J.D. Vance thinks he knows rural America. Tim Walz begs to differ.

• Ted Genoways

As Tim Walz took the stage at the Astro Theater in the Omaha suburb of La Vista on Saturday afternoon, the crowd roared with approval. Nearly 2,500 people were packed inside the auditorium, and thousands more were watching on big screens outside. It was the first time that Mr. Walz, the Minnesota governor, had been back to the state where he was born and grew up since Kamala Harris tapped him to join the Democratic ticket. He wasted no time in contrasting his running mate’s early years with her opponent Donald Trump’s gilded upbringing.

Ms. Harris, Mr. Walz reminded the audience, worked at McDonald’s in high school. “Can you picture Donald Trump working the McFlurry machine?” he asked. Later, he used a similar line of attack on Mr. Trump’s running mate. “You think JD Vance knows one damn thing about Nebraska?” he asked. “You think he’s ever had a Runza?” (A Runza is a German-style meat and cabbage roll that, improbably, can be purchased as fast food in Nebraska.) “That guy would call it a Hot Pocket,” he said. “You know it.”

For a generation or more, most of the politicians who visited towns like La Vista were Republicans who told their audiences a familiar story: that the government was in their way, that the welfare state was leeching their sweat and tears to service the lazy poor, that rugged individualism still reigned supreme. It’s the same story that Mr. Vance and his fellow Republicans are telling today. Mr. Walz is making a bold play to claw back the narrative by telling a different story — one that harks back to the prairie populists of the 20th century.

But there are limits to how much having a candidate like Mr. Walz on the ticket can achieve. Some parts of the country may be lost to Democrats for the foreseeable future, no matter how compelling a story the vice-presidential candidate has to tell. The rural Nebraska counties where Mr. Walz grew up and which comprise part of the Third Congressional District went 80 percent to 90 percent for Mr. Trump in the last two elections. And the state as a whole has voted for just two Democratic presidential candidates in the last century — Franklin Roosevelt at the height of the Dust Bowl and Lyndon Johnson after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Still, Democrats have an opportunity to win back at least some of these voters — but only if they talk about what Republican policies have done to rural people, many of whom have been forced to leave their rural hometowns to find education and work in urban centers like Omaha.

Mr. Walz knows from bruising experience just how much Republican politicians have failed rural America by draining funding from public institutions critical to the survival of small towns and farms: schools, rural hospitals and programs for rural development and agriculture. Nebraska’s Republican governor, Jim Pillen, recently pushed a tax cut plan that would have principally been paid for by eliminating operating funds for public schools and by taxing farm and manufacturing equipment; if it had passed, Mr. Pillen himself would have received a break on his property taxes of nearly $1 million a year. The question now is whether Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris can convince voters who distrust and even despise the Democratic Party that they have a better vision to restore rural America. The fact that Mr. Walz knows a Runza from a Hot Pocket is a start.

Nebraska, where members of my family have lived since 1856, long liked to boast that it was the political (as well as geographical) middle of the country. We have America’s only nonpartisan legislature. Between 1959 and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president 50 years later, we had six Republican and five Democratic governors. In that time, we sent four Democrats and four Republicans to the Senate. Our congressional representatives were almost always Republican, but the Second District, which includes most of Omaha, went for a Democrat, Brad Ashford, as recently as 2014 — and his Republican successor, Don Bacon, has never carried more than 51 percent of the vote, even after the Legislature gerrymandered the district in 2010 and again in 2020 to favor G.O.P. candidates.

Since 2009, rural districts all over the country have swung hard to the right. But many of the ones that run up against suburbs, like Nebraska’s Second, remain very much in play. Congressional races in Arizona’s First and Sixth Districts, California’s 13th District, Iowa’s Third District, Michigan’s 10th District and Oregon’s Fifth District — all positioned on the interface of rural and urban areas — were decided by around 20,000 votes collectively in 2022. Given that, it’s frustrating that the national Democratic Party hasn’t thrown more support behind identifying and developing candidates with centrist politics and rural backgrounds that could appeal to voters who live there.

Tim Walz is the rare exception. He was elected to six consecutive terms in the House from Minnesota’s First District by campaigning hard on his rural upbringing.

