ANAHEIM, California — Tim Walz on Saturday delivered blunt advice to fellow Democrats in an address to party activists and officials: “We’ve got to find some goddamn guts to fight for working people.”
Speaking in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state, the Minnesota governor told California Democratic Party convention-goers that his and Harris’ loss last fall was a clear sign that their party’s grasp on working-class voters had slipped. It was the latest in a string of critiques he has issued while traveling the country since November.
“The party of the working class lost a big chunk of the working class,” Walz said. “That last election was a primal scream on so many fronts.”
Of Republican control, he acknowledged: “Some of it is our own doing.”
Walz’s tough talk, and an energetic address from New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker earlier in the day, offered each Democrat a chance to court party insiders in the nation’s largest blue bastion ahead of a possible presidential run. Walz also made an appearance in South Carolina on Saturday, an early primary state, where he acknowledged mistakes in his fall campaign at a Democratic Party convention. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore spoke Friday at a dinner in South Carolina in a preview of the 2028 presidential primary.
Not all Democratic leaders have accepted there needs to be a reckoning after President Donald Trump made inroads with labor. But Trump’s success was laid bare when several national unions declined last year to endorse Harris after backing Joe Biden the cycle before.
He touted his successes in Minnesota — a signature child tax credit, free school meals and labor union protections — as a roadmap for the party to move forward. In another appeal to labor, he called union members in attendance the “real VIPs.”
Hundreds of attendees watched his half-hour speech, and many of them stood throughout. As he shuffled into the venue, passersby greeted him as “Coach,” a folksy title he embraced on the trail last year that referenced his past role on a high school football team. He drew loud cheers with a shoutout to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, but the crowd was more muted when Walz expressed gratitude to Harris, saying, “America is far better off because of her grace, courage and patriotic leadership.”
Harris, who is weighing a 2026 bid for governor, did not come to the convention. She spoke only in a pre-recorded video address in which she ripped the Trump administration’s tariffs and Congress’ votes to cut Medi-Cal funding. She offered no indication of whether she’ll run for governor next year or president, again, in 2028. And she did not look back at her bruising defeat last fall.
“What we have seen out of Washington these past few months is the swift implementation of an agenda,” Harris said, “that dismantles our progress to tackle the climate crisis and stands in the way of our state’s leadership on these issues, an agenda that threatens our world class university system.”
Hours earlier, Booker told the party faithful that “we are in a spiritual storm” and leaned into his Christian faith, as he did during his presidential run in 2020 and many times thereafter. He used his remarks to slam “hypocrites” on the right who, he said, profess to be religious but are less righteous than many atheists he has met.
“I don’t understand” people in Congress, he said, “who say they’re Christian evangelicals, but they’re the first people to cut food programs for the poor, health care for the sick.”
Booker drew some of the most thunderous applause of the weekend at a convention in which many of California’s own congressional delegates, including Sen. Adam Schiff and battleground Rep. Derek Tran, spoke. The audience roared especially loudly after Booker quipped about missing the Obama years — and former First Lady Michelle Obama in particular.
“I miss Obama, and I miss her husband too,” Booker said.
