Chairman Hicks (00:00):
Today we have heard so many amazing leaders that are on the front lines of so many important fights. I'm now proud to welcome our final speaker to inspire you once more, a leader who is living out Dr. King's words every single day. We got to know him more in the heat of the campaign of 2024. A teacher, a coach, a military veteran, a former member of Congress, and now a governor. During his tenure as governor, he has insured universal free school lunches for students. He's cut taxes for the middle class. He's expanded paid leave for workers, and he's fixed an old car or two along the way. He is living proof that progressive values and pragmatic results can go hand-in-hand, and he does it all with a smile in his face and a pep in his step, generally fueled by lots of Diet Mountain Dew. California Democrats, I want you to put your hands together and give a warm California welcome to the Governor of the great state of Minnesota, governor Tim Walz.
Song (01:26):
Well, I won't back down. No, I won't back down.
Governor Tim walz (01:26):
Wow. Well, good afternoon, California Democrats. Chairman Hicks, thank you for the kind introduction and your fearless stewardship of this largest Democratic Party in the country.
(01:42)
I'm proud to be back in the home state of vice President Kamala Harris. She was such a talented and accomplished nominee, and I was proud to join her on the ticket. America is far better off, because of her grace, her courage, and her patriotic leadership. It's also a thrill to be back in the great state of Nancy Pelosi. When we were in Congress together, I routinely saw Nancy Pelosi do things that Mike Johnson could only dream about in his wildest dreams, and she did it in five-inch heels. Badass is the definition when you look it up. California, your governor, my friend Gavin Newsom, a thank you for that. Two excellent senators, Senators Padilla and Schiff, who I've gotten to know. And in a point of personal privilege, an incredible congressional delegation of house members who I count amongst some of my dearest friends. Some of the new members you sent have proven to be superstars. You need to send them all back and a few more to join the ranks.
(02:55)
But my real thanks, go to the VIPs who are here today, the union members in the house. Thank you. And a special shout out to my fellow public school teachers. Thank you. So the teachers in this room know, you've been here all day. It's 4:30 in the afternoon. I taught long enough to know that thousand mile stare you got going on. So shake it out a little bit here, and to each and every one of you who took the time to come here, it is an honor to be with you here today. Look, it's California on a sunny day, you could be anywhere else and you could say, "Well, hell, the midterms are 500 days away." But you didn't say it. You came here. You went through the traffic, you did the parking, you stood in the hot hall, you listened to speeches all day. And as I continue to say it, it's for a very simple and eloquent reason. You love this country and that's why you're here. Now, look, I spent a lot of time after the last election thinking, and on the road over the last few months, I went to a lot of places. I went to Wheeling, West Virginia, went to Omaha, Nebraska, Youngstown, Ohio, Fort Bend, Texas. Now all you're saying, "Yep. Right to the Democratic strongholds," right where went. But I went to those places specifically because they have Republican members of Congress and states that voted for Donald Trump. And I went there to listen to those folks, and let me tell you, they spoke. They're really pissed off about what's going on in Washington. That does it. I'll start and look, this goes somewhere that you'll know. It starts out with right in the moment we're in. There was a lot of talk over recent weeks on the big beautiful bill that's out there.
(04:52)
I said earlier that it sounds like four-year-olds name it, but it was an insult to the four-year-olds. So I'm not doing it. They're trying to ram this thing through, this monstrosity through Congress, and they're trying to do it as quickly as they can before people figure it out. You've figured it out. It's a record-setting transfer of wealth from the working class to the richest amongst us. The implications are pretty simple. If you're a young couple raising a child and say your child has a disability, you're going to need to get your healthcare through Medicaid. You and 15 million other people are going to lose their healthcare under this bill. You're a single working parent. You rely on SNAP to put a little extra on the table, you and your kids and 11 million of our neighbors are going to be kicked off that vital lifeline. If you're a young person holding down a job making solar panels, your gig and 700,000 other good playing clean energy jobs are killed by this bill alone. So working people, we get the shaft, somebody's got a benefit from it, and you know who it is. If any of you out there make four million a year, you're getting a $400,000 tax break, I'm guessing you're probably not here. And if you happen to be one of the people who make more than 30 million as a couple, you can transfer all that tax-free to your nepo kids.
