Senator JD Vance might invoke his childhood in a former steel town in southwest Ohio or talk about his time as a student at Ohio State University. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota could drop anecdotes about his days as a football coach at Mankato West High School and his enthusiasm for mail-in rebates at Menards.
On Tuesday night, two vice-presidential candidates who hail from very different corners of the Midwest will face off on a debate stage in New York City. That presents a rare and particularly Midwest-specific political opportunity: The candidates could draw on their bonds to the region and try to reach on-the-fence voters in the battleground states of Michigan and Wisconsin, which share borders with Ohio and Minnesota.
“There is a Midwestern identity, and that’s one of the things that both Walz and Vance have been playing on,” said Jon Lauck, editor of Middle West Review, a journal at the University of South Dakota focused on studying the Midwest.
That said, the 12-state region is hardly a flyover monolith, and Mr. Walz and Mr. Vance have different stories to tell.
Mr. Lauck expects that Mr. Vance could speak to one narrative of the Midwest that is “more Michigan and Ohio centered, a little more affected by the unwinding of the old industrial order,” he said, connecting with voters in cities like Detroit and Flint, Mich., that were hollowed out during the decline of the auto industry.
The senator’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” chronicled the drug addiction and despair of Ohio, becoming a surprise best seller.
“It caught that moment where people were beginning to ask: ‘What about the center of the country? Who speaks to them? What are their issues?’” Mr. Lauck said. “He became a voice of the region in a way that very few people expected.”
Mr. Walz, on the other hand, might reference his experience growing up in the Plains state of Nebraska and his move to Minnesota, where he and his wife have raised their children.
On some level, at least, many people in Wisconsin recognize themselves in Mr. Walz, an advantage that he could lean into during the debate to reach voters in that swing state.
Wisconsin and Minnesota have plenty in common: snowy winters, a countryside dotted with lakes and farms, an appreciation for football and homey comfort food. Many people in western and northern Wisconsin get their news from TV stations in Minneapolis or Duluth, making them at least vaguely familiar with Mr. Walz before Vice President Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate.
In the last few weeks, Mr. Walz has leaned into his Wisconsin commonalities, sharing his order at Culver’s, the Midwestern fast food chain known for its frozen custard and ButterBurgers, and declaring himself a “Kwik Trip guy,” after the gas stations founded in Wisconsin that have inspired a cultish local devotion.
Midwesterners have been amused to see the spotlight on their region as the national media has tried to figure out the vice-presidential candidates. But what appears folksy to U.S. coastal residents is just normal to Minnesotans, said Curtis Sittenfeld, the novelist who grew up in Cincinnati but now lives in Minneapolis.
“I think that when I look at Walz, his Midwestern shtick works because it feels sincere,” she said. “Seeing an image of him holding a pig is unremarkable to a Minnesotan. It’s like, ‘Of course he’s holding a pig. He went to the state fair.’”
Mr. Vance has a less stereotypically Midwestern image — he left the Midwest to attend Yale Law School and had a successful career in finance in California — but that does not make him any less authentic to the region, Ms. Sittenfeld said.
“You can go to an Ivy League school and be Midwestern,” she said. “The idea that the Midwest is provincial is a very provincial perspective.”
Anthony Chergosky, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, said that he expected Mr. Vance to speak of the Midwest in broad terms, using his personal story to exemplify both the challenges and promises of the region.
“He really talks about the idea of these once-thriving Midwestern cities where the jobs have all left, population is declining, drug abuse is rampant,” he said. “The Midwest is not exactly setting the world on fire in population growth. Vance highlights both the challenges and the nostalgia, where Walz is the classic Midwestern retail politician.”
Yet Mr. Walz has a way of framing national issues that reflects a Midwestern way of thinking, Mr. Chergosky said, something he could use to his advantage in the debate.
“What I’ve noticed is that when Tim Walz talks about abortion and says, ‘None of your damn business,’ to me that is a way of talking about an issue that feels crafted to a Midwestern style of politics,” he said. “He’s talking about the way that we shouldn’t be super involved with other people’s decisions.”
Whether the Midwestern bona fides of two potential vice presidents will sway any swing voters is an open question.
“They both have an opportunity to be an ambassador,” said Brian Reisinger, a former Republican strategist who recently published a book about the loss of family farms in the Midwest. “Vance has positioned himself to be the voice of the forgotten worker when it comes to Rust Belt areas. Walz, being a teacher in a small farming community, can speak to places like southwest Wisconsin.”
“The question is whether either of them can pull it off in an authentic way,” he said.
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