Walz says 'I don't think we would have won' if Harris appeared on Rogan's podcast
On top of talking about the missed podcast appearance, Walz also reflected on the election loss, saying the campaign didn't offer enough change to convince voters to support the Democrats
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz says the decision by Kamala Harris' presidential campaign to skip appearing on Joe Rogan's popular podcast likely didn't impact the election too much.
Walz's comments came during a Tuesday night town hall meeting as he took questions from fellow Democrats on proposed cuts to social programs, as well as the 2024 election.
Walz was asked specifically about the decision to not appear on the Joe Rogan Experience, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the Paste BN Network.
“I don't think we would have won the election if we'd gone on Joe Rogan," he said. "But I don't think we would've got beat any worse."
Reflecting on his and Harris' loss, Walz said he believed that the campaign didn't promise enough change to convince voters to support of the Democratic ticket.
The relationship between the Harris-Walz campaign and the Joe Rogan Experience has been the subject of debate and coverage both in the lead-up to the 2024 election and in the months after.
Here is what you need to know.
Rogan says Harris’ team lied
Last month, multiple outlets published an excerpt of the book “FIGHT: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
In the book, the Harris campaign said it tried to get the former vice president to make an appearance on the show but alleged that Rogan’s team had implemented obstacles that made the appearance impossible.
In an episode only days after the release of the excerpt, Rogan rebuked the claims made in the book, saying that the Harris campaign was trying to excuse their mistake.
“They never said she was gonna do it. So this whole idea that we (expletive) her over for Trump is incorrect, just not true,” Rogan said. “I think it's someone trying to cover their (expletive) for the fact that she never did it.”
Around the same time that the Harris campaign and Rogan's team were discussing an appearance, now-President Donald Trump was a guest on the podcast, eventually earning Rogan’s endorsement.
“Trump was really easy to book, super easy, we offered one day, he said yes, that was it,” Rogan said in the same February episode.
Not enough change
In a sort of post-mortem, Walz told the Journal Sentinel that the Harris-Walz campaign failed to represent enough change to turn out the number of voters needed to defeat Trump.
Walz's analysis was backed up in the same excerpts of the book published last month. According to The Hill, instead of attempting to show a clear break between herself and former President Joe Biden, Harris’ campaign, as well as Biden's aides, decided to show “no daylight” between them.
“Almost everywhere she went, Harris walked among former Biden aides who sought to defend his presidency,” the excerpt published by The Hill said. “To the extent that she [Harris] wanted to forge her own path, Biden had no interest in giving her room to do so.”
Harris also had trouble conveying how she would be different from Biden. In an appearance on ABC’s “The View” in the leadup to the election, she struggled to explain what she would do differently.
That television moment underscored a fatal flaw of Harris’ campaign that doomed her election bid – an inability to separate herself from an unpopular president whose approval ratings have hovered around 40% for most of his four years in the White House.
Contributing: Joey Garrison, Paste BN
Fernando Cervantes Jr. is a trending news reporter for Paste BN. Reach him at fernando.cervantes@gannett.com and follow him on X @fern_cerv_.