(06:15)
But for the rest of us, if you make $50,000 or less, the most you're going to get's about 300 bucks. You can't even buy a decent set of tires for your car to get back and forth to that $50,000 a year job, and it's going to be eaten up by what you pay in healthcare cost and groceries alone. So look, the ability of us as Democrats to understand, they're going to feast on this thing. We're going to get the table scraps, and there's some peripheral issues here that they're not even talking about. 13 million kids are going to lose access to free school lunch. They get to go to school hungry. We live in states where we provide free breakfast and free lunch. We do it, because it's the right thing to do. But what's interesting about that, we do it because we're good people for Christ's sakes. But you know what? Even if you're not, guess what happened in Minnesota when we provided free school lunch? More kids came to school, and this year we recorded the highest graduation rates in our state's history because of that. You could be a cruel a-hole, and it's still the right thing to do, because your economy's going to grow by providing those kids breakfast and lunch. Look, 200 Planned Parenthood centers are going to close. Five already closed in Minnesota. Hey, but there's an upside to the bill. It's cheaper to get a gun silencer now. There's even a tax break in there for tanning beds. So look, you know what they're doing, and I'll give you some names. I worked with some of these people and I heard the chair say this. Valadeo, Kim Calvert,
Governor Tim walz (08:00):
… Calvert, Kylie, they all voted. They all voted for the Big Beautiful Bullshit, and they voted for it at 3:00 AM, the middle of the night because you know, you've watched TV. Every heist has to be done in the cover of darkness. So the Republicans, when they're not sacrificing the livelihood of the middle class at the altar of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, they're finding a lot of other ways to screw us. You felt it right here in California, and the rest of the country was appalled. When the horrific fire struck earlier this year, Trump and the Republicans kicked California when you were down. They played a blame game, and they put out misinformation about an incredibly tragic situation. They didn't have the backs of the firefighters. They didn't hustle to get you the help you needed. They hung you out to dry.
(08:54)
This bill and what they're doing, I think about this in each and every one of us. My mom and roughly one in six Californians rely solely on social security for their retirement. They're terrified of the 19-year-old DOGE dweebs rooting around in government, mainlining four local acting like a bunch of jackasses who flipped the wrong switch, and, all of a sudden, seniors aren't getting their checks. It's not a game. It's the rent payment. It's groceries. It's heating your house.
(09:29)
I got told the other day, I got said this, "You never say anything nice about the Republicans." Well, the answer is because they never do anything nice.
(09:41)
But I said, in an effort to reach out to the Republicans, I said I will give Elon credit this week. When he quit, he finally did get rid of government waste, and we should lift it up.
(09:56)
Now I don't want to… I know you're all pumped up. It's a big day. You're on the way out. You're going to talk about the things we're going to get motivated, but just think about this. It has only been four months since this shit-show started, but it is really clear where this is headed. And I think it sums down to this. You watch this guy, he's not all that complicated.
(10:16)
There's two things that motivate Trump, cruelty and corruption, and you can see it in the decisions they make. Ripping away healthcare from millions? That's the cruelty side. Tax cuts for billionaires? That's the corruption side. Tariffs blowing up budgets and destroying small businesses. The cruelty side of it, a free jet from Qatar. There's your corruption. Disappearing people off the streets is the cruelty. At the same time, they sell access to the White House, to the crypto bros and the corruption.
(10:53)
What was great about that is those poor bastards didn't even get a good stake when they went there, and he took off. So maybe there is justice in the universe.
(11:02)
But look, we can blame and we can put, and we should, but Trump doesn't do this alone. Those Republican names we just read and those other Republicans in Congress, they are fully complicit in everything that's happening. Everything.
(11:21)
And don't even get me started with anybody who's in elected office right now and wants to call themselves moderate. There's not one damn thing moderate about what they're doing or caving into him. Not one thing.
(11:36)
But here's the thing. You can sit at home and complain, you can turn on TV and yell at it, you can argue with your MAGA family members, or you can do what you did. You can come here, you can start to organize, and we can make sure these people pay at the midterms, that they pay the price.
(11:57)
Now look, this isn't about trying to… I don't know. If I had all the answers, maybe we won in November. I don't know, so I might be the wrong guy in this. But I think we got to be honest in what happened because losing elections has consequences. Losing elections has consequences for the most vulnerable, and we're seeing that. So I think we've got to be honest with us.
