Hollywood star Jennifer Garner and Queer Eye alum Bobby Berk joined rural Democratic activists on a Zoom call on Tuesday in celebrating Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
The Zoom call, formally called Rural Voters for Harris, took place after Harris and Walz took the stage in Philadelphia for their first rally since he was tapped to join her on the Democratic party’s ticket.
Walz had been slated to make an appearance at the event before the announcement, but instead, Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan spoke after his selection and hailed Walz as an opportunity to make inroads with rural voters.
“I know that you shouldn’t sleep on seconds in command as lieutenant governor, and what I have watched in Kamala Harris has been just tremendous in inspiring leadership for me and for so many others all across the country,” she said on the call.
A Harris-Walz victory would elevate Flanagan to become the first Indigenous woman to become governor of any state.
“If I do say so myself, rural Democrats always have a way of taking time and opportunity where it’s at, and so I’m very excited that on this day, we also get to celebrate historic announcement of Governor Tim Walz joining the ticket with our phenomenal present next president, Kamala Harris,” Anderson Clayton, the chairwoman of the North Carolina Democratic Party who has pushed for Democrats to appeal to Black and brown voters in rural areas, said on the call.
But the biggest stars of the event were celebrities Berk and Garner.
Berk for his part talked about his experience growing up in rural Missouri and his late Republican father.
“I really didn’t have any hope that I was going to be able to change the mind of my 80-year-old dad, who thought it was his Christian duty to vote Republican,” Berk said.
“However, after the 2020 election, my dad called me up because he wanted me to know he did not vote for that man. He did not vote for Trump because of me and my husband Dewey.”
Garner, a personal friend of Senator Joe Manchin, talked about the need to support rural areas – drawing on her own experience growing up in West Virginia with parents from Texas and Oklahoma.
“And I’m not talking about like, you know, behind the Walmart, I’m talking about the time, but in the town behind the town, behind the town, who can get to Walmart, you know, with a group of people, maybe once a month, because that’s how often they can afford gas,” she said.
“We have to get our neighbors excited,” she said. “We have to show our enthusiasm and our pride as we advocate for the Harris-Walz ticket and to the eventual success of having Harris-Walz in the White House, governing this country and caring about rural America, making sure that there’s more opportunity for healthcare in the middle of nowhere.”
Democrats have sought to shore up their support among rural voters in recent years in hopes of reshaping the party’s old coalition that not only included Black voters, Latinos and young people, but many non-college-educated white voters who have drifted toward the Republican Party – a trend that Donald Trump accelerated.
Indeed, in Walz’s final campaign for Congress, he narrowly won re-election in 2016 in his district in southern Minnesota when Trump won the district.
Harris and Walz will proceed to make a swing throughout multiple states this week, including Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, all states that have both major urban populations as well as large swaths of rural areas.