SUMMARY: Many people believe that Walz doesn’t really bring anything to Election 2024 because he didn’t win Minnesota by any greater margins or areas of the state than Biden won in 2020. But, they are wrong. The State of Superior is a new state that is proposed from time to time consisting of the contiguous counties from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the NorthWest of Minnesota. Tim Walz won those NW Minnesotan counties. He’ll win those counties in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula because its the same demographic and economy. He appeals to those MidWesterners in ways that Shapiro or Kelly could. Look at the maps, see where the votes are. It’s very clear.
KEY WORDS: Tim Walz, Kamala Harris, Election 2024, Political Maps, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Battleground States, Upper Peninsula, State of Superior, Tony Evers, Gretchen Whitmer
COMMENT: Tell me what you think Tim Walz brings to the ticket or how he hurts the campaign. I’d LOVE to discuss it in the comments.
- The 2022 Minnesota Gubernatorial Election Map
- State of Superior or Ontonogan
- The 2022 Wisconsin gubernatorial race
- the 2022 michigan gubernatorial election map
There’s been a lot of talk about how Walz may or may not be able to appeal to blue-collar rural white voters in the MidWest, especially in the swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
The naysayers point to Steve Kornaki the khaki-wearing MSNBC political data smartboard nerdy heartthrob, showing that Walz’ Minnesota wins were based on the same urban-suburban population centers as Biden’s in 2020 and that the percentages of votes across all of the counties didn’t really change. In other words, he was attracting the same voters as Biden did and wasn’t really appealing to the MAGA crowd out on the farm despite his representation of the very conservative First District in Congress.
The political landscape had changed significantly since he first flipped his Republican Congressional district back in 2006, and even from the last time he squeaked out a win in it in 2016. I think we would all agree that he probably couldn’t win an election in the First District for Congress, governor, or vice president. Probably, not even dog catcher.
However, the maps and history may tell a different story about his appeal to a certain demographic of MidWestern voter.
The 2022 Minnesota Gubernatorial Election Map
The blue counties are the ones that Walz won. The darker blue, the more votes for Walz. Walz won the election due to the huge margin he ran up in the counties where Minneapolis and St. Paul are located.
Steve Kornaki made a big show of indicating all of the red counties in Greater Minnesota. However, he doesn’t explain the four four rural counties in northeast Minnesota that are a large solid block of blue.
Those four counties got me to thinking, and I remembered that there have been periodic movements for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to break away from Michigan state and join with some counties from Minnesota and Wisconsin to make a state usually called Superior. The reasons for wanting to form a separate state is that the people who live in those counties feel like their needs are different from those in the rest of the state and aren’t being addressed by the state government. If they joined together, their needs would be more homogenous and addressed by the new state’s government.
The key term there is homogenous. Let’s look at the region we’re talking about.
State of Superior or Ontonogan
According to the Wikipedia article, Superior (proposed U.S. state), the proposed break away state would include counties from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. You’ll have use some imagination here because I can’t find a map showing exactly what I want, so I’ve been reduced to using my “photoshop” skills.
Do your best to remember the counties outlined in red. You see the four in the NE of Minn and they were solid blue. Now we’ll look at the maps from Michigan and Wisconsin.
Now, let’s look at the counties in Wisconsin and how they voted in the 2022 gubernatorial election.
The 2022 Wisconsin gubernatorial race
Tony Evers won by picking up the urban-suburban population centers: Milwaukee (SE), Madison (Center South), and Eau Claire (Middle West). The other counties are all rural with populations ranging from 4,000 to 120,000 or so.
Douglas County is western most in that trio. It borders Carlton County, the southern most county that Walz won in NE Minnesota. That tells me that Walz has a solid appeal across that region with similar demographics and economy.
the 2022 michigan gubernatorial election map
In 2022, Gretchen Whitmer won a million more votes than the Democratic ticket did in 2014 and adding 200,000 votes to her 2018 total.
Interestingly, Whitmer lost Gogebic County the far west county in UP between 2018 and 2022, but just across the lake, Walz held his counties with a similar demographic and economy as did Evers just across the border.
That means to me, that Walz has a chance to help strengthen Harris’ appeal in that Upper Peninsula region and could swing Gogebic County back to the Democratic ticket. In 2014, there were even more UP counties voting Democratic, those are possible now, too.
My interpretation of all of this is that it demonstrates Walz’ appeal to that demographic cohort that runs from Minnesota to Michigan that Harris and another vice presidential pick might not have appealed to. Even though, Walz didn’t expand the map or his winning margins over Biden’s in 2020, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t appeal to a certain kind of Midwestern voter that Harris might not appeal to.
When the margins in Wisconsin and Michigan are likely to be as slim as they were in 2020 and 2016, Harris will need every vote she can get in those two states. With Republican voter nullification efforts in the urban-suburban population centers of all three states, they’re going to need every vote they can get. If he can broaden her appeal by even a few thousand votes, it makes declining to certify the vote at either the county or state level harder to justify. The bigger the margin of victory, the more secure the election is.
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Image Attributions
Feature Image
The image was found on a Wikimedia Commons page using a a DuckDuckGo image search on the 2020 United States presidential election Wikipedia Page and has a Creative Commons license. I cropped the picture so that it just showed the MidWestern battle ground states and their immediate neighbors.
2022 Minnesota Gubernatorial Election Map
This map was a Wikimedia Commons image found on the 2022 Minnesota Gubernatorial Election Wikipedia Page and has a Creative Commons license.
County Map of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan
This map was found on a defunct Blogger blog using a DuckDuckGo image search. The URL indicates that it originated from the USGS National Land Database and was published in an article by David Mladenoff on Researchgate.
2022 Wisconsin Gubernatorial Election Map
This map was a Wikimedia Commons image found on the 2022 Wisconsin Gubernatorial Election Wikipedia Page and has a Creative Commons license.
2022 Michigan Gubernatorial Election Map
This map was found on the Geocurrents web page. I am uncertain of its license.
The Psy of Life 
A memory tickled my brain about that region of Minnesota and the proposed state of Superior, so I found a map that shows what is different about that area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesabi_Range#/media/File:Iron_Ranges.jpg
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The surprising thing to me, Bob, is that the three border counties in Wisconsin vote so heavily Democratic. If he can appeal to the miners in the region across the three states, he could add something no one else can to the ticket.
Jack
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That region around Lake Superior is different from all the areas around it. It is the coast of an inland sea. It has not just miners, but sailors, fishing people (industrial, subsistence, and recreational), lumber jacks, and Native Americans, as well as the supporting industries and tourism. It’s no wonder they might think about becoming their own state.
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My mother loved the Upper Peninsula region and spent many of her summers there after she retired. Unfortunately, it isn’t too economically viable as a state any more. The history of how we demarcated states as they entered the Union is an interesting one. The talk of the State of Superior started with Jefferson.
Huzzah!
Jack
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In a number of ways, economically and culturally, it never was part of the Midwest. In some degree the drift-less (unglaciated, so, there are real hills) region of northwester Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin was similar before the Civil War, with lead mining as the economic driver. That industry brought in a lot of Cornish and Welsh hard rock miners. In the 1820s to 1850s, Galena, IL was the largest city in the state. Then, the lead ran out. I lived there for much of the 1970s. It was the site of one of the Lincoln-Duglass debates, and the hotel with the balcony that happened on is still there. The bar where U. S, Grant and his buddies used to hang out drinking, smoking cigars, and playing cards is in that building.
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