Democrats need to be able to connect with rural and working-class white voters. This is why Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, 24-year Army National Guard vet, former state-championship-winning high school football coach, avid hunter, is the perfect choice to be Kamala Harris’ running mate.
The knock on Democrats, and I’ve been saying this for years, probably because I’m a white working-class Democrat from a rural area, is that they seem to have just given up on rural and working-class voters.
Which astounds me, not the least because, the working class was the backbone of the FDR New Deal coalition that held together into the 1980s.
Ronald Reagan, building off Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy of 1968 and 1972, peeled off Southern rural and white working-class voters, which is how we got what were called, for a while, Reagan Democrats – the ones who were Democrats because their parents and grandparents and down the line had been Democrats since Andrew Jackson, and didn’t want to be anymore, after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
You don’t hear about Reagan Democrats these days, because they’ve been Republicans for a generation now, and Democrats in Southern and border states, the ones who have been able to win, have adopted as their operating strategy efforting to run up huge majorities in the big cities, ceding the territory outside the exurbs to the Republicans.
Election 2024
- UVA alum Katie Couric: ‘Democrats have kind of lost the working class’
- Mailbag: How important is the Kamala Harris VP pick to her 2024 chances?
- Expert: Kamala Harris likely to face unique challenges due to gender, race
- Ben Cline, fellow Republicans, seem to be scared of Kamala Harris
I don’t claim any knowledge of how things have worked in this respect in the Midwest since the Reagan Revolution, but the idea of the wide swath of the U.S. between the coasts being what we’ve come to call “flyover country” suggests to me that perhaps a similar trend took place out there.
It’s no less true that Midwestern rural and working-class white voters vote against their interests when they vote Republican than it is for Southern rural and working-class white voters.
Tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires don’t work to their advantage. Neither does leaving the healthcare system to work the way that it does, where you can go bankrupt from being in the hospital too long even if you have the best insurance you can afford to pay for.
Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, in Virginia, have always impressed me, because they’re Democrats who have gotten it from Day 1, understanding that they shouldn’t just concede the rural parts of Virginia – the Shenandoah Valley, Southwest, Southside – making it a point to come out this way early and often during campaign season, but also out of season, with regular visits to check on things when votes aren’t on the line.
This, I’m learning today, from studying the biography of Tim Walz, is his story. He was born in rural Nebraska, enlisted in the Army National Guard at 17 at the encouragement of his father, so he could use the GI Bill to help pay for college, followed in his father’s footsteps and got a degree in education, and became a high-school teacher and football coach, leading Mankato West High School to its first state championship in 1999.
Also in 1999, Walz volunteered to be the faculty advisor to the first gay-straight alliance at Mankato West, which, think about what that signaled to the kids – that the football coach would do that, would endorse LGBTQ+ equality, and back then, in 1999, long before there was any sense that we’d ever get to any degree of acceptance, and from the perspective of 2024, 25 years later, we still have a ways to go.
His political origin story is, he was chaperoning a group of Mankato West students to a George W. Bush campaign rally in 2004, and the group wasn’t allowed in because one of the students had a John Kerry campaign sticker on his wallet, and Walz, motivated by the slight, went the next day to volunteer at the local Democratic Party headquarters.
A year later, Walz decided to run for Congress in his rural Minnesota district that had been represented by Republicans for 100 of the previous 112 years, and won in 2006 – and ended up serving six terms, before running for governor in 2018, winning that race, and winning re-election in 2022.
We’re hearing from the Trump MAGA camp that they’re delighted that Walz won, because he is, in their rendering, “dangerously liberal” – because he shepherded bills providing free college tuition for low-income students, free breakfasts and lunches for K-12 public schoolchildren, instituting paid medical and family leave, and tax rebates for working-class and middle-class families, through the state legislature.
He’s also presumably “dangerously liberal” because he signed a bill last year guaranteeing a “fundamental right to make autonomous decisions” about reproductive healthcare, in the wake of the dramatically unpopular Trump Supreme Court decision in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade.
What makes Walz dangerous to the Trump MAGA side is that the only way they can attack him is by highlighting policy initiatives that actually benefit rural and working-class whites that Trump desperately needs in his coalition, and in highlighting those supposedly “dangerously liberal” policies that actually benefit rural and working-class whites, they might come to realize that the Trump side doesn’t do anything for them, other than talk a good game.
Tim Walz is a rural guy, a military guy, he knows his way around a football tailgate, and when he talks about the issues affecting tens of millions of Americans who wake up every morning thinking about how to make ends meet, it’s from 60 years of experience of waking up himself every day thinking about how to make ends meet.
Democrats haven’t had a candidate on a national ticket like Tim Walz since, maybe Bill Clinton, maybe all the way back to Jimmy Carter.
If you can’t tell already, I love this move, and if it was possible for me to be more excited about the Kamala Harris campaign, that’s where I am.
Share
Chris Graham
