In Tim Walz's Republican hometown, spotlight is bittersweet
In Tim Walz's Republican hometown, spotlight is bittersweet
Tim Walz, who locks horns with J.D. Vance in Tuesday's vice-presidential debate, loves to talk about his small town roots in Butte, Nebraska.
Every time he does, Beth Lechtenberg, a rancher and mother-of-three in the staunchly Republican town of 270 people, laughs.
"The consensus around here is, we don't want him running our country," she told AFP.
"His morals and values don't line up with our morals and values here."
Surrounded by cornfields, Butte's short main street consists of a post office, bank, family-run cafe and bar. Residents have to travel for 10 miles for their nearest grocery shop.
Next to the community center, where residents will vote in November, a "TRUMP 2024" flag flutters. Across the road, a storage facility is adorned with the slogan "GOD, GUNS AND TRUMP."
Walz and his family may have deep roots here, but attitudes toward the former hometown boy lay bare the nation's stark political divisions.
People are unfailingly polite, but far from complimentary when asked about Walz a regular event because of the steady stream of journalists who have arrived since Kamala Harris chose the Minnesota governor as her running mate in August.
"I'm friends with a lot of his family. And ain't one of them will say anything good about him," said Brad Kallhoff, 58, who owns a transportation business.
"They say Tim was a good kid back in the day. But whatever happened to him up in Minnesota?"
Walz was born in West Point, grew up in Valentine, and attended high school in Butte each Nebraska town smaller than the last.
But it is Butte, where his mom still lives, that Walz name-checked at his Democratic convention speech in August.
He praised a small town where "that family down the road, they may not think like you do... but they're your neighbors and you look out for them and they look out for you."
Walz's politics certainly stand apart from those of a county that voted 87 percent Republican at the last presidential election.
Jean Hanson, a 63-year-old accountant, who attended Walz's high school but left Butte in 1980, said that his rise to prominence had been "very, very hard" for the people who still live in the town to digest.
"They want to be proud. They want to. It's the best thing that's happened to Butte in so many decades. And yet they're so torn," she told AFP, from her home in Omaha, Nebraska's biggest city.
"They want to be proud of him, but he's very Democratic."
Back in Butte, several residents said Walz was a "good man" and expressed pride that he had put their home town on the map even if they wished he was representing the other side.
"It gives people hope, because it's like, you can come from a school that is so small and a community that is so small and do anything," said Britanie Brewster, 38, who runs the town's small and eclectic museum.
But "his views are very different from those of people here," she added.
Few residents said they were planning to tune in to the debate, which clashed with a girl's school volleyball game, a meeting of the local firefighter volunteers, and harvesting season.
Walz's mother, Darlene, told AFP she did not plan to be in town the night of the debate. Neighbors said she had been flown out to support her son.
Lechtenberg who disagrees with Walz on everything from abortion to his handling of the protests sparked by George Floyd's death at police hands in 2020 plans to catch up with highlights later on Fox News.
"We know what he stands for, and I don't feel like we're gonna learn anything new," she said.
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