American presidential candidates’ selections for vice presidential running mates consistently attract substantial attention from political analysts. This attention is natural, given that the vice presidency is a powerful yet intentionally ambiguous role: while the office holder is the country’s designated second-in-command, they have no designated policy or advisory profile. As such, vice presidents have great purview to shape their duties to whatever scope or influence they choose, besides being expected to step into the presidency should the president be unable to fulfil their duties, and alongside their symbolic role.
This year’s selections featured two middle-aged white male candidates from the rural Midwest: Tim Walz, selected by Vice President Kamala Harris, and J.D. Vance, tapped by former President Donald Trump. In an American political environment increasingly defined by identity politics and the rural-urban divide, both candidates’ rural identities have become central to their political fortunes. These vice-presidential selections invoke an essential question about American political geography: what does it mean for these two candidates to be from the rural United States? And what kind of political implications emerge from their respective constructions of rural American values and politics?
These questions are essential to understanding the 2024 Presidential Election given the often-overlooked political power of rural voters in the United States. Twenty per cent of the U.S. population lives in rural areas; in the Midwest, where Vance and Walz come from, around 75% of the population lives outside of urban locales. The rural-urban divide looms large in America, as rurality is a powerful predictor of electoral outcomes. Living in rural versus urban areas accounts for rural vote polarisation toward the Republican Party by anywhere from 8 to 16 percentage points — even after controlling for demographic differences. Moreover, in the American electoral college, seven so-called “swing states” effectively decide candidates’ paths to the presidency. These swing states include some of the most rural states in the country: North Carolina and Pennsylvania. As such, rural voters have potentially decisive political power in the United States electoral system. This much was true on 5 November, when the two rural men vied for the vice presidential spot.
Two rural realities? Place as a constructed idea
Both vice presidential candidates have similar backgrounds, yet they personify rural political values in dramatically different ways. As such, voters’ preferences between the candidates holds up a mirror to how Americans conceptualise what rurality means to them and their political preferences; an investigation of the content of these rural candidates’ conceptions of rurality should therefore comprise a part of U.S. election analysis.
But how can it be that two candidates speak so differently about what it means to be from rural America and how this background affects their politics? This double reality is possible because rurality is not a purely empirical concept. In fact, Vance and Walz’s different interpretations of rural America speaks to the constructed nature of place and place-based politics. The practice of ‘constructing’ different – and equally valid – versions of their perceived reality through discourse is a commonplace social practice for humans. The constructed nature of discourse does away with hard-and-fast empirical realities and has specific applications to politics and political communication. Political sociologists conceive of many key and contested concepts in the social arena of political communication as comprising ‘floating signifiers’: words and turns of phrase without objective meaning. As such, these signifiers are constantly redefined, as political forces describe their nature in radically different ways in their discourse.
‘Rurality’ is indeed one such contested concept. Therefore, it is increasingly important to pay attention to the ideational elements of place — and rural place, specifically — amid what academics describe as a re-emergence of the rural-urban divide in modern democracies, including the United States. An ideational approach to rurality moves beyond empirical measurements such as population density, land use or rural-urban integration and instead considers rurality as a ‘category of thought.’ As such, rurality is a concept with its own distinct values, practices and even culture. This definition of rurality is analytically helpful in the case of the rural discourse of Vance and Walz, given their often-contradictory rural narratives of candidates. The ideational approach — that is, rurality as an idea rather than an empirical measurement — allows the two candidates’ narratives to co-exist. Moreover, because of the socially constructed nature of ‘rural reality,’ paying attention to how these rural vice-presidential candidates communicate their conceptions of reality can show us two ways in which voters conceive their identities as rural Americans.
Vance and Walz: Rural backgrounds on paper versus in practice
Vance and Walz beg direct comparison of their ideations of rural place and how this informs their politics. The men tout similar backstories alongside vastly different proposals for the direction of the country. Both candidates – and their different conceptions of the rural – attract the support of near perfect halves of the American electorate; these neck-and-neck polling results point to increasingly polarised conceptions of what it means to be a voter in rural America, and scholars have been attuned to this tension. The competing candidacies provide concrete examples for analysis of the interaction between place, discourse and policy in American politics.
