Walz says he 'speaks like everybody else.' And it's not working for the campaign.

Tim Walz has a problem misspeaking.

Since being tapped as Kamala Harris’ running mate, the folksy, plain-speaking Minnesota governor has had to explain a growing number of inaccurate statements — and at times embellishments — about his past. They range from comments about his military service to his visit to Hong Kong more than three decades ago to clarifying that his family didn’t specifically use in vitro fertilization.

It’s unclear whether Walz’s verbal errors will undercut his credibility with voters. But the need to continually clean up those claims could politically hurt Walz and Harris, who are locked in a tight race with Donald Trump and JD Vance . And in some cases, key members of Harris’ circle weren’t aware of some of the inaccurate statements until they became public despite the vetting process, according to four people familiar with the conversations who were granted anonymity to discuss the matter.

“Any time you are forced to go off message is never welcome,” said Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. “But in the end, voters are looking for somebody who is more concerned about what these candidates are going to do to improve their lives than, ‘Did he get every single fact correct?’”

The most recent example came Tuesday, when a CBS debate moderator pressed Walz over his claim that he had been in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, when Hong Kong was still under British rule (Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997). Walz over the years had said publicly he had been in Hong Kong during the crackdown in Beijing, including 10 years ago in Congress.

But on Tuesday during the debate, he awkwardly responded that “all I said on this was, is, I got there that summer,” and “I’m a knucklehead at times” before conceding he “misspoke.”

On Wednesday, Walz sought to clean up his debate comments during a campaign stop in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where polling shows Harris and Trump virtually tied .

“Yeah, look, I have my dates wrong,” Walz told reporters in Harrisburg. “I was in Hong Kong in China in 1989. … I speak like everybody else speaks. I need to be clearer.”

Candidates running for higher office have long embellished their records or personal histories. President Joe Biden had long been known to overstate even minor details of his personal life, like his academic achievements . Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in 2010 had to explain why he misstated his military record when he claimed he served in Vietnam when he in fact served in the Marine Corps Reserves during the Vietnam War — but stateside. Former Rep. George Santos is well known for lying about a number of things, including that his mother was killed in the 9/11 attacks

Walz’s misstatements could contradict the image that the campaign has painted of him as an upstanding, everyday Midwest guy.

“He’s just honest,” Bob Frisby, 70, who lives in Rochester, Minnesota, recalled of Walz in an interview shortly after Harris tapped the governor as her running mate.

One of the earliest claims that came under scrutiny during the presidential campaign centered on Walz’s military record. Walz has repeatedly and inaccurately described himself as a “retired command sergeant major” including in radio ads from his very first congressional bid . But he never finished the final coursework to retire at such a rank. The Harris campaign quietly changed its website description, after questions from reporters, to say Walz once served at the command sergeant major rank.

In 2018 while campaigning for governor, he stated that he didn’t want “those weapons of war, that I carried in war” accessible to everyday Americans during a discussion about why he was reversing his position from his congressional days to support an assault weapons ban, giving the incorrect impression that he served in combat. Harris’ campaign later said he “misspoke.”

He also drew criticism for using his family’s struggles with fertility during the campaign as a way to highlight his stance on reproductive rights, a key issue during the campaign. He even attacked Vance over it, saying, “if it was up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF.” The Harris campaign had to clarify that Walz and his wife, Gwen, didn’t specifically use in vitro fertilization, but another similar treatment that Republicans haven’t talked about banning.

Walz himself raised some of these issues with Harris and her team during the vice presidential vetting process, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Harris’ circle, for example, knew of Walz’s 1995 DUI arrest when he was a school teacher in Nebraska, despite Walz’s past campaign and official staff trying to downplay and in some cases outright mislead reporters about the circumstances of the arrest.

Harris’ vetting team called some of Walz’s former House colleagues and other allies to check out that episode, his drinking habits and temperament since then, according to two other people familiar with the calls at the time.

“As the governor has said, he sometimes misspeaks. He speaks like a normal person and speaks passionately about issues he cares deeply about including democracy and stopping gun violence in our school,” a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign said, adding Trump and Vance “repeatedly lie and mislead about their plan to ban abortion nationwide” and other topics.

Democrats in recent weeks have had to downplay and defend some of Walz’s past inaccurate comments, including about his military rank. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker classified the comments as Walz “misspeaking on occasion” over the course of his career.

“You can pick and choose the things that you want you know over somebody's entire career and call it out," Pritzker told reporters, adding that “JD Vance is lying every day.”