Opinion | Vance Thinks He Knows Rural America. Walz Begs to Differ.

As Tim Walz took the stage at the Astro Theater in the Omaha suburb of La Vista on Saturday afternoon, the crowd roared with approval. Nearly 2,500 people were packed inside the auditorium, and thousands more were watching on big screens outside. It was the first time that Mr. Walz, the Minnesota governor, had been back to the state where he was born and grew up since Kamala Harris tapped him to join the Democratic ticket. He wasted no time in contrasting his running mate’s early years with her opponent Donald Trump’s gilded upbringing.

Ms. Harris, Mr. Walz reminded the audience, worked at McDonald’s in high school. “Can you picture Donald Trump working the McFlurry machine?” he asked. Later, he used a similar line of attack on Mr. Trump’s running mate. “You think JD Vance knows one damn thing about Nebraska?” he asked. “You think he’s ever had a Runza?” (A Runza is a German-style meat and cabbage roll that, improbably, can be purchased as fast food in Nebraska.) “That guy would call it a Hot Pocket,” he said. “You know it.”

For a generation or more, most of the politicians who visited towns like La Vista were Republicans who told their audiences a familiar story: that the government was in their way, that the welfare state was leeching their sweat and tears to service the lazy poor, that rugged individualism still reigned supreme. It’s the same story that Mr. Vance and his fellow Republicans are telling today. Mr. Walz is making a bold play to claw back the narrative by telling a different story — one that harks back to the prairie populists of the 20th century.

But there are limits to how much having a candidate like Mr. Walz on the ticket can achieve. Some parts of the country may be lost to Democrats for the foreseeable future, no matter how compelling a story the vice-presidential candidate has to tell. The rural Nebraska counties where Mr. Walz grew up and which comprise part of the Third Congressional District, went 80 percent to 90 percent for Mr. Trump in the last two elections. And the state as a whole has voted for just two Democratic presidential candidates in the last century — Franklin Roosevelt at the height of the Dust Bowl and Lyndon Johnson after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Still, Democrats have an opportunity to win back at least some of these voters — but only if they talk about what Republican policies have done to rural people, many of whom have been forced to leave their rural hometowns to find education and work in urban centers like Omaha.

Mr. Walz knows from bruising experience just how much Republican politicians have failed rural America by draining funding from public institutions critical to the survival of small towns and farms: schools, rural hospitals and programs for rural development and agriculture. Nebraska’s Republican governor, Jim Pillen, recently pushed a tax cut plan that would have principally been paid for by eliminating operating funds for public schools and by taxing farm and manufacturing equipment; if it had passed, Mr. Pillen himself would have received a break on his property taxes of nearly $1 million a year. The question now is whether Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris can convince voters who distrust and even despise the Democratic Party that they have a better vision to restore rural America. The fact that Mr. Walz knows a Runza from a Hot Pocket is a start.

Nebraska, where members of my family have lived since 1856, long liked to boast that it was the political (as well as geographical) middle of the country. We have America’s only nonpartisan legislature. Between 1959 and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president 50 years later, we had six Republican and five Democratic governors. In that time, we sent four Democrats and four Republicans to the Senate. Our congressional representatives were almost always Republican, but the Second District, which includes most of Omaha, went for a Democrat, Brad Ashford as recently as 2014 — and his Republican successor, Don Bacon, has never carried more than 51 percent of the vote, even after the Legislature gerrymandered the district in 2010 and again in 2020 to favor G.O.P. candidates.