HANNIBAL, Missouri — The selection by Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris of Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) to be her running mate has created a very interesting phenomenon among our cultural curators in the press and in corporate America: interest in rural voters.

The same rural voters they have disparaged for years with a variety of colorful adjectives that include “bitter,” “clinging to guns and God,” “deplorable,” “extremists” who are a “threat to democracy,” and “weird” — and that is just what presidential candidates have called them.

Now, all of a sudden, there are think pieces about Carhartt overalls, Pennsylvania tuxedos, hunter orange vests attending a Grange meeting, joining the 4-H club, and the joys of turkey hunting as seen through the lens of Walz.

As one farmer told me, “Just because someone has a Midwest twang doesn’t mean they share my values. For me, no disrespect to Walz, but it seems to me he is what someone in New York thinks a rural voter would like but never asked a rural voter what they liked.”

Since 2010, rural voters who vote in midterm elections have gone from being pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans to far and away supportive of Republican candidates.

That year’s halfway point between then-President Barack Obama’s first and second terms marked the tipping point in which Obama, an aspirational candidate promising hope and change who valued having New Deal Democrats in his coalition, made a calculated move leftward, running as a change agent who would run and win with a slimmer but still effective “ascendant” coalition in 2012. 

Cut off permanently were the majority of rural Democratic voters. 

These voters went from welcomed in their party to being accused of racism — never mind that they had voted for Obama twice. They also went from needed and courted to being portrayed as “lesser than,” dumb, uneducated, angry, and bitter.

Remember, these were legacy Democrats who voted the same way their father’s father’s father did. They were loyal to their party. They carried their union cards. They believed the Democratic Party was the party of the working man and woman. It wasn’t they who changed. It was their party, and their party didn’t want them anymore.

In the 2000 presidential election, the Republican Party only held the narrowest “leaned” identification advantage over the Democratic Party among rural voters, 51% vs. 45%, according to Pew Research Center data. But it was a number that grew substantially and widened over the next 10 years, so by the 2010 midterm elections, the GOP held a 13-percentage point advantage over Democrats among rural voters.

Today that number has doubled. If you wonder why, ask New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who writes incessantly demeaning rural voters, penning think pieces such as “Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?” or political scientist Tom Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman, who wrote a book called White Rural Rage arguing that rural people are a unique “threat to democracy” and prone to violent tendencies.

There is an argument to be made that the Democratic Party has become the party of the elites. Their candidate for president, Harris, has never won a race that required her to appeal to rural voters. She won Democrats in California by going further leftward than her opponents to reach that goal.

Her pick of Walz on image is fine, but on policy, he is as far to the left as she is.

Dennis O’Leary, of O’Leary Ventures, brought the receipts on Walz’s policies Saturday on Fox News, arguing there is something going on in the market right now that is being overlooked by a lot of really smart people.

“And that is policy volatility,” he said. 

O’Leary explained he understands the strategy behind Harris’s decision of not talking to reporters or giving any indication of what her policies are.

“So many people are looking at Minnesota because that vice presidential candidate has more of a track record on economic policy, and we tried to glean from it what the policy might be,” he said.

O’Leary, a Shark Tank investor, said usually vice presidents are inconsequential, “but there’s more track record there than Harris has, and I got to tell you, I don’t like what I see. And I’m trying to be bipartisan here, but Minnesota [is] one of the eight states where capital is fleeing and people are fleeing and jobs are fleeing.”

He then proceeded to outline some stunning data points.

“The state tax there is 9.8%,” he said. “Then, Walz put on a super tax for people that are investing more than $1 million. So, all of his retirees have moved out of the state because of that.”

O’Leary argued that South Dakota should give an award to Walz: “They’re growing jobs in South Dakota four times faster than Walz is growing them in Minnesota, and so is North Dakota. He’s a great governor for Texas. He’s a great governor for Florida. He’s a great governor for South Dakota and North Dakota. But he’s not a good governor for Minnesota because he has taken the job creation there and wiped it out.”

The only growth area is social work and healthcare, which is funded by the state. So, he’s building, for the lack of a better world, a social state that is losing its capital in a huge way.

It is almost as if Harris and her team think rural voters are so stupid that they won’t notice his record, which is as leftward as hers and has failed to win rural voters in his home state.

NBC News cruncher Steve Kornacki pointed out last week that if the calculation was that Walz had rural style and reliability, and therefore that meant he could boost her with rural voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, there is a big catch: “Walz wasn’t able to do that himself in his last campaign in his own state.”

In short, the elite version of whom they think rural voters would support is disputed by the results. Walz won because he ran up the numbers in metropolitan areas, not because he had a tangible and authentic connection with the very voters Democrats want to win in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In fact, those very voters who can be found in those very important battleground states overwhelmingly rejected him.

There is the old saying “to pull the wool over someone’s eyes,” which means to deceive or hoodwink someone. That seems to be happening in spades here, with rural voters at the center of it. First came the pursuit of their votes with stories of their newfound worthiness in the elite media and among left-wing Democrats. Still, pretending the last 14 years of verbal abuse and disregard have not happened isn’t going to fly with voters. 

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And second, pretending Walz governed moderately just because he can say “ope sorry” authentically also isn’t going to fly.

As the Pittsfield Sun of Massachusetts noted in 1835: “Now, the sole drift of all this in Massachusetts, fellow-citizens, is, and has long been, not to affect the election of President, but to give the aristocrats of Massachusetts a chance to pull the wool over your eyes, to gull you, to pick your pockets, to pay you in kicks instead of coppers, to enslave you by the indirect plunder of unequal laws, to rob you of the profits and comforts of life, and to fatten quietly out of the state crib.”