Ever since he was picked, I’ve been struck by the disconnect between the media coverage of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s supposedly authentic appeal to Midwesterners, and the lack of evidence that this has translated into actual support in rural areas of his state. What I see is a bunch of people who aren’t from rural areas pontificating about how much those voters will like him.
New Yorker Molly Jong Fast gushed on MSNBC, “He ice fishes, he’s a hunter. He does butter carving . . . he’s a really a sort of — you know, he — he is a rural person.” New York Times cultural critic Amanda Hess wrote a piece titled, “The Political Appeal of the Aggressively Normal Dad.”
She wrote:
On the day Kamala Harris announced that she had picked him, Walz was styled online as a jolly imp with a camo hat on his head and a dad joke in his pocket, “an REI hire” and a “Swiss Army Knife candidate,” the guy so benignly folksy that he could reclaim progressive politics as a nostalgic masculine pastime, too.
The “REI hire” line seems to have been coined by an X user who is also from New York City. While I’ll admit it’s a clever turn of phrase, I also think it is unintentionally revealing as to this disconnect between Walz’s urban liberal fans and his underperformance among actual rural voters.
REI, for those unfamiliar, isn’t a rural brand. It’s an upscale outdoor-gear company that was founded in Seattle and mostly appeals to urbanites and suburbanites. If you look on the REI website, all of its locations in Minnesota are in the Twin Cities area. This is not the type of place where rural Americans go for fishing gear. It’s the sort of place where San Francisco hipsters buy their tents for Burning Man.
To be clear, I have never lived in rural America so I am not trying to claim any special authenticity. But the effort by coastal leftists to act as if Walz has some special appeal to rural America that is not supported by his races for governor strikes me sort of like if a Republican picked a black running mate and a bunch of white conservative pundits went on Fox to talk about how he is into hip-hop music so he’s gonna kill it among black voters.