Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, wearing a camouflage baseball cap and red-and-black plaid flannel, took the stage on Tuesday as the skies cleared on a muddy farm in Lawrence County, Pa.
He opened with tender talk of his rural roots. Then, he painted the kind of haunting picture frequently evoked by the Republicans opposing him and his running mate atop the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris: of a rural America under attack.
“Been a lot of talk about outsiders coming in, coming into rural communities, stealing our jobs, making life worse for the people who are living there,” he said, alluding to the hostile remarks about immigrants.
But Mr. Walz — speaking pointedly before a couple hundred people, with barns, bins and tractors as his backdrop — paused for dramatic effect.
“Those outsiders have names. They’re Donald Trump and JD Vance,” he said, eliciting laughter and a few whistles from the audience.
The event on Tuesday was part of a Wisconsin and Pennsylvania swing that Mr. Walz used to unveil his ticket’s plans to address the needs of rural voters. And Mr. Walz, who has been on a quest in recent days to reclaim male voters and football from the Republican Party, sought to make the most of the moment as a born and bred Nebraskan.
“Look,” he said in Lawrence County, “some of the things that I remember the most about those memories of growing up was being on the land and understanding what it meant.”
The Harris-Walz plan promises to expand telemedicine, increase the number of ambulances and add 10,000 health care professionals in rural areas. It also includes efforts to increase access to credit for small- and midsize farmers and producers, to lower the cost of child care and to spur new construction to lower housing costs.
But the plan is still a hard sell to some in the Midwest, as Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are virtually tied in all seven national battlegrounds, according to polling averages by The New York Times. Mr. Trump won rural voters by an almost 2-to-1 margin in 2020, according to Associated Press data.
On Tuesday, Mr. Walz started the day in flannel and ended in a dark suit, as he made stops that included a cafe sourced by locally owned farms, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ home stadium and a private residence in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood.
He referred to his recent excursions hunting pheasants in Minnesota and touring the revered grounds of Lambeau Field, home of the Packers, in Green Bay, Wis. He boasted that he and Ms. Harris were the first gun owners on the Democratic presidential ticket and supporters of the Second Amendment, but that they also knew “to make sure we’re protecting our children and our communities from gun violence.”
And he cast Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance as affluent outsiders out of touch with the needs of middle-class families and rural communities.
“You’re seeing the incoherence,” Mr. Walz said at a cafe in Valencia, Pa., taking a dig at Mr. Trump’s event in suburban Philadelphia on Monday night. “I don’t know if people went to a town hall to see him dance for 30 minutes,“ he said.
His jabs stirred laughter from a group of about 30 people, but Mr. Walz warned that such behavior would be funny if Mr. Trump’s rhetoric wasn’t so dangerous. Far across the street, about 20 Trump supporters held signs, and a few called out “Shame on Tim.” Mr. Walz told his audience that the Democrats’ policies would help those detractors, too.
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