How America Invented the Red State

According to conventional wisdom, the last quarter century of elections has proved that most of the country leans conservative. It all started with a map.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/red-states-walz-vance/

https://archive.ph/zH9gi

On November 8, Tim Walz had to face the music. The scene was Eagan, Minnesota, where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers meet—a site of sacred importance to the Dakota Sioux, who recognize the area “as the center of the earth and all things,” and also where the Minnesota Vikings recently moved their headquarters. The music was John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Small Town.” As the Minnesota governor and now-failed vice presidential candidate took the stage to deliver his final word on the 2024 election, Mellencamp’s song blared from the speakers:

Well, I was born in a small town
And I live in a small town
Probably die in a small town
Oh, those small communities

Walz set out to reassure the millions of terrified Democratic voters that everything would be all right in the coming years. “Minnesota always has and always will be there to provide shelter from the storm,” he proclaimed. He touted his progressive legacy as governor, made promises to bridge divides with his Trump-voting, conservative constituents, and even took one final shot at his vice presidential opponent, JD Vance: “I can order doughnuts, people.” But the speech was overshadowed by the ambivalence of Mellencamp’s song. After all, Walz had just lost his home county in Minnesota to Donald Trump and Vance, even though Blue Earth County went to Joe Biden in 2020. This was no small matter: Walz spent two decades there as a high school teacher and football coach before going on to serve for 12 years as its congressional representative in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He was a dedicated member of his community, and yet his community had rejected him in favor of a real estate developer from New York and a Yale-educated Rust Belt upstart who, Walz had quipped, couldn’t tell the difference between a Hot Pocket and a runza. (It’s a meat-and-cabbage roll popular in Nebraska.)


The map and the territory: Trump posted this image of the election results on Truth Social.

The leadership of Walz’s party had also seemed to reject him, but only after weeks of enthusiastically supporting him. He entered the competition for vice president in late July as a bit of a dark horse. In the taxonomy of Democratic types, Walz falls into the Bernie Sanders category, in contrast to his then-opponent Josh Shapiro, who mimics Barack Obama in both his centrist politics and in every last cadence of his speech. And yet after the Minnesota governor went viral for calling Vance “weird,” he was selected as the man for the job. It was off to the races from there. It looked like the Democratic Party had discovered an effective way to neutralize Vance while simultaneously advancing a rural-progressive agenda. The down-home, aw-shucks prairie-populism routine reached such dizzying heights that Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign was at one point selling $40 Harris-Walz camo hats—something that would have been inconceivable under Obama-Biden, Clinton-Kaine, or even Biden-Harris. The party had finally found its voice from the heartland.

But by early October, the campaign had moved so far to the right that Walz started to seem like an anachronism, or even a stage prop. The Harris team obviously wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. The campaign seemed to have decided to make a play for some of the red states in the Midwest, but its strategy for doing so involved enlisting Dick and Liz Cheney as surrogates and promising a stronger immigration policy than Trump’s. One of the strangest of the campaign’s many strange choices was to stage a photo shoot in which Walz, wearing an orange hunting vest and looking very much like Dick Cheney, stood in a field with a shotgun—apparently having forgotten that most Americans of a certain age associate “Dick Cheney” and “hunting” with the time the then–vice president shot a guy in the chest. It was the party’s progressive-populist ambitions running straight into the blind alley it had engineered for itself after a decade of suppressing its left flank.

snip