Opinion | Vance Thinks He Knows Rural America. Walz Begs to Differ.

Mr. Walz knows from bruising experience just how much Republican politicians have failed rural America by draining funding from public institutions critical to the survival of small towns and farms: schools, rural hospitals and programs for rural development and agriculture. Nebraska’s Republican governor, Jim Pillen, recently pushed a tax cut plan that would have principally been paid for by eliminating operating funds for public schools and by taxing farm and manufacturing equipment; if it had passed, Mr. Pillen himself would have received a break on his property taxes of nearly $1 million a year. The question now is whether Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris can convince voters who distrust and even despise the Democratic Party that they have a better vision to restore rural America. The fact that Mr. Walz knows a Runza from a Hot Pocket is a start.

Nebraska, where members of my family have lived since 1856, long liked to boast that it was the political (as well as geographical) middle of the country. We have America’s only nonpartisan legislature. Between 1959 and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president 50 years later, we had six Republican and five Democratic governors. In that time, we sent four Democrats and four Republicans to the Senate. Our congressional representatives were almost always Republican, but the Second District, which includes most of Omaha, went for a Democrat, Brad Ashford as recently as 2014 — and his Republican successor, Don Bacon, has never carried more than 51 percent of the vote, even after the Legislature gerrymandered the district in 2010 and again in 2020 to favor G.O.P. candidates.

Since 2009, rural districts all over the country have swung hard to the right. But many of the ones that run up against suburbs, like Nebraska’s Second, remain very much in play. Congressional races in Arizona’s First and Sixth Districts, California’s 13th District, Iowa’s Third District, Michigan’s 10th District and Oregon’s Fifth District — all positioned on the interface of rural and urban areas — were decided by around 20,000 votes collectively in 2022. Given that, it’s frustrating that the national Democratic Party hasn’t thrown more support behind identifying and developing candidates with centrist politics and rural backgrounds that could appeal to voters who live there.

Tim Walz is the rare exception. He was elected to six consecutive terms in the House from Minnesota’s First District by campaigning hard on his rural upbringing.

As he’ll often say on the trail, he grew up in Valentine, in north-central Nebraska, where his father, a Korean War veteran, taught in the public school. At 14, Mr. Walz worked on the Fairway Ranch, a beef operation about 20 miles south of town. He spent summer days “working cattle, building fence, putting up hay.” Each night, all the ranch hands returned to the bunkhouse to play cards, but Mr. Walz would go through boxes of old National Geographic magazines “and dream of exotic places that were far away from where I was at.”