ALBERT LEA, Minnesota — Tim Walz has been visiting Freeborn County for so long it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t have at least a passing familiarity with him. They’d seen him speaking at the Elks Lodge or surveying tornado damage or stopping by the gun club when he was still in Congress. The year after he was elected governor, he held the state’s fishing opener here.
There was a time they liked him, too. Even some conservatives did. They elected him six times to Congress.
Maybe, Janece Jeffrey, the president of the local teachers’ union, told me one recent Friday night, Democrats were onto something this election when Kamala Harris put Walz on the national ticket — someone who not only knew his way around farm country, but who once carried rural counties like Freeborn and could help the party make inroads in rural America.
But even if Walz is better than some other Democrats at talking to rural voters, how many people in a county like this one are even listening? “I think he can win back the ones that are maybe disillusioned with MAGA,” Jeffrey told me. The problem, she added, is that in her county, “I don’t know how many of them are left.”
Minnesota is not a battleground in the same way Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania are. But I’d come to Albert Lea, a town of 18,000 named for a topographer who mapped the area in the 19th century, to see how Walz’s message was landing here. If Walz really can connect to rural Americans — and if Democrats have an opening there — they would seem to have a head start in a place like this.
It isn’t necessarily even about winning. Rural America is still Trump country — maybe more so than ever. Four years ago, exit polls showed him carrying about 57 percent of the rural vote. This year, polls nationally and in Minnesota put his support in rural areas and small towns at around 60 percent or above.
But one of the Harris campaign’s goals is to cut down Trump’s margins in the rural Midwest. They are organizing in rural areas and have opened offices in far-flung outposts in swing states. And even if vice presidential candidates don’t have a rich history of making much of a difference in presidential elections, it was one reason many Democrats here cheered Harris’ selection of Walz, a Midwestern governor with a small-town pedigree.
The strategy, said John Anzalone, a veteran pollster and Harris adviser, is simple: “If you can do a couple points better, five points better, in those rural areas, and you multiply that by all the rural areas in those states, it’s a big deal.” Small margins tallied county-by-county can lead to a state-wide win. And Walz, he said, “is the first nominee in modern history, maybe since [Jimmy] Carter, who can talk small town America, rural America.”
I met Jeffrey in the field house overlooking the football field where Albert Lea’s high school football team, the Tigers, were getting beat. As the sun set over the far endzone, Jeffrey adjusted a window shade for a group of mostly older alumni watching from inside.
They weren’t exactly fans of the governor. There was Jim Munyer, the retired teacher I’d met at a Civil War Roundtable the previous night, who called Walz a “chameleon.” He suspected Walz was really more “California East, or California Midwest, I guess.”
There was Lowell Peterson, who told me over coffee earlier that day that when he saw Walz’s camo-print cap, all he saw was a desire to “be a friend to everybody.” And, he said, “I don’t like that crap, sucking up to everybody.”
And in a yellow safety vest by the concession stand, there was Mike Murtaugh, a former mayor of Albert Lea who, like a large number of people here voted for Barack Obama — and for Walz — before voting twice for Trump.
Murtaugh, who was helping with parking at the game, said of Walz, “He plays himself as a former teacher from out-state Minnesota, but his base definitely seems to be more metro.” And in the stands not far from him, the current mayor of Albert Lea, Rich Murray, told me that while Harris and Walz won’t have trouble winning the state, “he’s not going to get the votes out here.”
Not long ago, people here were voting for Democrats. Before flipping to Trump in 2016, Freeborn County, on Minnesota’s border with Iowa, had gone twice for Obama. Walz carried the county when he unseated a Republican in his House race in 2006. And it’s only about an hour from Mankato, the town where Walz taught high school and coached football in the 1990s and early 2000s. More than in most places in America, people here know Walz.
But when I asked Jeffrey about those rural, working-class voters she said might be “disillusioned with MAGA,” she considered her surroundings. Even talking about politics can be difficult here, she said.
“I’m a blue dot in a red county.”
To some Minnesota Democrats, watching Walz campaign for vice president has been more than a source of home-state pride or a calculated effort to narrow the party’s losses in rural America.
To them, it’s suggested at least the possibility of something bigger — a revival of the kind of prairie populism they revered in the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, whose name and likeness Democrats still put on bumper stickers and T-shirts here. They remember when Democrats — progressive Democrats, for that matter — were winning races not just in the Twin Cities, but on the Iron Range and in farm country, too.
The day that Harris selected Walz, one of the senator’s sons, David Wellstone — who helped start Camp Wellstone, the political training camp Walz attended at the start of his political career — told me Walz has “always been a Wellstone-type person, ever since the camps,” and that he saw in him a promise that his father’s “legacy’s still moving.”
