Amid assassination attempts, fact-free race-baiting and more talk of brain worms than should be necessary in an election campaign, there has been one seemingly calm presence on the US hustings: Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. The Minnesota governor has infused the campaign with the discreet charm of the genteel Midwesterner, extolling the virtues of not being a “weird guy” with the affect of the everyman. The left has gone wild for Walz, and the right’s attacks on the candidate have so far failed to stick.
In Minnesota for a summer holiday with my partner’s decidedly Midwestern family just as Walzmania hit the US, I decided to try to get to the bottom of this phenomenon. Was Walz the straight-shooting regular guy he appeared to be, or did his jolly persona mask an avaricious pursuit of power by a cut-throat political operator? Was there a carapace of steel beneath all that plaid? There was no better place to investigate than the Minnesota State Fair.
Soon after Walz’s VP nomination, his folksy videos from the Great Minnesota Get-Together went viral. Witness the governor being tricked into riding the stomach-flipping Slingshot ride by his daughter while wearing a Bruce Springsteen t-shirt! Marvel at the genial would-be VP as he cuddles a piglet at the Oink Booth!
As a wide-eyed Austro-Brit transported to France, I gird my loins for a day out at the biggest party in the Midwest. I am hoping to understand this part of the country that has been rocketed to international attention due to the rise of its avuncular governor. My quarry was fresh from an emotional appearance at the Democratic National Convention, where his son, Gus Walz, spoke for many a progressive American when he shouted: “That’s my Dad!”
The Minnesota State Fair is a knockout dose of wholesome Americana, especially for the unsuspecting traveller. Salesmen hawk their wares. Teenagers attempt to win gargantuan stuffed animals for their sweethearts. Bearded men in checkered shirts perform feats of lumberjackery. Evening entertainment is provided by Ludacris and Mötley Crüe. And if Paris is a feast, then Minneapolis-Saint Paul is a buffet: the main attractions each year are the somewhat ominous-sounding “new foods” of the fair.
At the Minnesota Newspaper Museum, the smell of ink is thick in the air as old-school printing presses churn out the state fair’s official daily paper, as well as free posters bearing the text of the First Amendment. Volunteer Pat Kinney, a veteran reporter from over the border in Iowa, is operating one of these relics from an earlier age of journalism when layoffs were rare and newsprint stains were a hazard of the profession. He has a Walz story to share.
In 2022, Kinney tells me, he was helping out at the Hamline Church Dining Hall (new food for 2024: Swedish ‘Sota Sliders), watching local dignitaries get ready to celebrate the venue’s 125th anniversary. “I see this guy in a ball cap and t-shirt, looking like he just climbed out of a Freightliner semi-truck … he comes up to the microphone and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, that’s the governor!’”
“He’s the real deal,” Kinney says. “What you see is what you get, and if you don’t like him, he dares you to go ahead and vote him out.”
Alas, my attempt to reveal the dark side of Walz is so far unsuccessful.
A short walk away, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party stand is about as hopping as a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party stand can possibly be. Posters of Walz and Harris fan out around the perimeter and Minnesotans happily push pins into a state map showing where they plan to vote Democrat in November. T-shirts emblazoned with various “yas kween” slogans — “I’m in My Voting Era” and “Madam President” are both sold out — though the vetement du jour is the more forceful “BALZ TO THE WALZ” shirt, which your correspondent saw being sported all over the great state on her summer travels.
The volunteers at the stand are not authorised to speak to the media (“even the Australian media?” I beg, to no avail), so I head over to the stifling Education Building — the only enclosed space I encounter in the United States of America without bone-chillingly crisp air-conditioning — where the enthusiastic team behind the Fairvote Minnesota campaign have certified their governor as a “Democracy Champion” for his endorsement of preferential voting.
At the Minnesota House of Representatives booth, the helpful volunteers collar an elected member to talk to me on the record about their governor. State Representative Jim Nash is the minority whip in the House, and as a Republican is an increasingly endangered species in a state where Democrats hold the state’s House, Senate and Governor’s Mansion; the “trifecta”. It is this political feat that has allowed Walz to enact his agenda, from free school meals to paid parental leave.
Nash represents the rural district of Carver County — head West out of Minneapolis, pass Prince’s house and keep going — and is no fan of Walz. He says there are “two Minnesotas”: the liberal Walz voters of the Twin Cities, and the “very conservative” population of his district. In Nash’s telling, Walz has raised taxes too high and burned through a significant portion of a US$18 billion surplus to carry out his political program. Nash says the state now faces a “structural deficit”, though the House classifies it as a “structural imbalance” with an overall surplus of US$3.71 billion going into 2025.
