Will Walz’s rural upbringing lure small-town swing voters?

WINNEBAGO COUNTY, Wis. — The walls of the Fish Tales bait shop near the banks of Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin are lined with brightly colored bobs and lures. Big coolers hold leeches, butter worms and cans of Red Bull. On a recent morning, two fussy Dobermans were whining to be let out of a back room.

It is the kind of place the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, would feel comfortable stopping by as he headed out for a day of fishing, which he is known to do in Minnesota, where he is governor, and which he did as a child growing up in rural Nebraska.

His folksy, regular-guy image is part of the reason that Vice President Kamala Harris picked him as her running mate. Walz, the thinking goes, could help peel away voters in rural Republican areas of Midwestern swing states like Wisconsin who might feel kinship with his persona as hunter, fisherman and small-town football coach.

But in doing so, the campaign will need to circumvent people like Cory Van Vonderen, the owner of Fish Tales who said he related far less to Walz than to a billionaire scion of New York real estate, former President Donald Trump.

“The first time I saw Trump, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Everything I’d been thinking in my head came out of his mouth.”

Rural areas of Midwestern swing states abound with hard-liners for Trump. But here in the region south of Green Bay in swing-state Wisconsin, potential converts are everywhere — like down the street from the bait shop where one of Van Vonderen’s best friends (“the most gruff, no-nonsense guy,” he said) has come to detest Trump’s mean-spiritedness. Van Vonderen fears that he is bound to lose his friend to the Harris-Walz team.

In 2020, President Joe Biden won 49.45% of the vote in Wisconsin to Trump’s 48.82%. Back then, the cities and suburbs helped flip the state for Biden. This time, Democrats are looking more closely at rural areas full of white voters. There, the Harris campaign hopes that Walz can be a secret weapon.

To win in swing states like Wisconsin, which has one of the country’s highest proportions of white voters without college degrees, Harris does not have to persuade everyone who shares the views of Van Vonderen to switch allegiances. She just needs to pick off enough people in Republican counties to sway what is bound to be a close election in Wisconsin and beyond, something Walz noted Thursday in North Carolina. “Votes matter in every part of the state,” he said. “If we can reduce some of the margins in some areas, that’s all it takes.”

The hope is to sway people who are tired of what they see as Trump’s outlandish claims and his mockery of his enemies, as some Wisconsin voters say they are. Or people who remain, so far, undecided, a category that Van Vonderen, for one, just cannot wrap his head around.

“How can you be undecided?” he asked. The candidates are so different, he said, “it’s like choosing between polka music and rock ‘n’ roll.”

The Democrats’ emphasis on Wisconsin was clear last week when, during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Harris and Walz held a rally in Milwaukee, the largest city in the state. And in some parts of the state, Walz’s addition to the ticket might make a difference, local officials said.

“His presence says it all,” said Thomas M. Nelson, the Outagamie County executive who ran as a Democrat for U.S. Senate in 2022. “He sounds like a football coach. He gesticulates like an overstimulated social studies teacher. He looks the part and acts the part.”

Lauri Asbury, a school board member in Neenah, Wisconsin, who lost a Republican primary for the state Legislature in 2020, described Walz as a strategic pick who could pay dividends for the Democrats.

Her hometown, which boasts of “urban living in a rural setting,” has tended to lean Republican in both national and local elections. But redistricting has loosened the Republican grip there and in other areas and could improve Democratic turnout in November. In 2020, Trump won 50.8% of the votes in Winnebago County, where Neenah is situated.

Asbury said she plans to vote for Harris after growing tired of the lack of civil discourse from some in the Republican Party, among other reasons. To win over other voters, especially outside the college towns and liberal communities in the state, she said, the Harris campaign will need to channel Walz’s ethos to “establish common ground and build from there.”

“Approach them where they are,” she said, “like at a corn roast.”

Those kinds of opportunities abound in this stretch of Wisconsin this time of year, which on a recent weekend bustled with brat fries, including one in Ripon to raise money to replace a retiring police dog. There was a fish fair in Neenah; an outdoor gospel concert at a church pavilion in Waukau; a block party hosted by the Oshkosh Free Masons with balloon animals and a bounce house; and in tiny Omro, where all-terrain vehicles share the wildflower-lined roads with cars, a corn roast.