Just as significant was that it was happening here, in the Midwest. Since the ascendancy of the Clintons, part of the Midwestern critique of the Democratic Party has been that it is mostly a party fashioned by elite, coastal liberals. And within Minnesota — as in other states — part of the rural- and small-town criticism of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Democrats are known here, is exactly the same, substituting the Twin Cities in this case for California or New York.
“The magic of Tim Walz,” said Jeff Blodgett, a longtime Democratic strategist in the state who worked for Wellstone, “is he’s a candidate not from the metro area … who was able to win over voters in the metro area, as well as do better than most statewide Democrats do in rural areas, too.”
“That had to do with the fact that he’s from a small town, he talks that language, he looks the part,” Blodgett said. “The fact that he had these kind of small-town qualities to him, that allowed him to connect with people really well outside the Twin Cities.”
For a while, anyway.
In 2006, in his first House campaign, Walz ran 13 percentage points ahead of the Republican incumbent, Gil Gutknecht, in Freeborn County. Six years later, he did even better, carrying 64 percent of the vote.
But by 2016, Walz was fading here. He won about 53 percent of the vote in Freeborn in his House race that year. Two years later, in his first run for governor, Walz beat his Republican opponent in the county by an even narrower margin. And when he ran for reelection in 2022, he got clobbered in Freeborn — losing to a relatively weak Republican challenger, Scott Jensen, by nearly 15 percentage points.
That’s a nearly 30 percentage point swing against him from his first race to his last.
“I don’t understand it,” said Larry Baker, a member of the Albert Lea City Council. “It’s just weird.”
Baker, an independent, told me he tries not to talk about partisan politics. It makes his work on the council harder. But Walz, he said, “made sense. He was a straight shooter … You listen to a guy like Tim Walz, you know, he’s a teacher for all these years, and it’s kind of refreshing, because he gets down to the basics on what we should be doing.”
Of voters’ shift away from him, Baker said, “I don’t know what happened. It’s hard to say.”
One explanation is that it’s Walz who changed. A former National Guardsman and public school teacher from small-town Nebraska, he’d cut a moderate profile in Washington with his support for the Keystone XL pipeline, his vote against the bank bailout in 2008 and his ‘A’ rating from the NRA.
Then, as governor — no longer representing a conservative-leaning House district, but a state where Democrats control the levers of government — he traded his old persona for a more progressive one, signing into law everything from universal background checks to free school lunches and protections for abortion and gender-affirming care. (The Republican insult “Tampon Tim” comes from a bill requiring public schools to provide their students access to menstrual products).
None of that played well in places like Freeborn County.
“I call it the Democrat ‘smash and grab’ in the Capitol,” said Karla Salier, who was in the bleachers to watch her son, Jack, ride a horse in a Sunset Saddle Club event at the county fairgrounds. “They went for everything they could get to make us a sanctuary for transgenders and illegals. They just went nuts.”
When her husband, Bill, called Walz a “phony,” she said, “A flannel shirt doesn’t mean you blend in in the country.”
And there’s the lingering resentment for the Covid restrictions Walz oversaw as governor. Before a restaurant owner in Albert Lea was convicted of six misdemeanors for keeping her business open in violation of emergency orders, supporters here rallied to help raise money for her legal fund. This summer, the New York Post ran her story under the headline: “Minn. grandma issues warning after getting jailed over Walz’s COVID lockdown: ‘You do not want tyranny at this level.’”
Rick Kahn, a friend of Walz’s who has advised him and was a longtime friend and campaign treasurer to Wellstone, told me the governor’s drop-off in support outside of the Twin Cities between 2018 and 2022 primarily reflected frustration over his Covid response.
“Think about the demonization that occurred revolving around all the Covid-era restrictions, and that there was a greater sense of resentment, a greater sense of anger in greater Minnesota about why are our schools closed down, why are the businesses closed, why did we have to get vaccinated, why did we have to wear masks,” he said. “I personally believe that was the one and only thing between 2018 and 2022 for Tim in Minnesota, that there were still those hard feelings.”
Kahn remembered meeting with Walz before he first ran for office in 2006. And when I ran into Kahn this summer at the Democratic National Convention, he’d just seen Walz that morning.
“Same guy,” Kahn said. “This is not some version of Tim. It’s Tim.”
The other explanation for Walz’s erosion of support in Freeborn — the one the data would seem to back up — is that it had very little to do with him at all, and more to do with voters here.
Eric Ostermeier, a University of Minnesota professor who writes the “Smart Politics” blog, ran through the numbers for me: Of the 70 seats Democrats held in the state House when it convened earlier this year, 40 sat in the suburbs or exurbs, 18 came from Minneapolis and St. Paul, and 10 more from Duluth, Rochester and a handful of college towns. That means Democrats held just two districts in what could be considered out-state, non-college town areas of Minnesota.
And politically, there is little imperative to care about those areas at all. Democrats in Minnesota control not only the governor’s mansion, but both houses of the legislature. And that was after two longtime Democrats from the Iron Range left the party in 2020 to form their own, more moderate caucus of two.
