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?