As Vice President Kamala Harris and her newly-minted running mate Tim Walz embark on their late summer swing-state circuit, their campaign is setting up infrastructure and testing messages that they think can appeal to rural voters and shave away the GOP's statewide margins across the Midwest and Rust Belt.
According to a strategy memo sent out Wednesday afternoon, Walz, who grew up in a small Nebraska town and represented a red-tinted rural House district in Minnesota, will be the face of this new effort.
"He is a historically popular leader who consistently outperformed national Democrats in his House district, including in counties that have supported Trump, offering a blueprint for how to cut margins in rural areas across the country," the memo states. "In Wisconsin specifically, many voters we need to reach already know him, since roughly 400,000 Wisconsinites see him every day on local television coming in from Minnesota."
Democrats appear conscious of their limitations in rural areas. Rural voters have broken for Republicans for many decades now, and urban voters for Democrats, with the divide widening more with each election cycle. A Pew Research Center analysis of the 2022 elections found that 69% of rural voters cast ballots for GOP candidates and only 29% for Democrats.
That same election cycle, Democrats lost several key rural House seats they had held for years, including Wisconsin's 3rd District, which runs up the state's western border. In 2018, Walz left his own rural congressional seat in Minnesota to run for governor; a Republican won the election to replace him. In his 2022 re-election bid, Walz roughly matched Biden's 2020 performance statewide and in Minnesota's rural counties, albeit while battling a relatively moderate Republican opponent who did not join his colleagues in some of their more inflammatory statements and positions. After winning three of Iowa's four House seats in 2018, Democrats have been pushed out of all federal and statewide offices in a state that voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary and general election, the latter by a nearly 10-point margin.
Obama's 2008 campaign, the most decisive electoral college victory for a Democratic candidate since 1996, won in part by rebuilding Democratic strength in rural areas and outperforming Sen. John Kerry's 2004 showing. Although Obama was never going to win rural America outright, his improvements there paved the way for urban and suburban voters to tip statewide elections and some House elections in favor of Democratic candidates.
In a sign that they are seeking to emulate parts of Obama's strategy, the Harris campaign has hired David Plouffe, the former president's 2008 campaign manager, as a top advisor.
"We have invested in campaign infrastructure across Wisconsin and are competing everywhere because we know we need to narrow the margins in rural areas to win," the Harris-Walz campaign memo states. "Our campaign will continue to go everywhere, and Governor Walz will be a key messenger in these rural areas where we’re focused on limiting Republicans’ margins," it said later, referring to Pennsylvania.
It's an apparent contrast to some past Democratic campaigns, which relied on turning out urban voters or converting as many voters as possible in suburban areas, which are often tightly contested, rather than setting foot into more inhospitable territory. Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, for example, lost all three blue-wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that Biden recaptured in 2020, in part by trimming Trump's margins in Republican counties.
The Harris campaign believes they've identified the issues they need to pick up rural voters.
"We are campaigning on the issues that matter to voters in these areas, including lowering health care costs, protecting abortion access, and strengthening local infrastructure," the memo states. "Democrats have a track record of performing well in critical rural counties like Iowa, Sauk, and Green [in Wisconsin] in recent elections – winning all three in 2020 – and our massive coordinated campaign is poised to build on that energy in the lead-up to November."
