Good morning. School, crisp mornings and pumpkin spice products galore. Fall is here.
Tim Walz has spent far more time doing events away from Minnesota over the last month, which makes his brief pop-in at the State Fair so notable. Walz, the two-term governor, didn’t really mingle with the masses. The Democratic vice presidential nominee grabbed a pork chop, served up some ice cream and posed for selfies with people who just happened to be wearing Harris-Walz garb in the dairy building. He said he’s keeping up with his day job as he campaigns for a new one. “I got a good team being able to manage my schedule,” Walz said to the assembled reporters. Of course, he bragged about Minnesota’s fair being the fairest of them all. Clay Masters was there for Sunday’s stop.
Yesterday, Walz was in Milwaukee for Labor Day festivities. Tomorrow, he heads to Pennsylvania for two days of campaigning for the Democratic ticket. There was a bit of a scare as one of the vehicles in the vice presidential motorcade was involved in a crash. Reporters traveling with the Walz contingent sustained minor injuries.
As Republicans criticize Walz over his response to George Floyd's murder and the resulting riots, there are still questions about what was happening internally. An after-action report was released in the year after the 2020 unrest. But the Walz administration hasn’t released all the documentation from that effort, saying an outside contractor did the work and therefore isn’t treated the same way as government-produced material. Public Record Media, a transparency watchdog group, filed a lawsuit last week seeking to unlock the information. The Star Tribune wrote about the legal wrangling here.
The effort to get independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to endorse Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump picked up the day of the assassination attempt on the former president. The New York Times has a lengthy piece on the political courtship that put the member of the iconic Democratic family behind Trump. It wasn’t a smooth process and, as the Times says, “it nearly fell apart several times.” Trump and his team were worried that Kennedy would be a drain on his support in key states, leading to some consideration of adding him to the ticket at one point; Kennedy has said he wouldn’t have taken “the worst job in Washington.”
Both the Minnesota House and Senate are in play this November. Republicans would need to win the only Senate seat on the ballot — a Lake Minnetonka-area district that is currently vacant — to take the chamber majority. They would have to flip a net four seats in the 134-seat House to take that chamber. The Star Tribune and MinnPost both have their races to watch. Clip and save them and watch the money rain down in these contests. | 