The people of rural Minnesota voted for Democrat Gov. Tim Walz six times for Congress, and once for governor, but times have changed, according to a new report.
Residents of Albert Lea, Minnesota, a rural Midwest town of 18,000 in Freeborn County, seem to be abandoning their support for Walz, Politico reported Friday.
"I don’t think Trump has ever been stronger in rural areas," Terry Gjersvik, a local Democrat who lost his bid for a state house seat in 2018, told Politico.
While Minnesota is not a key battleground state in the upcoming election, national and state polls show support for former President Trump in rural areas and small towns at around 60 percent or above.
But, the Harris-Walz campaign is targeting those rural areas ahead of November's election.
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"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," John Anzalone, a veteran pollster and Harris adviser, said. Walz, he said, "is the first nominee in modern history, maybe since [Jimmy] Carter, who can talk small town America, rural America."
Politico spoke with a multitude of people on the ground, and found that many Freeborn County locals who previously had voted Democrat were planning to pull the lever for Trump.
Rich Murray, Albert Lea's current mayor, told Politico that Harris and Walz will win the state, but that the governor is "not going to get the votes out here," which was not the case before 2016.
Freeborn County went twice to Obama and Walz carried the county when he unseated a Republican in his House race in 2006. But by 2016, Walz's support was narrowing and the county went for Trump twice.
Walz barely won the county when he was elected governor in 2018, but when he ran for reelection in 2022, he lost Freeborn to Republican challenger Scott Jensen by almost 15 points, a nearly 30 percentage point swing against him from his first Congressional race in 2006.
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When he first entered politics, Walz struck a moderate tone, but as governor he signed into law bills that enacted universal background checks, free school lunches and protections for abortion and gender transitions, Politico reported. Those policies, as well as lingering frustration over his COVID response, didn't appeal to voters in places like Freeborn County.
"I call it the Democrat ‘smash and grab’ in the Capitol," Freeborn resident Karla Salier said. "They went for everything they could get to make us a sanctuary for transgenders and illegals. They just went nuts."
But, the shift might be due in part to the polarization of voters.
"I think the voters changed," Eric Ostermeier, a politics professor at University of Minnesota, told Politico. "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," he said. "Which is saying party over personality, I guess."
