Walz’s reelection in 2022 against a weak opponent showed that he lost the rural and small-town voters who used to see him as one of them.
Walz’s reelection in 2022 against a weak opponent showed that he lost the rural and small-town voters who used to see him as one of them.
A sk Democratic partisans what they like about Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate, and many will argue that, in spite of being a hard-shell progressive ideologue, Walz is a guy who knows how to win Middle America. He did, after all, spend twelve years representing Minnesota’s first congressional district, a red-leaning district along the Iowa border that voted twice for George W. Bush and twice for Donald Trump. He’s from Nebraska. He used to coach football and work in a factory. He was enlisted in the Army National Guard. He looks and sounds like a regular Red America guy.
It’s a mirage. Whatever political niche Walz once inhabited, his brand by now to voters who know him is that of an arch-progressive. That’s how his most recent election in Minnesota played out.
The Twin Cities Governor
Last year, I took a deep dive into the 2022 elections in Minnesota. There are a couple of distinctions in Minnesota’s political geography, but the most important one is between the Twin Cities and the rest of the state. Hennepin County, which contains Minneapolis, typically makes up 22 to 24 percent of the state electorate. Next-door Ramsey County, which includes the state capital of Saint Paul, typically makes up another 9 percent, so the Twin Cities counties alone are around a third of the state electorate.
This is not as extreme a distribution as Illinois’s, where in 2022, Cook County (Chicago) made up 35 percent of the electorate, and Cook plus the five counties that border it made up 61 percent. But it does explain why Minnesota remains stubbornly blue in comparison with Midwestern states that are less dominated by a single metropolitan area.
In 2018, Walz held Republicans to 51.6 percent of the two-party vote outside of Hennepin and Ramsey. That was a better showing for Democrats than Hillary Clinton’s, Joe Biden’s, or any gubernatorial candidate’s since 2002. The 2018 midterm also saw the most heavily urban electorate of the past two decades, with Hennepin and Ramsey making up 33.7 percent of the state. No surprise that Walz waltzed to an eleven-point win in a blue-wave year with that combination. It helped that he faced a weak opponent, former state representative and Hennepin County commissioner Jeff Johnson, who went down to his third straight defeat in a statewide election.
When Walz ran for reelection in 2022, he faced a fresh face in doctor and former state senator Scott Jensen, but Jensen was also not much of a candidate. He was easily placed on the defensive over vaccines, abortion, and whether the 2020 election was stolen. Turnout was about 5 percent lower statewide (as a share of eligible voters) than it had been in 2018. That drop-off hit hardest in the Twin Cities counties, which fell to 31.6 percent of the electorate. Jensen, despite being an uninspiring opponent, returned to the more historic Republican share of 54.7 percent of the two-party vote outside Hennepin and Ramsey. What nonetheless carried the election for Walz (who still won by 7.7 points) was that he held Jensen to 27.3 percent of the two-party vote in the Twin Cities counties, the best showing for a Democrat in the past two decades and a dramatic shift left from even a decade earlier:
Walz also won by double digits in populous, largely suburban Dakota and Washington Counties, which border the Twin Cities counties and are part of the same metro area, and in Olmsted County, which contains the city of Rochester (whose chief employer is the Mayo Clinic). You can guess why a strictly pro-lockdown stance was popular against a vaccine skeptic in a county built around the Mayo Clinic.
In short, Walz in office transformed himself into the candidate of urban, suburban, and blue Minnesota. Outside of the Twin Cities area and a few outposts in his old House district (more on that in a moment), Walz carried only five counties, four of them in the Iron Range in the far northeast of the state. That region is perhaps the last bastion of rural socialism in America, and it has been deep-blue territory throughout living memory. The rest of the state was all red:
As Steve Kornacki has observed, Walz’s record is not impressive in the sorts of counties full of non-college-educated white voters, where Democrats have suffered most during the Trump era:
The results of Walz's '22 GOV race in MN don't suggest he provides an obvious boost with the blue collar voters Dems have been shedding in WI/MI/PA: https://t.co/knKPzbd05E
— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) August 6, 2024
For comparison, adding in Klobuchar's '18 Senate results. Dem-friendly midterm and different dynamics, but striking contrast: pic.twitter.com/7CA4zh7xby
— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) August 6, 2024
Kornacki compares Walz with Amy Klobuchar, which is a bit unfair because Klobuchar in 2018 was running for her third term against an even more outgunned opponent than Johnson. Still, Kamala Harris could have picked Klobuchar if she wanted to. Walz has not matched her record with the Minnesota electorate.
Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight argues that Walz has historically outperformed a generic Democrat, but his data show a sharp drop-off in that regard when Walz moved from Congress to the governorship, with him outperforming a generic Democrat only by two points in 2018. I question why Rakich’s data show that a generic Democrat would have lost in Minnesota in 2022; while the margins were closer, the Democrat-Farmer-Labor candidates still won the statewide popular vote for the House, the state senate, the state assembly, and every statewide office.
Forgetting His Roots
What about Walz’s old House district? Consider the 24 counties that were at least partly incorporated in Minnesota’s first congressional district. The state was redistricted in 2013, so I’m combining the two iterations of the district, but 20 of the 24 counties were at least partly included throughout Walz’s tenure, mostly in their entirety.
In 2022, Walz carried only four of the 24 (Olmsted, Blue Earth, Nicollet, and Rice Counties), compared with eight in 2018. Across those 24 counties, Walz in 2018 won a narrow victory over Johnson, 49.6 percent to 47.1 percent, reflecting his good standing with his old voters. By 2022, Walz was defeated handily in those same 24 counties, 52.3 percent to 44.2 percent. He ran only slightly ahead of Joe Biden’s 2020 showing, when he lost 53.9 percent to 43.8 percent across those counties. That wasn’t because Jensen was a great improvement on Johnson. Nor is it just the political environment, although if you look at House races in Minnesota, Democrats went from a 55.1–43.7 advantage in 2018 to a 50.1–48.1 advantage in 2022.
If Walz still had a more moderate, rural-friendly brand than national Democrats, he might have bucked that trend with the advantage of incumbency. Gretchen Whitmer and Tony Evers, for example, both won by wider margins in 2022 than in 2018. But Walz’s shift to the left as governor and the chaotic events of 2020 (especially in Minneapolis) destroyed the old moderate brand that had helped him win six terms in the district.
Look at shifts in the margins. Walz went from a 2.5-point win in those 24 counties to an 8.5-point loss — an eleven-point swing. By contrast, the rest of the state (including the Twin Cities) swung 2.7 points against him. Olmsted was the only one of the 24 counties in which Walz’s margin improved, by 0.96 points. But Walz’s margin swung by double digits against him in 21 of the 24 counties of his old House district between 2018 and 2022. In seven of those counties, Walz ran worse than Biden had run in 2020.
Where did Walz do better in 2022 than in 2018? Just eight of the state’s counties — but those included Hennepin, Ramsey, Washington, and Dakota as well as Olmsted. The other three? Carver and Scott Counties, both of which border Hennepin, and Cook County, at the eastern tip of the Iron Range.
Maybe Tim Walz will wear better over three months on the national stage, where voters know only what the national press tells them about his record, than he has with rural and small-town Minnesotans who know him. But that would be no more obvious a conclusion from Walz’s record than it would be to project J. D. Vance as a working-class hero based on his 2022 Senate race.