Sleepy Eye resident JoAnn Lux remembers when Gov. Tim Walz first ran for Congress in 2006 and conducted a town hall in nearby New Ulm.
“When I first met him, he was really open to any of our questions, and he seemed real friendly,” Lux said. “He seemed like he really, at that time, wanted to know what we thought or what was important to us, and that’s probably why I voted for him.”
Walz was reelected five times to represent the 1st Congressional District, a largely rural swath of small communities, college towns and farms that covers much of southern Minnesota.
The district also backed Walz in his first run for governor but failed to support his bid for a second term and is now considered out of reach for the DFL Party. Its current congressman, Rep. Brad Finstad, is a Donald Trump loyalist and among the most conservative Republicans in Congress.
Walz’s work on a farm bill and other issues important to rural America impressed Lux. But like other 1st District voters, she said her opinion of Walz shifted.
“When they nominated him to be vice president, at first I thought, ‘Oh, that’d be kind of neat to have somebody from Minnesota in a high office.’ But then I thought back to the stuff that he’s done over the last four or five years,” Lux said.
Party politics — and the progressive legislation he’s signed as governor — has outperformed Walz’s legacy in the most rural areas of the district he once called home.
And while Walz stumps for the Harris-Walz ticket across swing states hoping to win back some rural voters, their trend toward the GOP, accelerated by the election of Trump in 2016, is hard to overcome. While he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump carried rural voters by a nearly 2-to-1 margin that year, according to AP VoteCast.
Lux has lived in Sleepy Eye, a town of 3,500 residents that is dotted with Trump-Vance signs, for more than 50 years. Interviewed recently at Sleepy Eye Coffee Co. along the city’s Main Street, where Walz had interacted with patrons recently after a pheasant hunt, Lux said Walz has become “more radical” while the district has become more conservative.
But Sleepy Eye has always been a challenge for Walz, who won the town only twice during his six runs for Congress.
At a nearby cattle auction, David Mack, a cattle and grain farmer, chatted with friends of various political views.
Like Lux, Mack said Walz has done things to help farmers but “is more liberal” in an area that’s “just very conservative.”
“He won in a Republican zone. He was a congressman in a Republican area. We voted him in,” Mack said.
But people were less focused on party affiliation at that time, Mack said, and things are now more polarized.
Sleepy Eye resident Jim Rubie said Walz was not on his radar until he was running for governor.
“Everybody that I talked to seemed to like him when he was first elected, and he was pretty much a regular guy,” Rubie said. “(But) he’s gone further and further away from his roots, and that’s what upsets a lot of people.”
Flipping the district
A social studies teacher and football coach in Mankato who was also a member of the National Guard, Walz entered politics late in life, after students and others close to him persuaded him to run for Congress at the age of 41, largely because of dissatisfaction with former President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, a Democrat who represents the eastern Twin Cities region in Congress, championed the effort, although the 1st District had been represented by a Republican for 100 of the previous 114 years and Walz would have to unseat Republican incumbent Gil Gutknecht.
Although Walz was a longshot, had little campaign money and was ignored by the national Democratic Party, McCollum knew that, as a teacher, he had a network of students and fellow teachers that could help his candidacy. And Walz capitalized on anger over the Iraq war and campaigned on better healthcare for rural residents, which McCollum said resonated with voters.
Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, 2000-2010
Walz also campaigned on his “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, a mark that has recently been downgraded to an “F” since the governor evolved to support modest gun safety measures after a wave of mass shootings, especially the massacres at a Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and a high school in Parkland, Florida.
Gref Graif, a retired International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local official, said Walz won over some skeptics during a 2006 campaign event at the Mankato Energy Center by defending his Second Amendment stance.
“One of the guys asked if he was going to be a Democrat that takes away their guns and his comment back really took everybody by surprise,” Graif said. “He said, ‘Well, I’m a sergeant in the artillery of the National Guard, and I’ll take Gil Gutknecht on at any firing range he wants to.’ That pretty much quieted that subject.”
In Congress, Walz served the district’s needs as a member of the Agriculture Committee and Veterans Affairs Committee. He secured increased access to credit and conservation programs in the 2008 farm bill and secured passage of a bill in 2010 that expanded the definition of a veteran to include many in the National Guard and reserves who had not qualified for that status.
Michael McLaughlin, who works at the Blue Earth County Veterans Service office, met Walz for the first time after returning from the Iraq war at the end of 2007. He went to the VFW in Mankato to grab a beer with a fellow veteran and Walz was holding a town hall at the post.
“We … had a casual conversation with Congressman Walz just about the issues we saw and kind of the attrition of people dropping out (of college) because there wasn’t good communication with the VA and the schools,” McLaughlin said.
He said he had struggled to pay for college under the GI Bill and benefited greatly from the GI bill reforms Walz pushed forward as a senior member of the Veterans Affairs Committee.
“The work that he did … the change that happened with the GI Bill, the direct impact — I don’t even think I knew he was a Democrat, none of that matters to me, I’m pretty middle of the road,” McLaughlin said. “But Democrat, Republican, none of that mattered. It was just more about the work that was done.”
Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, 2010-2020
Walz won reelection to Congress by comfortable margins until 2016, when Trump was on the ballot and rural areas increased their trend toward the GOP. That year, Walz won reelection by less than one percentage point and decided to run for governor.
The 1st District has some Democratic strongholds, including Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic, and Austin, headquarters to Hormel Foods. But it also encompasses vast rural areas and “lots of turkeys, and I mean the ones that gobble,” McCollum said.
And it’s changed over time.
Eight counties in the district flipped from “blue” to “red” in the dozen years Walz was in Congress.
The Harris-Walz campaign declined to respond to a request for Walz to address why the congressional district he used to represent has changed politically.
‘Nostalgia’ for a slower pace
McCollum pushed back against those who say Walz abandoned his centrist roots and drifted to the left over time. “As time goes by, you learn more about who you are,” she said. “He always stood for human rights, civil rights and women’s rights. He was always who he was.”
McCollum also said rural America has a “nostalgia for a way of life that wasn’t changing so rapidly.”
“In rural America, things aren’t moving as fast as the world around them,” McCollum said, and Trump was able to capitalize on the disconnect.
“Trump is offering a soothing balm,” she said.
Chosen as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in part because of his small-town, rural roots, Walz is on the campaign trail with two weeks until the Nov. 5 election to try to convince rural voters that Democrats also understand their problems.
Last week, Walz unveiled the Harris-Walz campaign’s rural initiative, which, among other things, would expand telemedicine and add 10,000 health care professionals to rural areas through new scholarships, loan forgiveness and new grant programs.
The campaign also vowed to cut the number of “ambulance deserts” in half and provide aid to keep independent pharmacies that overwhelmingly serve rural areas from shutting down.
“We will have rural America’s back,” Walz promised a crowd in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of Michael McLaughlin’s employer, the Blue Earth County Veterans Service office.
Ava Kian
Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.
Ana Radelat
Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.