(12:22)
We're in this mess because some of it's our own doing. Some of it is our own doing. Again, I'm going to be… I may be the last person to lecture on this topic, but I'm going to tell you. None of us can afford to shy away from having hard conversations about what it's going to take to win elections.
(12:42)
Here's the fact I came to, and it's not easy to come to this conclusion. I came to the fact that the Democratic Party, the party of the working class, lost a big chunk of the working class. We didn't just lose the working class to just anybody. We lost to a grifter billionaire giving tax cuts to his grifter billionaire buddies.
(13:06)
That last election was a primal scream on so many fronts. Do something. Do something. Stand up and make a difference. And for all of the boneheaded, self-serving, despicable crap that Donald Trump does, that guy can sniff out a grievance and a problem, and he puts on one hell of a show pretending like he's solving it.
(13:28)
I hear this in all those places I listed to you, people were coming up. They weren't all Democrats. Some of them Republican, some are independents. But I hear this more often than you would like to think. People come at me and say, "I don't know. I don't really like Trump." No shit on that if they say it. "I don't really like Trump. I don't know if I trust him or not for sure, and I don't even know what he's doing if it's good. But I got to tell you, it feels like he's fighting and he's trying and he's breaking stuff up."
(13:57)
Now, that may sound ridiculous to us, but for Democrats, we have good ideas. But when it seems like we get into power, we incrementally change thing, and we don't do the big stuff. We don't do the big stuff.
(14:16)
We talk about things that are really important, but the average person doesn't see it in their life, and they can't feel it. So the voters come away from us thinking we're either incapable of getting big things done, or we truly don't care, and we're just talking about it for votes.
(14:35)
They did an interview the other day and look, I'm with you. The New York Times goes out and interviews somebody at a bar in Wisconsin or something like that and ask them to do, I don't think it's the best take on what's actually happened everywhere, but this is pretty interesting when they were going out.
(14:49)
They were in Georgia and they asked a woman, a self-described Democrat, to describe the Democratic Party in her own words, and she said, "A deer in the headlights." She said, "You see the car coming at you, but you go ahead and stand there and you get hit by it anyway."
(15:08)
That's a review of our party by someone who likes us. I think she's right. I think she's right. This problem isn't just an existential threat for us politically. Fixing what we're not doing and what we can do is demanded of us morally. Because we are fighting for working class people, and it's supposed to be our DNA to work for those people.
(15:36)
We used to be the party that had the courage to do the big, bold stuff. It was us who built social security. It was us who led the Civil Rights Movement, and it's us who have to rescue the damn economy after Republicans screw it up every single time, and you know we're going to have to do it again.
Governor Tim walz (16:02):
And I would say it's because we have to have competence 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. But somewhere we strayed from our North star. Right here, right now, Trump and the Republicans are going to screw stuff up enough with the working class, we're going to have an opportunity to be their champions.
(16:31)
Now look, I'll tell you this. It seemed pretty obvious last November that there was a pretty stark choice, but we need to be honest about this. It apparently wasn't for a large number of people who did not vote for Donald Trump, but they stayed home because there wasn't something viscerally in them. When I was growing up, it was easy. If you asked someone, what's a Democrat? "I don't know. That's a union people, they fight for the working people." What's a Republican? "I don't know. They're the country club people who work for the rich." That was a pretty apt description of where it was. If you ask people today what a Democrat is, they say, "A deer in the headlights." We've got to find some guts to fight for working people in a way that really makes a difference.
(17:17)
And I know some of you are like, "Oh my God, it took getting your ass kicked to figure that one out." No, no. What I'm telling you is that we for some reason are super cautious that we might say something that offends somebody. We might say something that offends the Republicans because of the way they're acting. You can't appease dictators. You can't appease people. And I think our states, California becomes the target of the Republicans so much. This was a saying Nancy Pelosi said to me, and she gave a baseball analogy out of this, it was wonderful. She said, "The Republicans hit at California so much just like pitchers only throw at batters who can hit home runs." And the idea was California is the laboratory of experiments when it comes to making sure everyone is heard, that people are valued, that our democracy is heard. And you know what? It's messy and it's loud and it can be disruptive.
(18:23)
But the states that are taking these things on are unabashedly saying, "Oh, California, they're socialists like in Minnesota." They told me that. "Governor Walz is passing socialist agendas in Minnesota," whatever. Oh, like feeding children and making sure that people have healthcare and making sure we're tackling things. We heard it, states heard it. We heard the call in Minnesota. In Minnesota, we call ourselves the Democratic Farmer Labor Party. We are two parties. The Democratic Party and Hubert Humphrey brought the Farmer Labor Party together. And it's a pretty good description because we know who we work for and an expectation to get the job done.