Yet Nash sees some brightside in his political foe’s rise to international stardom. “I like it that we’re no longer fly-over country, and that people are paying attention,” he says.
And this is really the battle at the heart of this campaign. If 2016 was the election that overlooked the Midwest as a political force, in 2024, fly-over country is centre stage. Walz’s progressive vision of the Midwest is not one of disgruntled Trump voters in rural diners, but one of the open-minded football coach who supports gay rights and celebrates what immigrants have brought to middle America. But will voters go for Walz’s folksy tales of ordinary people getting by and minding their own business, or the Ohioan JD Vance’s dark warnings of pet-eating immigrants and childless cat ladies?
Nash is lukewarm in his endorsement of Trump and Vance. “I am supporting the endorsed Republican candidates,” he says, acknowledging there are some things about the former president and convicted felon who incited a mob to overthrow the 2020 election that are “not the greatest from some people’s perspective”. But he sees Walz as pulling an already progressive Democrat ticket even further to the left, and insists Americans were better off in the Trump years than they have been under Biden. It’s clear Nash has profound political disagreements with the governor, but he is not in the business of partisan character assassination.
Things are wrapping up when veteran Democrat State Representative Frank Hornstein, clad in a public-transport-themed baseball cap, wanders by with his family. Nash greets his colleague from across the aisle warmly and ropes him in for an interview.
“I’m a Republican, my friend here Frank Hornstein is a Democrat and we get on very, very well,” Nash says. Hornstein agrees “100%”.
Political polarisation? Not in the land of Minnesota Nice.
Hornstein has the air of a man who is having his cake and eating it too. A longtime public transport advocate, the House representative is stepping down after having passed a major infrastructure bill under the trifecta. He jumps at the chance to sing the governor’s praises, citing his record on climate change and education. “I’m just really excited that the whole world and the country is discovering what we’ve known all along — we have a gem in Tim Walz.”
But surely he must be a canny political operator to have gotten so far, so fast?
“He’s skilled at what he does, but I think what makes him so effective is that what you’re seeing is what we see,” Hornstein says. “That authenticity is what has launched him into the national limelight.”
It’s clear I will have to go further in my quest to reveal the Machivellian manoeuvring of this particular Midwesterner. If Nash, who cites Ronald Reagan in our conversation, embodies the old-school Republican Party, the dominant force in the GOP is out in force at the NEVER WALZ booth, where fair-goers can spin a wheel to win anti-governor swag. Here we go.
Jesse Smith from lobby group Action for Liberty is running the show as night falls and people begin to stream out of the fair. Action for Liberty officially claims no political affiliation, but Smith smiles from beneath an ULTRA MAGA hat as he tells me that Walz violated Minnesotans’ bodily autonomy with his COVID policies, lied about his military record and is testing castration drugs for rapists on gender-questioning children.
“Hey, have you got any rainbow flags here?” a passer-by asks Smith with a twinkle in his eye. “No, you’re going to have to go to your gay Democrat Party booth to find that,” Smith responds tartly, before assuring me that Action for Liberty is actually quite LGBT-friendly.
Smith’s entreaties that Walz is not popular in Minnesota ring hollow — he says the governor was elected with “just over 50% of the vote” in 2022, calling him “a guy who barely scraped by”, so who knows what he makes of Trump losing the popular vote in 2016 and entering the White House on just 46%, a scenario we could well see repeated in 2024.
As the fair winds down and I shuffle into the humid late-summer evening, I have found little to truly disrupt the narrative that what you see is what you get with Tim Walz, like him or loathe him. The world beyond the fair seems to agree. While the election looks like it will come down to the wire, Walz has a handy approval rating lead over Vance, who is diving ever deeper into the dangerous rhetoric of blood-and-soil ethnonationalism.
Several days after my full-body immersion in Minnesota culture (after which I did not know hunger for several days), Walz finally popped up at the fair, projecting, per The New York Times, “peak Midwestern dad energy” while doling out ice cream at the All You Can Drink Milk Stand. Call him the anti-Thatcher.
It remains to be seen whether the vice-presidential mansion will soon be occupied by the man in flannel, but at the Minnesota State Fair at least, Tim Walz is always on home turf.
