Walz and legions of 'dudes' want to give men permission to vote Democrat

When Vice President Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, to the nation this week, she ran through his biography – dad, military member, high school football coach, teacher – but lingered on one particular story about his time teaching and coaching.

“Coach Walz was approached by a student in his social studies class,” Harris said. “The young man was one of the first openly gay students at the school and was hoping to start a gay straight alliance at a time when acceptance was difficult to find for LGBTQ students. Tim knew the signal that it would send to have a football coach get involved. So he signed up to be the group's faculty advisor.”

It was a story about Walz helping a kid out, but it was also a story about how, decades ago, Walz understood something that Democratic men are understanding en masse right now: not only that they have a gender, but that they can use their gender to send a political signal.

Building permission structures

There has been a remarkable trend since Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket: reaching out to men voters as men. There's White Dudes for Harris, which held a recent organizing call, plus other virtual meetups from groups including Win With Black Men, Men for Harris and Dads for Kamala.

Often, gender-specific organizing is aimed at women – think Moms Demand Action, Moms for Liberty, or Women for Trump. And indeed, there have been an array of Harris organizing calls aimed at different groups of women.

But men as a group vote substantially more Republican than women, and men continue to be a big part of Donald Trump's base. Indeed, the GOP (and particularly Trump’s GOP) has made itself the party of overt displays of masculinity.

So Democrats