At “Smalltown Days” in the community of Van Dyne, members of the local Lions Club slung brats and grilled chicken, plopping dinner rolls on plates next to an auto show.

Strolling among the rows of pristinely preserved Pontiac Trans Ams, Chevy Novas and Camaros were white-haired men with dad bods and goofy smiles — doppelgängers of Walz — amid tattooed men and women wearing Harley-Davidson gear and people with flag shirts, flag earrings and red-white-and-blue nail polish.

Some were skeptical that Walz’s unpretentious image would make a difference to voters turned off by his liberal politics.

“Show me,” said Joe Tondu, sitting in his 1950 Studebaker and motioning at passersby. “Do you think anyone in this audience here would think it’s OK to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms?”

Walz’s progressive stances, which included signing a bill that would offer free menstrual products to “all menstruating students” in public school bathrooms, were out of step with rural America, and that was what mattered, Tondu said, not the fact that he might have more of a Wisconsin aura than Trump does.

“It is no hyperbole when I say that he is a socialist and probably a communist,” said Tondu.

Cheri Cearns, who lives near Van Dyne in Fond du Lac County, said Republicans had tried and failed at the regular-person tactic, too. She pointed to the 2008 presidential race, when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, hoping her lack of political polish would appeal to voters.

To Cearns, a retired prison intake sergeant who now helps babysit her grandchildren, all politicians, regardless of where they come from, are unrelatable.

“When you’re in a position of power, you live totally different than us,” she said.

Her thinking was largely in line with people like Brooke Huebner, tending bar at the FoxHaus in Omro. “It doesn’t matter where you come from,” said Huebner, who plans to back Trump. “It’s what you believe.”

Many voters in rural Wisconsin complain about the high cost of groceries and gas. Home prices have shot up, and rentals are scarce, they said. Manufacturing in the area has been on a steady decline, but several big paper mills and other plants are still in operation, and some are having trouble filling jobs, local officials said. A large red-black-and-white banner outside one advertised $250 hiring bonuses.

“Now hiring all positions,” it said. “Immediate hire.”

Cities like Oshkosh, a college town with a somewhat diverse population that includes a sizable Hmong community, are facing housing crunches, too. Only 19 single-family homes were built last year in the city of 66,000, said Jacob Floam, a City Council member.

“I know there are a lot of vibes,” said Floam, talking about how Democrats have deployed Walz to channel relatable optimism. “But this is more of a policy-based thing. Are you better off than you were four years ago? And do I think that him being on the ticket will have an influence in that? No, I don’t. I don’t.”

Leaders in this part of Wisconsin have been able to get past conflicting political ideologies to reach agreement on issues like securing funding for vending machines to distribute naloxone and fentanyl test strips to help a combat a scourge of overdoses. The area’s drug crisis makes Trump’s nominee, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who grew up with a drug-addicted mother in an area plagued by opioids, more relatable, some Republicans said.

But others conceded Walz has one important quality that Vance lacks: likability. Reid Ribble, a former Republican congressman from the area who is not enamored with either of the presidential nominees, called Walz “this affable, huggable guy.”

“People aren’t going to dislike him even if they disagree with him,” he said, but he also thinks that Harris exudes elitism.

“Harris needs to come across as being normal as well as likable, too,” he said.

Leslie Achterberg, who lives is Rush Lake, Wisconsin, which is not far from Ripon and counts itself as one of the birthplaces of the Republican Party, is among the skeptics.

He is the president of the local chapter of the 1800s-era Anti-Horse Thief Association — its sole activity is an annual oyster stew dinner — and served nearly four decades in the Army National Guard and Reserves, including 11 years of active duty in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. He likes to go fishing, and so far this summer has worked at nine brat fries to raise money for the local American Legion chapter.

A lifelong Republican, Achterberg has yet to make up his mind about the presidential race. He is not sure if Harris’ resume makes her qualified to lead the country. But Trump’s time in office, for him, was a total turnoff.

“He’s been there once, and what did he do for us?” he asked. “The way he acted in his presidency is a disgrace to the country.”

Recently, Achterberg has been studying Walz.

“He is a homegrown guy, not a major metropolitan guy. He relates to people a lot more than somebody out of San Francisco and Dallas, Texas, and Miami,” he said. “When they are born and raised in those big cities, I don’t think they have as much touch with the people in general.”

Could Walz’s background sway him to vote for a Harris-Walz ticket?

“It might,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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