Real heroics belong to the voters

In the land of Tim Walz, hard work matters, and that lesson is exactly what may save American democracy

The road through Nebraska’s Sandhills reveals a landscape where life was never easy. (Photo by John Dame on Unsplash)

---

About a quarter of Nebraska lies in what’s known as the Sandhills, an area of prairie and grass-covered dunes so arid that it’s barely even suitable for grazing. Unlike other parts of the Midwest, most of the land in the Sandhills has never been turned over by a plow. So bleak were the prospects of the hardy few trying to live off the land that Congress in 1904 gave Sandhills settlers unique standing: While the 1862 Homestead Act had allowed citizens to claim up to 160 acres of public land for farming, the 1904 Kincaid Act granted anybody foolish enough to try to settle western Nebraska up to four times that much land. Few took advantage of the opportunity; the region’s population remains sparse.

I’m familiar with the area because it’s not far from where I grew up. My high school sports teams competed there sometimes, and the ice-glazed Sandhills were a welcome sight driving home from college at Christmastime, signaling that only a couple more hours on the road separated me from a mug of hot Dr. Pepper at the fireplace.

It was in the Sandhills that Tim Walz, now the Democratic vice presidential candidate, was born and raised, where he went to college, started teaching and coaching – that was in Box Butte County – and met his wife, Gwen. It’s about as remote a place as you can imagine nurturing someone to 21^st-century political success, and certainly not the kind of an environment typically friendly to progressive ideas. Walz’s local roots notwithstanding, most Box Butte County voters will surely support Donald Trump, the stereotypical ugly New Yorker, and his Yale-educated but elite-bashing running mate, JD Vance.

But Walz is playing a crucial role at this odd moment in American politics, in which, I’m beginning to believe, we might have a chance to emerge from the animosity that has nearly disabled our government in recent years. It’s not that the growing popularity of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, means that she will certainly win the White House, nor that a victory by the Harris-Walz ticket would quickly end the divisive excesses of Trumpism. Yet there are signs that Trump’s vulnerabilities are becoming more widely recognized, and that more Americans are receptive to the message of hope and civility that Harris and her Nebraska-born running mate are confidently projecting.

This, then, is where we find ourselves: The yearning for heroic deliverance that has drawn so many alienated voters to Trump – misguided as their placement of trust in him surely is – may be yielding to a growing sense that Trump isn’t the vessel for those aspirations. That could become the dynamic that propels a woman of color from California and a onetime high school football coach from the Upper Midwest to the leadership of the free world. And that could bring a realignment that might clear away some of the toxicity of today’s politics, restoring the healthier tug-and-pull of ideological partisanship that has characterized American democracy for most of our history.

American voters are fickle, sometimes seeming to prefer candidates who project a just-one-of-us persona and other times grasping for celebrity and inspiration. As we veer from crisis to confidence, so do our choices change, often in ways that seem irrational.

It’s unsurprising that a war hero like Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied troops in World War II, would be elected the nation’s president just seven years after the war’s end, just as Ulysses S. Grant had moved from the battlefield to the White House after the Civil War. But in some moments of uncertainty, we turn instead to a leader who might seem more to be just one of us – like the election of Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. Carter’s personal decency and humble roots were seen as an attractive alternative to the criminality of the Nixon White House, with a president rescued from likely prosecution only by the pardon of his successor.

In Donald Trump, who is neither heroic nor humble, voters made a unique choice: the only president ever elected without a day of public service on his resumé, either military or civilian. His political success was in no small part a result of the celebrity he gained during 14 seasons as host of The Apprentice, a reality TV series on NBC. But his emergence also owed a lot to timing: He stepped into politics at a moment when the Republican Party had been pushed to the right by the tea party movement and when the party’s rank-and-file had been unsettled by the dynamic popularity of Barack Obama.

In the latter regard, it’s worth recalling that NBC fired Trump when he made disparaging comments about Mexican immigrants during his presidential campaign announcement, in which he also suggested that Obama wasn’t actually born in America. It’s hardly coincidental that such overt racism drew support during the term of the nation’s first Black president, given the Republican Party’s recent history of race-based campaigning. True to form, Trump’s claim last month that Harris “happened to turn Black” – that “all of a sudden, she made a turn” in her racial identity – is just his latest use of bigotry to draw white support.