(19:05)
Now, Minnesota is a purple state. From 1990 to 2011, we only had Republican governors. Until 2018, that was the first time in our state's history that one democratic governor followed another democratic governor. So we're a purple state and we go back and forth. But in 2022 when we won, had the governor's office, we had the House, and for the first time in over a decade, we had a one vote majority in the Senate. And the first thing we did was we gathered together, and I made it clear we do not bank political capital to win the next election. We burn political capital to improve lives as quickly as we can.
(19:58)
You know the old saying, they always tell us this, "Oh, you overreached. You overreached." How do you overreach when it comes to making security for people? How do you overreach in providing living wages? How do you overreach in providing healthcare or making sure people don't go broke from student loans? So we tackled things like, and it was a bit of a competition because the Republicans kept saying, "Governor Walz is trying to make Minnesota cold California, all these progressive policies." I said, "Oh no, I'm going further than where they're going." We have the nation's leading child tax credit, the largest in the nation, reducing childhood poverty and making our state the lowest in childhood poverty. We did finally catch up with you. We have 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave so you can take care of your kids when they're sick. And we don't have any paperwork or any forms to fill out. Every child that walks through the door of a school gets a free breakfast and a free lunch for every single one of them.
(21:06)
And we said, "We're not interested in fighting these retreating actions." When politicians say, and this happens in the Midwest because it's happened all over, "We'll never let our state go right to work." Well, no kidding, we'll never go to a right to work state. But how about expanding and making it easier to form unions? How about we make sure in Minnesota we ban captive meeting laws? We made heavy investments in manufacturing, we put historic amounts into public schools, and we are at a three decade low in crime and violent crime in our state. Those things make a difference in people's lives. They see those things. Every day, we're showing what we do. If you get elected for God's sakes, govern with courage and competency and move quickly. Embrace the big idea. Sweat the small stuff.
(21:58)
And I said this, "I'm not afraid to reach across the aisle and work with folks if they're willing to be reasonable about it." The results are, we now have a state that is not only providing all those things to people. Lo and behold, when you take care of your workers, businesses thrive. We're now the friendliest state to start and grow a business. Largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies. And we are ranked as the freest state to choose your life, love who you are, and bring your authentic self wherever you want to bring it.
(22:26)
And the two that I'm most proud of, recently named the best place in the country to raise a child. And this one, I'll own it. We rank second in another category. We're the second-happiest state. It's cold as hell but we're still happy about it. Hawaii ranks first. We'll give it to them. Look, I left the public school classroom not to get elected to office. I went to fight for the very things I was seeing in my friends around me. To fight for the middle class, families just like my own. Look, there's folks that doubted us. Those of you in here know this. I did not know this when I ran in my congressional district. There had been one Democrat since 1892 and all the pundits and all the power to be and all the consultants said, "Oh, isn't that sweet? Public school teacher is running." And then you could tell they would turn around and say, "What a dumbass. He's never going to win."
(23:23)
Well, we did win because people want to see people who look like them, they want them to fight for the things they have and they want to make sure, as I've said it numerous times, don't underestimate working people. Don't underestimate folks who know what it means to have to work a full day to make sure that they're able to provide for their families. So look, I'm convinced, I know it's old school, I'm convinced on this. There is an appetite out there across this country to govern with courage and competency, to call crap where it is, to not be afraid to make a mistake about things, but to show people who you truly are and that they don't have to wonder who the Democratic Party is. "Oh, are you going to go to
Governor Tim walz (24:00):
… to a cocktail party with somebody who's super rich and then pass a law that benefits them. Are you going to work your ass off and make sure our kids get a good education and make sure it's free? That's what they want to know. So we got to get rid of the calibrating our words. We got to get rid of poll testing things, as I've said to this. Do you know that people want to be able to own a home? Really? Somebody polled that recently that yeah, they'd like to do that. So get out there and listen to people, have the guts to fight for them. In the short term, I'm telling you what, we have to push back every single day to what Trump is doing, every single day.
