From Walz, a Rosier View of a Midwestern Upbringing

In the western Nebraska town where Tim Walz came of age, teenagers gathered at the Frosty Drive-In after football practice and spent summers working on farms. Foosball was popular, and so was Pizza Hut. The high school mascot was a badger.

The tree-lined streets of JD Vance’s hometown in Ohio surrounded a hulking steel mill that endured layoff after layoff. Businesses were boarded up, and pessimism prevailed. By his own telling, it was a community “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.”

The rural Midwestern back stories presented by the two major-party vice-presidential candidates are strikingly different. One is a grim tableau of addiction and poverty in the once-thriving industrial Midwest, as recollected by the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. Another is a glowing portrait of rural America offered by Mr. Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota who is Vice President Kamala Harris’s new running mate.

The rival campaigns are using these opposing depictions of rural life to make very different appeals to voters. The contrast captures the complexity of a region on which the outcome of the presidential election may hang.

“A rural identity is bound to mean different things to different people and to vary over time,” said Pierce Ekstrom, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies the consequences of political disagreement. “Campaigns have a lot of material that they could choose to work with, or not.”

Part of the candidates’ diverging takes on these places may be chalked up to a generational difference.

Mr. Walz, 60, is two decades older than Mr. Vance and came of age largely before opioids and methamphetamine ripped through rural communities, tearing up families and institutions that made small-town life worth pining for. The drug crisis has since penetrated small-town Nebraska, too, but residents point out that different vices plagued communities during Mr. Walz’s era, chiefly alcohol. Mr. Walz was arrested and charged with drunken driving in 1995 in Nebraska and has said that he no longer drinks alcohol.

Mr. Vance, who grew up in Middletown, Ohio, had a mother who was addicted to drugs. He was raised by his grandparents. Mr. Walz, who left Nebraska in 1996, grew up in a stable home with parents who were involved in their communities. But his childhood was not without struggle; he moved around, including during his high school years, when his father was diagnosed with lung cancer. His father died when Mr. Walz was 19.

Now, their outlooks on their rural upbringings serve the messages of their respective presidential candidates. Mr. Vance’s dark tales of his harsh upbringing bolster former President Donald J. Trump’s worldview that the left is pulling the country into a spiral of crime, violence and moral corruption. Mr. Walz leans into a simple-life nostalgia that underscores Ms. Harris’s sunnier assessment of the country.

“These are two very different experiences of being from a small town,” said Matt Mason, the poet laureate of Nebraska who writes with a sharp understanding of his state. “We have the cranky critic on the corner as opposed to the coach helping people across the street. That’s just how they come across.”

Nebraska’s politics in recent decades have shifted from socially conservative — for decades, the first highway signs many motorists see while crossing into the state promote anti-abortion messaging — to a more grievance-style of politics embraced by Mr. Vance, according to former politicians in the state and other rural areas from both political parties.

Rural Nebraska voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

In many ways, the difference in how each candidate is employing his rural identity is part of the fun-house-mirror state of U.S. politics. Mr. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, has labeled Mr. Walz, a graduate of tiny Chadron State College in Nebraska, an elite. Camouflage merchandise signaling support for hunting and guns — once chiefly the domain of Republican campaigns — is now peddled by the Harris team, too. (Mr. Walz is a hunter.)

Both men have upbringings that are unfamiliar to many urban voters but are authentically rural.

Mr. Vance detailed his early years across the 264 pages of “Hillbilly Elegy,” his memoir describing the violence and verbal abuse he suffered at home as well as his ultimate journey out of the Appalachian culture he identifies with. The best-selling book was turned into a movie by the director Ron Howard.

Mr. Walz’s provenance is less well-known.

He was raised mostly in western Nebraska, amid sparsely populated miles of farms and ranchland, a region dismissed by people in more urban Lincoln and Omaha as “outstate.” The area exuded a get-through-it mind-set instilled by a farmer’s way of looking at life. Community was important, but so was hope that if things were bad now, a better season was always on the way.

Mr. Walz’s family moved around with his father’s job as superintendent of schools. School district superintendents with higher-level college degrees sometimes were seen as snooty in small towns, but Mr. Walz’s father did not have that reputation. Students remember him as affable, standing in the hallway shaking hands with passing teenagers. (Mr. Walz today looks like his dad, some said.)

The family lived in hardscrabble cow towns like Valentine, Neb., where upperclassmen were known to knock freshmen in the backs of their heads with clunky class rings. The struggles of the Rosebud Sioux reservation, just a few miles away, spilled into Valentine.

Pat Donovan, a former tribal attorney who attended St. Nicholas Catholic Church along with the Walz family, said that back then, before the price of land skyrocketed and corporate farms moved into the state, most families were far from wealthy.

Middle school boys in Valentine cruised the streets on bikes in search of friends tossing a football. Mr. Walz was a quarterback of a school team in seventh grade, said Mr. Donovan, who was a quarterback in the class ahead of him.

Mr. Walz’s high school football career in Valentine was interrupted briefly when his family moved to Butte, Neb., to be closer to relatives after Mr. Walz’s father became ill.

After graduation, Mr. Walz enlisted in the National Guard and enrolled at Chadron State College, working at a local convenience store and swapping shifts to make time for Guard duty, said Joselyn Eitemiller, a co-worker at the time.

At Chadron State, one professor said Mr. Walz stood out as “international and cosmopolitan,” eager to learn not just from textbooks but also from experience. The professor, Allen Shepherd, recalled how Mr. Walz came to him after graduation to ask advice about his next move.

Mr. Walz recalled the episode, too, in a 2014 speech, saying he had a choice between a conventional 9-to-5 job with good pay, retirement and benefits and going to teach at a high school in China.

He chose to go to China. When he returned, he got a job teaching high school social studies in Alliance, another small town in western Nebraska.

Reading through Facebook posts by former students of Mr. Walz’s in Alliance is like reading a script from an old-timey TV show. One student recalled the buzz in the hallways when Mr. Walz started dating the cheerleading coach (he married her). One remembered when Mr. Walz brought new food for middle schoolers to try: seaweed. And that time Mr. Walz forgot to put on his parking brake, and his silver two-door car rolled onto the practice field.

“Remember when he let you borrow his car to take us to homecoming?!” read one post. “Was he selfless or crazy?!”

For rural America, many of these small-town scenes are timeless, still playing out today in areas far from art museums and concert venues and five-star restaurants. Mr. Walz, wearing Carhartts and a wide smile and armed with his hunting rifle, fits right in, even though he has spent much of the past 15 years in Washington and St. Paul, the Minnesota capital.

His rural persona makes him likable to a broader audience, even one that may not vote for him, said former Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska. For instance, Boyd County, Neb., the home of Mr. Walz’s high school alma mater, voted 87 percent for Mr. Trump and is likely to vote similarly this year, Mr. Kerrey said. But in a politically divided nation, likability is important, he added.

“‘I like you’ is not a bad starting point to find common ground,” Mr. Kerrey said.

Mr. Walz adopts the country boy stereotype, waxing in speeches about his love for football and mountain oysters, or deep-fried bull’s testicles, a dish served in some parts of Nebraska and other rural areas.

But Bud Pettigrew, who went to school with Mr. Walz in Valentine and was a leader in Nebraska Democratic politics, said it was not just a shtick. In 2010, at a party fund-raiser in Nebraska, he caught up with Mr. Walz, who was then a congressman.

The two men huddled in private, scribbling on a napkin and piquing the curiosity of other attendees, who thought they were engaged in political strategy. They were, Mr. Pettigrew said, diagraming how to run the counter trey, a football play.

Kitty Bennett and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.