“The devastation of the Democrats in the greater Minnesota and rural areas has been fairly swift in recent decades,” Ostermeier said, “and is almost complete.”
Part of that might be Walz, he said. But part of it is the voters — and how they seem to view any Democrat. Consider Collin Peterson, the House Agriculture chair from the district neighboring Walz’s who was ousted in 2020 after 30 years in Congress. It’s hard to get more rural or conservative than Peterson, who didn’t support Trump’s impeachment and who voted in favor of gun rights and anti-abortion legislation.
“You’re wondering if in Freeborn County or some of these other counties, could any Democrat perform well?” Ostermeier said. “Well, eventually, even the 7th Congressional District turned on Collin Peterson, and he didn’t really change.”
“I think the voters changed,” he said. “And I would say this is the other aspect of it, is the willingness of voters to split their ticket has changed. Because I think with people in their [information] silos and increasingly characterizing the other side as evil, it’s difficult for people to say, well, there is this one good Democrat and I’m still going to vote for him, or there is this one good Republican … he’s not so bad.”
Ostermeier added, “Which is saying party over personality, I guess.”
Members of the Freeborn County Democrats regularly meet for coffee at MineAgain’s Bar & Grill in Albert Lea, and on the morning I joined them, an activist was trying to persuade Joe Staloch, a candidate for a state legislative seat, that what he needed most was a “gimmick.”
Staloch wasn’t interested: “I don’t care about ‘gimmicks’,” he told him. He said he cared about health care and childcare and economic opportunity and gun control — and, most of all when he signed up to run, “to do what I can as a candidate to beat Trump.”
Democrats here know how long their prospects are. Earlier that day, when I asked Julie Ackland, the chair of the Freeborn County Democrats and a candidate for county commissioner, about her campaign, she told me, “I don’t have a very good chance.” In fact, she has so much else going on professionally and otherwise, she said, “I’m regretting signing up.”
There were about a dozen people at coffee, and I was sitting at the other end of the table from Ackland.
“It’s the farmers, they will not vote Democratic. It’s awful,” one of the women sitting across from me said.
“It’s the culture wars, too,” said another.
“People are hurting one way or another,” Staloch said. “Sometimes it’s financial, sometimes they don’t feel like they’re fitting in.”
Trump, he said, “is not pulling punches and he’s not being politically correct and that’s appealing to some people.”
“A lot of people,” one of the DFLers sitting near him said.
Ackland and her husband, Mark, told me they knew some Republicans they doubted would vote for Trump this year — a cousin, a Republican who had written a letter to the editor they’d read.
But they’d also seen Democrats before Walz try and fail here. Outside of town, not far from the Ackland’s soybean and sweetcorn farm, I met with Terry Gjersvik on the farm where he raises goats.
When he ran for a state House seat in 2018, he was certain he could win the rural vote. He had a family name that farmers knew. He lived in the house his grandfather bought in 1939. His campaign manager, Mac Ehrhardt, was the chair of a local company, Albert Lea Seed. Walz campaigned with him.
“We thought, look, I’m a farmer. We’re going to get the farmer vote,” he told me.
Instead, after he lost to the Republican incumbent, Peggy Bennett, by about 13 percentage points, he said some of the people who voted against him told him, “I trust you, but I don’t trust your party.”
Gjersvik said he’s optimistic that “there might be a one, two or three-percent crumble” in Trump’s numbers in rural areas, and that having Walz campaigning with Harris could help. But then there are all the Trump signs he sees.
Today, he said, “I don’t think Trump has ever been stronger in rural areas.”
And what if Democrats do manage to cut into Trump’s margins by a percentage point or two? It could tip elections in close states, significantly. And though it wouldn’t mark a wholesale change for the party’s standing in rural America, to optimistic Democrats, it could be a start.
Walz won the governorship because he racked up huge margins in the Twin Cities and their suburbs. His election night map in 2022 — with bursts of blue around Minneapolis and St. Paul, Rochester and Duluth, surrounded by seas of red — wasn’t much different from Biden’s in 2020.
But he still went to those places. Kahn said having someone on the ticket who “welcomes the opportunity to talk to people who don’t already agree and make the case and truly listen to what they have to say,” could “make a real difference in reducing the sense of anger that underscores the polarization.”
Or it could go the way it’s going now.
The morning after the Albert Lea Civil War Roundtable, where about 30 people gathered to hear a presentation on the Grand Army of the Republic, I found Munyer drinking coffee with friends at the Hy-Vee. Between the two parties, he said, “Right now, I think there’s a peaceful coexistence.”
But he wasn’t sure it would be sustainable after the election.
“Whoever doesn’t win, they are going to be very upset,” he said. “Either way, I think there’s going to be some violence.”
And after that?
“Learn from the Civil War,” he said. “Try to rebuild.”
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