As he’ll often say on the trail, he grew up in Valentine, in north-central Nebraska, where his father, a Korean War veteran, taught in the public school. At 14, Mr. Walz worked on the Fairway Ranch, a beef operation about 20 miles south of town. He spent summer days “working cattle, building fence, putting up hay.” Each night, all the ranch hands returned to the bunkhouse to play cards, but Mr. Walz would go through boxes of old National Geographic magazines “and dream of exotic places that were far away from where I was at.”

The following year, Mr. Walz and his family moved almost 90 miles east to an even more remote farming community called Butte. Population: about 500 — many of them family. What Mr. Walz and his siblings didn’t know was that his father had lung cancer and wanted his kids to be close to this big extended family in case treatments proved ineffective. “Two days after my 17th birthday,” Mr. Walz remembered recently, “my chain-smoking Korean War veteran father took me to join the Army,” knowing the G.I. Bill would cover his son’s education if he weren’t around to pay tuition.

Not long after Mr. Walz graduated from high school in a class of just 25, his father died, and Mr. Walz did exactly what his father had hoped, joining the National Guard and using the G.I. Bill to attend college, ultimately graduating from Chadron State College, in Nebraska’s far northwestern corner, with a degree in social science education. He would spend more than 15 years teaching in public schools and coaching football in Alliance, Neb., and Mankato, Minn. — while visiting the places he’d dreamed of in the bunkhouse at Fairway Ranch, from Guangdong Province in China to Norway and Italy, where he was deployed as part of Operation Enduring Freedom after Sept. 11, 2001.

After getting into politics in Minnesota, Mr. Walz ran on his back story — but once elected he did more than just talk. He sponsored legislation that offered veterans like his father access to farm education programs and crop insurance subsidies. He also voted to pass Obamacare in 2010, and fought subsequent efforts to repeal the law, to ensure that other families wouldn’t be crushed by medical expenses as his family was after his father died. His grieving mother was forced to go out and find work, Mr. Walz said recently, because Social Security survivor benefits weren’t enough. “We’re fine pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps,” he said. “We had no boots.”

Mr. Walz’s broad-minded worldview stands in stark contrast to the story that Republicans have been telling rural America for a generation.

In his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance describes learning “how people gamed the welfare system” while he was working as a cashier at the grocery store in his hometown, Middletown, Ohio. “They’d buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash,” he wrote. “They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cellphones.” Mr. Vance says he grew resentful that the state and federal taxes withheld from his paycheck went to safety-net programs for lazy hillbillies and drug addicts “content to live off the dole.”

Like the rest of the Republican Party, he was — and still is — advancing a vision of social decay that placed the blame squarely on the individual for being too weak, too dependent on the government. It was — and is — repackaged rugged individualism, the Gospel of Go It Alone. It’s also precisely the narrative that has landed rural America in the fix it’s in.

Today, if you drive Highway 20 across northern Nebraska, the stretch of rural blacktop that connects many of the places where Mr. Walz grew up, you’ll see signs promoting QAnon, denouncing Hunter Biden and declaring support for “Trump, God and guns.” You’ll also find communities with no grocery stores, with no churches, with no schools closer than an hour away. People are suspicious of outsiders, dying of isolation.

The sorts of farms and ranches where Mr. Walz and his extended family worked were — and are — supported by farm subsidies, government-supported crop insurance, and highly manipulated and regulated markets. His family saw its fortunes rise through the opportunities of public education and was nearly undone by the limits of underfunded rural health care. He got a college degree and traveled the world thanks to military service. That truth is too rarely told — and Mr. Walz is uniquely well positioned to tell it.

When he addresses the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Wednesday night, Mr. Walz can start by offering his vision for bringing rural America into the 21st century. Many voters who grew up in rural communities — the young people who had ambition and ideas and hope, the ones who might be politically persuadable — are now living in the college towns and small cities of the Midwest, the Southwest and the Pacific Coast. They know firsthand how the abandonment of farming and ranching communities has left their families and childhood friends isolated and embittered. Those voters are craving a hopeful message.

Mr. Walz has a direct way of speaking that feels authentic and a teacher’s knack for making a message simple and memorable. If he can make people born on farms and in small towns feel they are finally being heard, it might make a difference, at least on the margins, in November. (The Democratic strategist David Plouffe told Axios this week that this election would come down to seven swing states — and Nebraska’s Second District.) It might also help Democrats recognize that there’s a stronger coalition waiting to be built for future elections.

For now, the presidential election and the balance of the House may depend on Mr. Walz getting the details right. On Saturday, leaving Nebraska to get back on the campaign trail, his team stopped to buy Runzas.