For Democrats, Midwest Is Best: Two Reporters From the Region Discuss

The Democratic National Convention is in Chicago. The party’s vice-presidential nominee is from Minnesota. Wisconsin and Michigan are, once again, at the center of its national campaign strategy.

In the Democratic Party, everybody’s talking about the Midwest.

To those of us who are natives of the states from Ohio and Michigan to the east and Minnesota and Iowa to the west, the Midwest is a place of flat accents, agriculture reports on the radio and pork tenderloins that jut out from the bun on all sides.

Katie Rogers and I, two New York Times political reporters who grew up in the Midwest, decided to take a moment to explain the aura of our politically crucial home region, and why Democrats find themselves — thanks in large part to their vice-presidential nominee, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — betting that an appeal to Midwesternness is a key to winning the presidency in 2024.

Reid Epstein: Katie, in preparing to cover this convention, I’ve been talking with numerous Midwesterners about what makes our part of the world distinct both culturally and politically. Al Franken, the Minnesotan who parlayed a career on “Saturday Night Live” into a Senate seat, named his political action committee the Midwest Values PAC because, he said, he wanted to “identify myself as a Midwestern kid.”

When I asked him what it meant to be Midwestern, he put it succinctly.

“You know, you’re neighborly,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily inviting strangers into your house. That’s not very Midwestern, but I think it’s a certain kind of modesty, a certain sense of humor and common sense.”

How does that square with how you think about where you grew up?

Katie Rogers: That about sums it up. I was born in South Bend, and I grew up in nearby Elkhart, about two hours east of Chicago. I went to college in Chicago and didn’t come to the East Coast — and I had never seen the East Coast — until my mid-20s. What about you?

Reid: I was born and raised in Peoria, Ill., about two and a half hours southwest of Chicago. I had family on the East Coast and grandparents in Florida, and like good Midwesterners, we always loaded up a station wagon to make the long drives to see them.

Katie: I grew up pretty landlocked. But, I have spent much of my life being shaped by the values Franken is describing. A lot of the Midwesterners I know have a pretty dry, self-effacing sense of humor, one that is incredibly fine-tuned to life’s absurdities and to our own.

You really do grow up learning to call things as you see them. Of course, the other side to growing up Midwestern is that people can be tribal, and very wedded to what they know. I hadn’t really thought of this until now, but I think the ideas Franken describes make Midwesterners naturally adept at defusing tensions and suspicions associated with the unknown. We’re hard-wired to put people at ease. It can amount to a fine-tuned set of social skills, which is what we’re seeing in someone like Walz, don’t you think?

Reid: I think that’s right, Katie. It’s why so many people where we grew up go to places like New York and say things they think come across as polite but aren’t. Like, “It’s nice, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”

Walz himself made a joke about this at a fund-raiser last week. “This week has been interesting,” he told donors in Colorado. “That’s a Minnesota word, ‘interesting’ — you Minnesotans know, it has multiple meanings.”

When I read that from Walz, I knew precisely what he meant.

Katie: Why don’t you explain for our coastal readers?

Reid: It’s Midwestern for “Bless your heart.”

Katie: That’s one way to put it. I think we should get into the political strategy of this a bit more. Kamala Harris picked Walz because he could balance out her background. In recent days, it has been interesting to watch them interact and for her to rib him a bit on his music and food choices — kind of underscoring that he’s a white, Midwestern dad. How does this help her win over voters in the region? What do your Midwestern sources say?

Reid: The campaign is leaning way into his white-bread image and emphasizing a lack of cosmopolitanism that has defined the Democratic Party in recent decades.

Of course, Walz is no hayseed. We’ve written about the rather sophisticated way he put himself in position to be picked to be the nominee for vice president.

He spent all those years leading trips to China, and we’re supposed to believe he doesn’t eat spicy food? Come on.

Katie: It will definitely be interesting how he talks about his experience in that part of the world, and whether he emphasizes it much going forward. But right now it seems that he is most comfortable on the trail talking about what he sees as Midwestern values. He keeps saying that where he is from, people mind their own business when it comes to the sorts of personal choices that are going to be decisive issues in this election.

Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary — and a fellow Hoosier — mentioned something interesting to me the other day, which is that Democrats may be in a moment right now where they need to do a little extra work to remind Midwestern voters “that we are on their side.”

Buttigieg said Walz “represents another chance to get that across, precisely because some of the things that he’s associated with, in terms of style, in terms of biography, and importantly, in terms of policy.”

On the Republican side, of course, Senator JD Vance of Ohio is representing a very different view of what Midwesterners believe, homing in on the idea that people feel distrustful of politics, feel taken advantage of, and feel forgotten. It will be interesting to see which argument — and whose definition of this region — wins out in November.

Reid: Vance also appears to have a different definition of regional boundaries — he claims to be Appalachian despite growing up in southwest Ohio.

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who has known Walz for two decades, has on multiple occasions told me the story of her mother-in-law, who raised six boys in Mankato, cooking a Parmesan chicken dinner for Walz and his wife, Gwen, when their son, Gus, was born in the last weeks of Walz’s first campaign for Congress.

“It’s not just geography,” Klobuchar said of the Midwest. “It’s also a way of life.”

Katie: Speaking of geography, we are in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention this week. Given all that we just discussed, I expect we will hear a lot more about how the Democratic Party is a big tent that has a place for Americans of all walks of life and varying worldviews. Broadening the existing coalition will be crucial for the Harris-Walz ticket, and this week in Chicago will be a big first step.

Speaking of Chicago, it’s a lot nicer here right now than in Washington in August.

Reid: Oh, you mean being in a place where you’re not drenched in sweat after being outside for five minutes is a good thing? The summer weather was one of Chicago’s biggest selling points when Gov. JB Pritzker’s team was pitching the city to host this convention. His team made sure to remind Democratic National Committee officials that it is typically quite hot this time of year in Houston, the other finalist.

But Chicago also holds itself out as a global city in a way that the rest of the Midwest — certainly the places you and I come from — does not. When I was chatting last week with Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton of Illinois, who grew up and represented the South Side of Chicago in the General Assembly, she placed the city in competition not with the rest of the region or even the country, but with places like London, Paris and Toyko.

“Chicago has been, several years in a row, voted as the best city in the world,” she said.