Let’s hear it for joyful older white guys. That’s one of the beneficial vibes MN Gov. Tim Walz brings to the new Democratic ticket, and a lot of Americans are feeling it after his electrifying introduction to the 2024 political campaign Tuesday night.  Steven Greenhouse points out in a recent tweet that Walz is also notable as the most pro-worker governor in America. Greenhouse links to an article he wrote about Walz more than a year ago at The Guardian, which noted: “Minnesota’s Democratic governor and legislature has enacted one of the most pro-worker packages of legislation that any US state has passed in decades which includes paid family and medical leave, prohibits non-compete clauses, bars employers from holding anti-union captive audience meetings, and strengthens protections for meatpacking workers and Amazon warehouse employees….Minnesota’s new legislation mandates paid sick days, allows teachers’ unions to bargain over educator-to-student ratios and creates a statewide council to improve conditions for nursing home workers…“Paid family and medical leave is extremely popular, not only in Minnesota, but nationally as well,” [state Rep. Ruth] Richardson said. “It’s one of those issues that are incredibly bipartisan. I believe that passing paid family and medical leave is possible in blue and red trifecta states and in everything in between…Minnesota’s commissioner of labor and industry, Nicole Blissenbach, said the new laws “truly make Minnesota the best state for workers and their families”.” It is estimated that there are at present about 3.8 million teachers working in the U.S., and their incomes are roughly analogous to that of skilled and semiskilled blue collar workers. Add to that number millions of retired teachers and all the voting family members from nuclear families of teachers and former teachers, and you have a sizable occupation-related group. Walz was an extraordinary, empathetic teacher by all reports, and is also married to a teacher. Ask friends if they were influenced in some positive way by a good teacher, and watch them light up. Walz and his ticket-mate Harris are in position to become the electoral beneficiaries of those feelings.

Timothy Noah emphatically concurs with the argument that Walz is a draw for working-class voters for the Democratic Ticket. As Noah writes in “Tim Walz Is a Dream Pick for the Labor Movement: He’ll help Kamala Harris make up for lost time courting the working class” at the New Republic: “Kamala Harris entered the presidential race with a worrisome deficit of working-class support. In an average of matchups after the June 27 presidential debate, Trump led Harris among voters who did not graduate from college by 11.6 percentage points, a slightly larger margin than the 11.2 percentage points by which Trump led Biden (whose conspicuously poor debate performance was the reason for doing such polls in the first place). For a brief while it looked as though Harris might worsen her standing among working-class voters by choosing Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, whose record on labor was not good. Instead, she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who has strong working-class appeal….In 2020 President Joe Biden, with an excellent record as a friend of labor, won 56 percent of union households. Two years later, Walz, running for reelection as governor, won nearly 60 percent of union households. In 2020, Biden won 32 percent of the white working-class vote, defined conventionally as white people who lack a college degree. In 2022, Walz won 44 percent….In a July 29 letter urging Harris to choose Walz, 26 Minnesota labor leaders noted that Walz

enacted paid family and medical leave for all families, provided unemployment insurance to hourly school workers, expanded the collective bargaining rights of Minnesotans, provided free school meals to every Minnesota student, appointed a labor lawyer to lead the state Department of Labor and Industry, signed a tough law against wage theft by corporations and developers, and made it illegal for employers to force working people to attend anti-union meetings.

….Walz left Congress with a lifetime score from the AFL-CIO of 93 percent, compared to 90 percent for the average House Democrat. Harris left the Senate with a 98 percent lifetime score, which sounds better but matches the score for the average Democrat in the Senate, where labor bills get voted on less frequently.”

But after the sugar high from Tuesday night fades, there is the stark reality that Vice Presidents are more often ribbon-cutters and funeral-attenders, who occasionally cast an important tie-breaker vote in U.S. Senate deliberations. But they are also potential presidents in training, as is the case with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. In that context, LBJ and Harry Truman did well, when history called. The selection of vice presidential candidates also reflects on the quality of judgement of the presidential nominee. In that context, Harris looks a whole lot better than her Republican opponent, whose venture capitalist ticket-mate is most famous for condescending comments about childless women. For a metric of the success of the Harris-Walz ticket roll-out, consider that their campaign raised $36 million in contributions within 24 hours of the announcement. It is expected that they will keep raking it in during their tour of swing states, including WI, MI, NV and AZ on this leg. But no one should take reports of Democratic superiority in fund-raising over Republicans too seriously. Trump’s campaign reportedly pulled in $137 million in July. Through their network of SuperPacs and billionaire sugar-daddies, the Republicans will have enough to be competitive in ad-buys by the time early voting starts. Democrats are going to need more contributions all the way to Election Day, and donations can be made up and down the Democratic ticket right here.

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, J. Miles Coleman notes some new electoral college rating changes, including: “….it appears that at least in the short term, Harris has reversed the slippage—or has at least been able to stop the bleeding—that Democrats have seen since the Biden-Trump debate in June. Looking nationally, Harris currently leads in all national polling aggregators….Before this week, one of the more recent changes we made to our Electoral College ratings was when we downgraded Democrats’ prospects in Walz’s Minnesota. Our reasoning was that the Gopher State was just not that much bluer than Michigan, a state we simultaneously moved in the Toss-up column. But some recent Fox News polling was telling: while Harris was tied with Trump in Michigan, her 52%-46% lead over Trump in Minnesota was close to what Biden carried the state by in 2020. Shortly after that Fox poll came out, a KSTP/SurveyUSA poll gave Harris an even more comfortable 50%-40% lead in Minnesota. So, from what we can tell, while Michigan (along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) remain on a knife’s edge, Minnesota is true to its usual form, as a state that typically leans a few points bluer than the nation as a whole….Though we wrote last week that vice presidential candidates, on average, deliver only marginal home state boosts, we feel that Walz’s placement on the Democratic ticket, combined with recent polling, provides more than enough justification to move the state into a firmer rating category. We are moving Minnesota from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic….Harris is somewhat unproven in the Midwest, one of the upsides of her candidacy, at least so far, is that she’s seemed to re-open Democrats’ Sun Belt path. While Biden had basically been stuck in the low-40s in Georgia for at least the last few months of his campaign, Harris’s numbers have typically been higher and she has run close to Trump in recent surveys. For his part, Trump has, at minimum, likely not helped his standing in Georgia by re-airing some of his long-running grievances against two of his favorite intraparty foils: Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), both of whom are broadly popular in the state. So, with all this, we feel that Georgia is more of a legitimately competitive state than it was prior to Biden’s departure—we are moving it back into the Toss-up column from Leans Republican. Here is the latest Crystal Ball map of the current electoral vote leanings: