Tim Walz is the elite idea of what appeals to a rural voter. He dresses casually, looks folksy—you’ve heard that he’s folksy a hundred times, and you’ll hear it a million times by November—and has a Midwestern accent. Those who have never met someone from rural America—or anyone outside of Washington and New York, really—think that this makes him popular among rural voters.
Walz’s record as a candidate says otherwise. When he first ran for Congress in 2006, he mostly campaigned against the Iraq War during a blue wave cycle. His district was in southern Minnesota. He did well in the eastern part of his district, largely winning the urban counties like Dodge, Blue Earth, and Olmsted, and losing the western rural counties of his district.
The only entirely rural county in his district was Murray County, which he won in 2006 because of the opposition to the Iraq War. In 2008, he didn’t have a serious challenger, and in 2010 he lost that county.
After 2010, because of redistricting, he didn’t have entirely rural counties in his district anymore. His district included either mixed counties or entirely urban ones. He did well in more urban areas and poorly in more rural places for the rest of his congressional career.
Walz ran for governor first in 2018 and then in 2022. He only won one rural county each time—both times he won Cook County. Here are maps of Minnesota. The left ones are Walz’s gubernatorial margins by county in 2018 and 2022, and the right ones are counties based on rural/urban population.
You can see that there is an almost perfect overlap between blue areas that Walz won and dark brown areas that are urban.
Minnesota has 87 counties, and 13 of them are entirely urban. In 2018, 71% of Walz’s entire votes came from those 13 counties. In 2022, 73% of his votes came from these counties.
Put differently, about 2.5 million Minnesotans voted in 2018 and 2022. Almost a million of them were city residents who voted for Walz. That is 4 in 10.
In those 13 counties specifically, there were about 1.6 million voters. Walz won about a million of them, or 3 in 5.
By contrast, in all of the rest of Minnesota, 4 in 10 voted for Walz in 2018. In 2022, his share dropped to 3 in 10. This includes entirely rural counties and counties with a mix of rural and urban populations. It is a safe guess that most of his votes in these areas came from urban areas.
If you compare Walz’s votes in rural areas, he ran behind Amy Klobuchar in all counties in 2022. Even though Klobuchar doesn’t look like what the elite think everyone in rural Minnesota looks like!
Walz’s rural appeal is a fantasy for pundits and coastal reporters who do not know any rural folks. But these numbers are unnecessary. You can also use logic.
If it were true that a guy who dresses casually, speaks with a Midwestern accent, and looks folksy appeals to rural communities, then a New Yorker, never seen without a suit, who is rich and eats his cheeseburger with a fork and knife, should be the last person those voters would like. That New Yorker is Donald Trump, who has won a larger share of the rural vote than any major politician in recent memory.
This is because rural voters don’t vote based on how you look. They vote according to where you stand on the issues they care about. Walz is culturally very progressive, despite how he presents himself, and far left on all issues. Rural voters are culturally conservative and put off by his soft-on-crime stance and by his support for gender-affirming care for minors, as well as many other of his positions.
Despite what the people in Washington and New York reporters think, these voters are not idiots who are fooled by your sense of fashion. They know what they want from their elected officials and vote for the candidates who promise to give it to them. Walz doesn’t promise that, and he has not been able to get them to vote for him.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
