From Walz, a Rosier View of a Midwestern Upbringing

In the western Nebraska town where Tim Walz came of age, teenagers gathered at the Frosty Drive-In after football practice and spent summers working on farms. Foosball was popular, and so was Pizza Hut. The high school mascot was a badger.

The tree-lined streets of JD Vance’s hometown in Ohio surrounded a hulking steel mill that endured layoff after layoff. Businesses were boarded up, and pessimism prevailed. By his own telling, it was a community “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.”

The rural Midwestern back stories presented by the two major-party vice-presidential candidates are strikingly different. One is a grim tableau of addiction and poverty in the once-thriving industrial Midwest, as recollected by the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. Another is a glowing portrait of rural America offered by Mr. Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota who is Vice President Kamala Harris’s new running mate.

The rival campaigns are using these opposing depictions of rural life to make very different appeals to voters. The contrast captures the complexity of a region on which the outcome of the presidential election may hang.

“A rural identity is bound to mean different things to different people and to vary over time,” said Pierce Ekstrom, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies the consequences of political disagreement. “Campaigns have a lot of material that they could choose to work with, or not.”

Part of the candidates’ diverging takes on these places may be chalked up to a generational difference.