(24:37)
We have a responsibility to make sure that come hell or high water, we're working for the middle class, we're making sure they get a good job, they can own a home, their kids are safe and they can retire with dignity. And the thing that we know, this is when we're fighting for all those things that seem pretty clear, we can do multiple things for those who tell us we should give up on what Republicans have decided are social issues or distraction issues, a woman's right to make her own healthcare decision is a fundamental decision, it's not a distraction issue, it's not something…I heard folks say we should focus on the tariffs, not that Abrego Garcia was polled off by masked men, thrown in a van and shipped off to El Salvadorian gulag. We shouldn't do that. Who the hell are we as Americans if that's not a top priority of ours, to protect that due process?
(25:32)
And we can talk about funding public education, but we are damn sure going to talk about responsible gun ownership so that our children don't die in schools. So we let our party be defined as anti-Trump. We are anti-Trump. That is the truth. But I'll tell you what, if you're a firefighter and there's a five-alarm fire, you go put it out. But what you should really be doing is fireproofing homes on the front end. So making sure that we don't ever get to that point. How did we allow it that America would vote for that thing that sits in the White House. We got to let voters know we've got a big, bold vision. We're going to build a government that works for them. It means having the guts to break down and break down the power structures that are there. We know who's strangling our politics and we know who's afraid to say things when they should be saying other things.
(26:28)
So I got to tell you this, there's a system that keeps our wages stagnant. There's things that make sure that what used to be the air we breathe, everyone in here who's gray hair like me knows there was no question, you had every opportunity to do better than your parents. That's because when we were young, the average age of homeownership was 26 years old. Now it's 40 because the system is screwing over young people, making it more difficult. So for us, we got to make sure upward mobility is part of what we do. Celebrate them for them, shake up the status quo, make sure that no young people are left behind and have the damn courage that for too long we've got work to do. Black and brown folks are being left behind in systemic issues and systemic racism is still holding them down. And if we don't do it, they're damn sure not do it on the other side of the aisle. So when they try and bully us and say, we shouldn't talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, that's what we should be talking about because that's how we grow. So let's go deliver. Let's deliver on healthcare. Let's deliver on the idea of homeownership as a possibility. Let's deliver and talk about climate change. And I'm just going to say it, shame on any of us who throws a chance child under the bus for thinking they're going to get elected. That child deserves our support. Don't worry about the pollsters calling it distractions because we need to be the party of human dignity. If we're going to stay and they're going to believe us, we've got to fight in every part of the country. We've got to fight in every red state, we've got to fight in every congressional district because we've got a problem right now with image because we've allowed them to control the narrative, we've allowed them to define what things are, we've allowed them to tell us some states are red and some are blue. That is crap.
(28:24)
Our policies improve lives, our policies grow the economy, our policies make us safer and our policies live up to our true American values so we better say it. If we're talking about all these things in here and we've got a platform, it better mean everybody gets a seat at the table, every single person. So look, you know it. I'll say this, losing an election doesn't mean you have the right to retreat from a fight. What it means is you get back in the fight more than ever. We lost. Our party lost. We did not take the House. We did not take the presidency. But we're not here. Winning elections is the means to an end. The end is improving people's lives. We didn't win, so we can't improve life. We got to go back out and make sure we're doing it.
(29:13)
So look, right now, people just want to know one thing, "Do you have the guts to fight for me and do you believe in what you're saying?" Politics isn't left and right anymore. And I'm telling those people, those town halls, they don't really care, they're judging people on their willingness to stand up and fight. They don't want to see us standing like a deer in a goddang headlights. And there's a good reason for that. Nobody votes for roadkill. Nobody votes for roadkill. So I'll end with this and you've heard it, teachers in here know it. It's dang, nearly five o'clock, I'm standing between you and dinner and drinks with your friends. I'm an eternal optimist and the teachers in here know you supervise the lunchroom, you remain optimistic when you see those kids. But I'm optimistic because our path back starts with winning elections this year.
(30:00)
We win the governor's race in Virginia. We win the governor's race in New Jersey. That builds momentum that in 2026 we fire that merry band of dipshits that are backing Trump on everything, we take back the House majority and it goes right through California. There's going to be a bunch of voices come. Our fight is now. There's going to be a lot of voices out there. Everybody needs to be on the field, every lane needs to be full and we need to prepare ourselves to fight on every single issue. So California, thank you for what you do, thank you for leading. Let's get ready to kick their ass. Let's go.
