The Georgia delegates danced with the rapper Lil Jon at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday. The Wisconsin delegates cheered in their Cheesehead hats.
But across a party gathering where the word “joy” has become an unofficial mantra, perhaps no one exudes it more than the Minnesotans.
After nearly four decades without representation on a presidential ticket, the sudden, stunning elevation of Tim Walz and his wife, Gwen, has prompted a surge of excitement among the state’s Democrats. Minnesota attendees are celebrating Mr. Walz as a beloved state export on par with Prince or Bob Dylan.
“The Minnesota delegation is, like, buzzing,” Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat from the state, enthused in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s like they can’t even complete a sentence because they’re so excited about what this means for their friends Tim and Gwen, and also what it means for the country.”
Mr. Walz, whom Vice President Kamala Harris chose as her running mate, is set to address the convention on Wednesday. It will be his most prominent appearance yet as he continues to introduce himself to a nation that was overwhelmingly unfamiliar with him until this month.
But Minnesota Democrats have long known Mr. Walz as a folksy former football coach who speaks a neighborly language of moderate Midwestern pragmatism even as he pushes a sweeping agenda of liberal priorities.
He is the first Minnesotan to join a major-party presidential ticket since former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, who ran for president in 1984 and lost in a landslide, winning only his home state and Washington, D.C. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, another Minnesota Democrat, served with President Lyndon B. Johnson before losing his own presidential contest in 1968.
“We’re a state where the women are strong, where the men are good-looking, and where all the vice presidents are above average,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, referring to a familiar line from Garrison Keillor’s long-running, Minnesota-based radio program “A Prairie Home Companion” as she opened her speech at a delegation breakfast on Monday.
“We’re the state where moms bounce their babies on their knees and say, ‘One day you can grow up to be vice president,’” she cracked. “We are pretty psyched about what’s going on here.”
In presidential elections over the last 100 years, only four Republicans have captured Minnesota, and none have done so since 1972.
But at the Democratic convention this week, the state is now enjoying the treatment often reserved for competitive battlegrounds: high-profile speakers at its delegation’s breakfasts, significant news media attention and prime convention seating.
For Minnesotans, like the rest of the country, the transformation of the race since President Biden dropped out and Ms. Harris ascended has been head-spinning.
“It was just sort of like a ‘power on’ switch for Democratic enthusiasm,” Ms. Smith said. “In Minnesota, we can see a lot of independents who are quite important to our electoral coalition just being so jazzed by the possibility of this ticket.”
While Democrats are overjoyed to be back in the game after months of rough polling, no one doubts that the campaign to come will be difficult, unpredictable and highly competitive.
But Representative Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat who was publicly talking up Mr. Walz as vice-presidential material even before Mr. Biden exited the race, said she had “never experienced this type of enthusiasm.”
“I found this much grief when I attended Senator, Vice President Humphrey’s, funeral,” she said of the level of emotion. “But this much enthusiasm, this much excitement, I have to say — first time in my life in Minnesota, for a Minnesotan.”
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