Two Competing Visions of the Midwest Could Decide the Election

The Midwest is having a moment. Not only did both major political parties plan their conventions in Midwestern cities, both (coastal) presidential nominees plucked their running mates from the country’s interior — Sen. JD Vance from Ohio, and Gov. Tim Walz from Minnesota. Walz’s selection in particular prompted a tornado of paeans to Midwestern-ness in media both social (@SamuelAAdams on X: “ Tim Walz: The Audacity of Ope ”) and traditional ( NYT Opinion : “Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need?”). For a region with a long history of being ignored by the coasts’ arbiters of culture and politics, the experience has been kind of … weird .

Until recently, the region has been an afterthought to many scholars, too, which is why Jon K. Lauck, a history and political science professor at the University of South Dakota, effectively invented the field of Midwest studies — though, being Midwestern himself, he is too modest to say so. A decade ago, he co-founded the Midwestern History Association along with a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of the region’s “identity, geography, society, culture, and politics.” If anyone could explain the currency of “the Midwest” as a political brand, I figured it was Lauck.

Turns out there are multiple Midwestern identities, according to Lauck, and the two vice presidential candidates showcase two of the dominant ones. If Walz represents the agrarian, small-town version of his upbringing in Nebraska and Minnesota, Vance represents the industrial-city version of Rust Belt Ohio. “They represent different subcultures or subregions of the Midwest,” Lauck said, “but both stories are iconic to the Midwestern experience.”

Which version proves more appealing across this region — a region that gained renewed political attention from Democrats in particular after the party allowed its “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to crumble in 2016 — will be for voters to decide. How Walz and Vance talk about themselves will play into that decision, and both campaigns have been deploying them across the Midwestern battlegrounds in hopes their guy will do it better.

Lauck is not picking sides, but he does hope that the larger debate hews to a more “Midwestern” style of communication that avoids the coastal tendency toward catastrophization. It’s more effective, he thinks, to present “ideas on how to fix the problem, and not just constantly bellyache.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you make of Midwest-oriented internet culture, accounts like “ Midwest vs. Everybody ,” that gently mock but also celebrate the Midwest in a self-deprecating way?

I think there is a streak of nonchalance in Midwestern culture. People don’t take things too seriously and overreact. I think there is this culture of catastrophism on the coasts. I think this is one of the clever things of Walz — instead of this constant drumbeat, like the world’s going to end and American democracy will cease to exist if we lose, he’s making it more about child care and the price of a house. That’s practical. It’s tangible and something people can understand and feel. Whereas these other concerns are so theoretical and so distant from people’s day-to-day concerns that I don’t think they have the same resonance.

To me, a much more convincing style is the Midwestern style, where someone is very sober. They explain the problem in real terms. They quantify the problem, and they don’t exaggerate it. They don’t make it seem like tomorrow the world is ending, and they end with some sort of reasonable solution, or at least ideas on how to fix the problem and not just constantly bellyache.

Why is this a brand that it seems like Democrats in particular want to be associated with right now, in marketing the vice presidential pick as a Midwestern dad, for example?

I don’t think it’s any great shock to the world that the Democrats have a problem in the sense that their party is heavily coastal. Of course, Biden is from Delaware. Pelosi’s from San Francisco. Hakeem Jeffries is from New York City. And Kamala [Harris] is from San Francisco. That’s about as far coastal as you can get without falling into the ocean. They realize they have this problem in rural parts of the country and in the interior part of the country. If they were going to do something to cater to these interior Midwestern states, they needed somebody who could in some way embody that culture. And the governor of Minnesota, who’s from Nebraska, helps them to address that. And the media coverage has heavily highlighted all of that, which is very helpful for the Harris campaign.

You have a wonderful line in your book [ The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800-1900 ]: “a stronger grounding in the dull but decent and routine world of old-time Midwestern civic culture might be just what we need, a modern version of what the Ohioan Warren Harding called normalcy.” Beyond the geographical imperative, what is it about the culture of the Midwest that might be politically appealing in this moment?

Well, people think we are passing through this moment of chaos, where some people in both parties have staked out extreme positions. There is a genuine, deep hunger for normalcy, and nothing represents normalcy better than the Midwest. I think this is one of the things that Walz tapped into when he started talking about “weird” and, hey, we just want things to be normal. Let’s get back to basics. Let’s just focus on people and housing prices and child care, and I’m just the normal dude who was a football coach.

And I think on the Republican side, they’re trying to tap into someone who embodies the American dream. The American dream is someone who comes from modest means and works hard and advances up through the system. And there’s always these stories about: Is the American dream dead? Has it passed us by? Are millennials able to succeed to the extent their parents did? This debate about the American dream is not new to this time period. It’s been going on for 150 years. But when you can tap into someone like Vance, who came from very, not just modest circumstances, but dysfunctional circumstances by his own description, to work his way out of that and go to kind of a blue-collar, working-class university like Ohio State and go to the Marines, get deployed — that is tapping into an old staple of Midwestern culture, the importance of hard work and virtue and striving.

