the suggestion that this effort was laying the groundwork for a future national run.
“I will do anything possible to make sure that we win in ‘28. I do not need to be on that ticket,” he told CNN. “That’s not my pursuit here. My pursuit is that I am still in a position where I have a platform and I have some power to make a difference, and if 20 people show up that’s good by me because those 20 people are making a difference. This isn’t about drawing a crowd. I’ll go to states where it wouldn’t matter, but it matters to those people. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