But nearly one-third of eligible U.S. voters are people of color. If they turn out for Harris – a woman of Black and South Asian ancestry – at the same rate as they did for Obama, she would likely carry the seven swing states that are widely considered key to winning the electoral college.

A new analysis of the presidential race released this week by political strategist Doug Sosnik is illuminating. Sosnik was White House political director and senior advisor during the presidency of Bill Clinton, and he has advised dozens of governors and U.S. senators. In a 12-page memo released Friday, Sosnik charts the varying paths that Trump and Harris might take to get to the magical 270 electoral votes needed to win.

Harris now leads most national and battleground state polls, Sosnik notes, though the race still could go either way. But he notes this: Harris’s trajectory suggests that she has a chance to emerge as not just a winning candidate, but as the leader of a movement, with a mandate for change.

“In my political lifetime, there have been three political movements in presidential politics,” Sosnik, who is 67, told Politico. “And to be clear, a movement in politics is way bigger than a campaign.” Those three movement leaders: Ronald Reagan in 1980, Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016. (Before Reagan, the last movement led by a president was the realignment resulting from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.)

“Harris is not the leader of a movement right now,” Sosnik continued. “She’s still the leader of a campaign. But she has been making strides and… she could be at a point of a movement which is bigger than a candidate, and that’s pretty much unstoppable. … She’s not that far from being there.”¹

That is, it’s more than possible that the momentum Harris is carrying into her national convention will continue to elevate her, and that the sizable minority of Republican voters who aren’t enthusiastic about Trump – think of the one-quarter of primary voters who supported Nikki Haley – would then erode from Trump’s camp. Sosnik’s analysis draws on data showing segments of voters who were unenthusiastic about Joe Biden but are likely to support Harris in greater numbers – including women, non-white voters and independent voters.

Beyond those statistics, then, comes a scenario of what might happen if Harris does, in fact, emerge at the head of a true movement. It could lead to her election by a margin that would carry Democrats into control of the House, and perhaps the Senate. A movement would most likely draw its strength not only from partisans, but from the half of voters who don’t consider themselves either Republicans or Democrats. That is, there are twice as many independents as there are people who consider themselves members of either party; their alignment behind Harris could signal a shift back to political civility, which Trump gleefully renounces in displaying his trademark nastiness and malicious mendacity.

In such a moment, the pendulum of politics in America would swing away from the bitterness of these recent years and toward the pragmatic rivalries of past generations. There would be new hope for not only our democracy, but also for small-D democrats worldwide.

Nebraska is a Midwestern state, but the area where Tim Walz lived during the first three decades of his life is suitable more for cowboys than farmers, and its spirit is western. First homes were often built of sod, and family dreams were fashioned from hope and sweat. For both the people indigenous to the land and those who came later, life wasn’t as much heroic as it was hard.

It's difficult to imagine that such people – that is, the folks who grew up around Walz – would see anything heroic in Donald Trump. Heroism is displayed when someone sees a need and decides to act despite whatever personal cost may come; Trump, by contrast, is engaged only for the purpose of personal fulfillment, and he is enraged when he is forced to face the consequences of his actions – including two impeachments, the loss of an election and guilty verdicts in both civil and criminal courts. For all his posing and preening, he is no hero.

But there’s a risk, in any case, in looking to a political leader for heroics. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a Princeton professor and bestselling author, argues in his new book, We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, that it’s what voters do that makes the most difference.

“I think we have outsourced our responsibility for democracy too long, for too long,” Glaude said during a PBS interview in May. “We have outsourced it to politicians. We have outsourced it to so-called community leaders, to so-called prophets and heroes, when, in fact, we need to take responsibility for it.”²

That responsibility arrives with this campaign. Polls only tell us so much, and the force of habit is powerful in a voting booth, so nobody should be predicting the outcome of an election that’s still ten weeks away. But the threat of Donald Trump’s return to the White House demands what we may call heroic citizenship – namely, hard work to turn a campaign into a movement, and thus to give American democracy new hope.

1. https://politicos-nerdcast-874ac64d.simplecast.com/episodes/the-new-fundamentals-of-the-2024-campaign

2. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-book-explores-how-ordinary-americans-can-be-the-heroes-of-democracy

---

DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN NOW: MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’RE A READER who wants to hear more of Rex Smith’s views, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay. 

AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday, and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.” It’s often worth your time!

---

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-REX SMITH