So you have two vice presidential candidates who are both Midwestern dads, and to the extent either of them is emphasizing or performing Midwestern-ness, they seem to be doing it in different ways. Can you tell me a bit about the contrast there?

They’re both doing it. But the region is not a monolith. There are various intricacies, niches and subregions that make experiences different. Walz is emphasizing his roots in small-town Nebraska. He talks about working on a Nebraska farm when he was a kid. His dad was a superintendent of a small school in Nebraska, and he went to the local college, Chadron State. And then he becomes a teacher in a small town, where there aren’t tons of other entertainment opportunities — there’s not a Broadway and all that. The center of civic and public life is the school. And he was there at the center of all of that. He was teaching geography and history and coaching football, which, as popular as basketball is, baseball, and other things, nothing tops football. In most towns, everyone goes to the Friday night football game. And so that is a real signifier of life in the small-town Midwest. And then he wears the Carhartts, and he goes walleye fishing, that sort of thing.

Now, what’s interesting about Walz is he kind of covers a couple of worlds because, in terms of Valentine [Nebraska, Walz’s hometown] and central western Nebraska, [it’s] definitely farm and ranch country. It’s kind of getting close to the line of aridity where we pass into the Great Plains or High Plains. So it’s not a place of tons of classic Midwestern lakes. He moves to Mankato [Minnesota]. In Mankato they’re right below that line where you pass into what I’ve called the North Country — Upper Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, which is another variety of Midwestern culture, which is heavy on lakes and logging and mining and fishing and trees and lumber. It’s a different deal than western Nebraska. So he has his foot in a couple of different Midwestern subregions.

In the case of Vance, he is identified with this working-class, blue-collar industrial culture of the Midwest that is very dominant in places like Ohio and Michigan, where towns have a big factory and people work in the factory their whole lives, and they get a pension and they have health care, and their wife can stay home and they can maybe have a cabin in the woods up north. It’s not agrarian. It’s industrial. And the Midwest was the center of the American industrial economy for a century. It’s still the number-one manufacturing region. [It] is definitely identified with middle-class life in the Midwest. You come from modest circumstances. You go into the factory, work hard, you save, you have a union job, and you can live a classic American middle-class life.

So they represent different subcultures or subregions of the Midwest, but both stories are iconic to the Midwestern experience.

What’s significant about the Appalachian identity as a subset of Midwestern identity?

There used to be a mountaineer culture in Eastern Kentucky in which Scots-Irish settlers — they were like 90 percent Scots-Irish — lived in the hills and hollers. And then some big corporations discovered coal. And a lot of these people went to work in the coal mines and had good jobs mining coal. But as coal mining became much more mechanized, you could mine the same amount of coal with a tenth of the number of workers. So these Scots-Irish mountain people began to migrate north right across the Ohio River. They took what was called the Hillbilly Highway, and they moved into these booming industrial Midwestern towns. Akron, Ohio, became known as the capital of West Virginia because there were so many people from Kentucky and West Virginia living there. They would form their own little enclave and their own little subculture and live in these towns. That workforce was essential to the Midwestern industrial economy. These people were a big chunk of the auto industry in Detroit, in Indianapolis, because the auto industry is huge. [Vance’s] family was part of that. Their particular town was Middletown, Ohio.

You’ve done polling on the extent to which folks in different parts of what we would consider the Midwest feel as far as identifying with Midwestern-ness. And you have some interesting results from Ohio, right?

We did a major poll of 2,000 Ohioans and 87 percent of people in Ohio, to no one’s surprise, said, we live in the Midwest. The exception was those counties in the southeastern tier of Ohio along the Ohio River, adjacent to West Virginia and Kentucky. And in those counties, we found a much higher percentage of people identifying as Appalachian. Which makes perfect sense, given the history and geography and settlement patterns of this era.

Now Walz is governor of Minnesota, which is in the core of the Midwest. Ninety-seven percent of people polled [in Minnesota] said they lived in the Midwest. That’s an amazing number. You can’t get 97 percent of people who agree on anything.

I know you’re not a political strategist, but what does it take for either vice presidential candidate to convince Midwesterners that they, or the ticket they represent, get the problems or aspirations of the region? What’s the best way for either of them to message to this important part of the country that they get it in a way that coastal types at the top of their tickets don’t?

You can have Walz go to some of these rural and small-town areas of these swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan and say, “We haven’t forgotten you, we’re not going to leave you behind. I came from a small town; I understand your problems. Here’s how I fixed this problem in Minnesota. I know how badly Democrats have been performing in rural counties in these areas. I’m going to make sure that the representatives of the Harris administration are out here addressing your problems.” And maybe he could even talk about the legacy of Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, and how they understood rural issues.