Vance and Walz’s respective rises to political fame reflect two seemingly similar men on paper. Thirty-nine-year-old Vance was born in Ohio and calls his grandparents’ Appalachian holler in Kentucky home. Vance became a household name not in Washington, D.C., but as the author of the acclaimed 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which became a national bestseller and the subject of a 2020 Oscar-nominated Netflix film. After a career in venture capital, Vance entered the political world in 2022 when he was elected as Senator for Ohio: his first and only previous public office. On the other side of the vice-presidential contest, 60-year-old Tim Walz was born and raised in small-town Nebraska before moving to Minnesota. Walz worked as a public school teacher and coach for ten years and was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. After twelve years in the House, Walz stepped down to run for governor of Minnesota in 2018 and won re-election in 2022, where he enacted a progressive platform in relative political obscurity.
Vance and traditional rural conservatism
Both candidates present themselves as political outsiders: rural Midwesterners who found their way to politics in order to correct societal shortcomings. The character of these perceived shortcomings, however, are vastly different. Vance’s career in the Republican party has hinged on his staunch support of former President Donald Trump’s policies. Though he was once a ‘never Trump guy,’ Vance cites a change of heart on Trump’s policies and has called him ‘the best president of my lifetime.’ However, Vance’s unfailing political loyalty, that ultimately drew Trump to select him as his running mate, did not emerge in a vacuum.
Vance’s conceptualisation of rurality is informed by the social conservatism characteristic of rural America, which has grown more extreme over time. Vance’s claim that the United States is being run by ‘a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made’ suggests that women who do not follow traditional life paths (for example, non-married women without children) are veritable social ills. He has derided divorce, even in cases of potential violence, because of its impact on children and families. These appeals to the ‘sanctity of marriage’ and traditional family structures are hallmarks of rural social conservatism. Vance’s infamous — and admittedly fabricated — claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating family pets emerged from familiar conservative fear-mongering about immigrant arrivals in small rural towns. Less than 1% of Clark County, in which Springfield sits, includes urban areas, and 98% of Springfield residents are U.S. citizens. These fictions peddled by Vance and Trump on the behaviour of racial minorities evoke racialised and xenophobic conceptions of idealised rural residents and create borders to rural belonging.
Walz and inclusive rural values
By contrast, Walz’s political accomplishments are rooted in a reflection of rural social progressivism that once made rural areas strongholds of the Left. A former public school teacher, Walz praises the social services he had access to in his small Midwestern town as a source of his current support for strong public education — a classic conservative bogeyman. Moreover, Walz frames issues such as immigration and abortion with appeals to Christian morality and small government — characteristics that resonate with rural areas and their policy preferences. These rural frames justify progressive aims, however. During his time as governor of Minnesota, Walz voiced explicit support for immigrants and refugee resettlement in the state after then-President Trump transferred control of the resettlement to the state level. This value of accepting outsiders, on the contrary from Vance, emerges from a rural Christian worldview of community obligation and responsibility; Walz stated ‘the inn is not full in Minnesota.’ Governor Walz made Minnesota the first state to enshrine abortion rights after the repeal of Roe v. Wade in 2023. These abortion protection measures are justified by Walz in small government discourse familiar to rural inhabitants — an interpretation omitted from Vance’s other conservative interpretations of the role of government in personal life. His support for gun control firmly established after the Parkland shooting in 2017 (Walz once received an ‘A’ Rating from the National Rifle Association) emerged from his own experience as a gun owner, veteran, and hunter, and is something which he references regularly (for example, he critiqued J. D. Vance for not being able to ‘shoot pheasants like I can’).
Translating rural discourse into political reality
What are the policy implications of Vance and Walz’s rural place-based politics and their associated political ideologies? Both candidates consider their construction of rurality and rural politics to be the ‘truth’; it becomes impossible to rubber-stamp one candidate’s rural narrative as the definitive account of what rural place implies in politics. This double-reality constructed through the candidates’ political narratives rendered the 2024 Presidential Election an even more contentious choice for voters — particularly rural voters. Any attempt to predict the electoral preferences of rural constituencies was further complicated by the absence of an objective, commonly held definition of rurality and rural politics — especially when that conception was actively contested by two vice presidential candidates in the political arena.
The conceptions of rurality advanced by J. D. Vance and Tim Walz had the potential to be deciding political factors. When rural voters went to the polls to cast their ballots for Vance or Walz on 5 November, they also signalled which version of rural values resonated with them most. As such, the Trump-Vance victory can be said to be indicative not only of the preferences of rural American voters but also of the relative narrative dominance of Vance’s conservative construction of rurality over that of Walz.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 14: Fictions and Narratives.