Rural Minnesotans Who Voted for Tim Walz 7 Times May Support Trump in November: Report

Rural Minnesotans voted for Democrat Tim Walz six times in congressional elections and once for governor, but times have changed, according to a new report.

Residents of Albert Lea, Minnesota, a rural Midwestern town of 18,000 in Freeborn County, appear to be abandoning their support for Walz, Polityka reported Friday.

“I don't think Trump has ever been stronger in rural areas,” Terry Gjersvik, a local Democrat who lost a 2018 race for a state House seat, 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 higher.

However, Harris-Walz's campaign is targeting rural areas ahead of the November election.

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“If you can do a few points better, five points better in rural areas and multiply that by all the rural areas in those states, that's a big deal,” said John Anzalone, a veteran pollster and adviser to Harris. Walz, he said, “is the first nominee in modern history, maybe since (Jimmy) Carter, who can talk about small-town America and rural America.”

Politico spoke to multiple people in the field and found that many Freeborn County residents who previously voted Democratic plan to pull the lever for Trump.

Rich Murray, the current mayor of Alberta Lea, told Politico that Harris and Walz would win the state, but the governor “won't be able to win votes here,” which wasn't the case before 2016.

Freeborn County has twice endorsed Obama, and Walz led the county when he unseated the Republican in his 2006 House race. But by 2016, support for Walz was waning and the county had twice gone for Trump.

Walz narrowly won the county when he was elected governor in 2018, but when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost Freeborn to Republican challenger Scott Jensen by almost 15 points, a nearly 30-point gap over him in compared to his first congressional race in 2006.

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When he first entered politics, Walz adopted a moderate tone, but as governor he signed bills establishing universal background checks, free school lunches and protections for abortion and gender reassignment, according to Politico. These policies, as well as ongoing frustration with them, The Covid response appealed to voters in places like Freeborn County.

“I call it the Democrat 'smash and grab' at the Capitol,” said Freeborn resident Karla Salier. “They did everything they could to make us a sanctuary for trans people and undocumented people. They just went crazy.”

However, this change may be due in part to voter polarization.

“I think voters have changed,” Eric Ostermeier, a politics professor at the University of Minnesota, told Politico. “And I would say that this is the second aspect of this situation: the willingness of voters to share tickets has changed.

“Because I think when people sit in (information) silos and increasingly characterize the other side as bad, it's hard for people to say, well, is there this one good Democrat and I'll still vote for him, or is there this one good Republican… it's not so bad,” he said. – I guess that means party over personality.

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