For Vance, I think, maybe targeting these industrial areas, [having] him say, “We get the problems that were caused by too much free trade and the dumping of steel and the importation of foreign autos and what that did to our industrial base. I saw it with my own eyes. My parents lived through this. We’re going to have a different approach to industrial policy.”

You’ve previously called the Midwest a forgotten region. At least politically this cycle, the reason we’re having this conversation is the region seems very much on campaigns’ minds. I’m wondering who forgot the Midwest in the first place and how did it get so, if you’ll forgive me the phrasing, central to this campaign season?

It just has not been the centerpiece of American culture for a long time. It once was. And it kind of faded from the mainstream. A lot of cultural production takes place in New York and LA, and that’s felt in places in the interior of the country, that they don’t have as loud a voice as they think they should, and that would be justified and would be fair. I think it’s fortunate for the Midwest that states like Michigan and Wisconsin have become tossups. It draws people in who want to win the campaign. Those states are essential to both sides’ efforts. Wisconsin in particular is basically a 50/50 state. I feel bad for these poor people in Wisconsin who are going to be bombarded with mailers and attacks for the next two months, but they’re probably used to it. They know how to tune it out by now. But it really does come down to places like Wisconsin and Michigan. And even more specifically, it comes down to things like the suburbs of Detroit and Macomb County, and Waukesha, Wisconsin. It’s going to be a game of inches.

Some of this increased political attention on the region happened in the wake of 2016, right? Dems had taken the “blue wall” for granted. Was that part of the region being politically forgotten?

No question. You remember the retrospectives on that race, people would constantly point out that Hillary Clinton did not visit Wisconsin. Which is pretty shocking. They just assumed they were going to win Wisconsin, and they didn’t. Same with Michigan. Even Minnesota, in 2016, Trump lost it by one point. And I remember thinking at the end of that campaign, [Trump held a rally] in Duluth, Minnesota. And I thought, what a waste. Obviously, Hillary’s going to win Minnesota. What are you even doing? But they had obviously picked up on some trend and they thought, “Well, maybe we can sneak out a win here,” and they almost did. And so that was a huge wake-up call to the Dems, like, “Oh, the blue wall has crumbled. This area is competitive. These are three or four swing states.”

The group of swing states was even a little bit bigger [before] then; people used to compete very aggressively over Iowa and Ohio. Iowa went for [Michael] Dukakis in 1988. It was a very purple state for a long time. [George W.] Bush worked hard to win Iowa in 2000 and 2004. And similar with Ohio too — remember how hard Bush and [John] Kerry worked to win Ohio? That’s just not a thing anymore.

So much has been made of the political realignment of the Midwest, particularly in 2016. I wonder what you think, as a historian of the region, is misunderstood about that? The classic explanation is “rural resentment.” Is there something that we’re all missing about what happened there?

I’ve never liked the term “rural resentment,” because it connotes that people are complaining about things that aren’t true or accurate. And it’s not mythical to say that the Midwest as a region really hasn’t been on the national agenda for a while, and it’s not mythical to say that deindustrialization was very painful for a lot of communities. And it’s not mythical to say that the farm crisis of the ’80s and the subsequent unwinding of rural America was painful. Those are all very true things. I think when you use the phrase “rural resentment,” it is a way of dismissing these concerns and not taking them seriously. I think it should be rephrased as rural concerns; rural concerns have not been on the agenda.

And you may remember after the 2016 election and Hillary losing Michigan and Wisconsin, there was this talk among Democratic strategists [about how to win] back the white working class. And a different group of strategists said, forget about the white working class in Wisconsin and Michigan, they’re gone. We need to focus on winning these new and emerging groups in Georgia and Arizona. We need to switch our focus to other states and get to 270 using a different form of map. People heard that, and people were aware of this debate about, should we just write off the Midwest? I think that was somewhat damaging. That’s actual proof that the region had been written off.

The other thing that gets stuck in the craw of people in my part of the country is the killing off of the Iowa caucuses by the Democrats. That was seen as kind of a proxy for the rural Midwest having a voice. And the Dems really unceremoniously just killed that off. That was done by people in the Biden political team who wanted South Carolina to go first because they thought that was advantageous to Biden. I think they were right about that. But there is also a consequence to that in terms of how you’re viewed in the rural interior part of the country. They’re like, “Wait, you’re killing off the Iowa caucuses — one chance we have to have some say in a broader culture that’s dominated by Washington, New York and LA? That doesn’t seem fair.”

Your point about Wisconsin reminded me of a conversation I had during a recent Senate race there, and this person said it felt like they were being punished for something because of the deluge of advertising. Were we better off when these national types just left us alone? What actually is good for Midwesterners here?

I think it’s good for the region to be part of the national conversation. I think it’s good for people to have a deeper discussion about what’s important to people in Wisconsin and Michigan. I think it’s all a win-win. I know that television advertising is annoying, but it will be over the second week of November.