People in rural Minnesota voted for Democratic Gov. Tim Walz for Congress six times and for governor once, but times have changed, a new report says.

Residents of Albert Lea, Minnesota, a rural Midwestern town of 18,000 in Freeborn County, appear to be abandoning their support for Walz, Politico reported Friday.

“I don’t think Trump has ever been stronger in rural areas,” Terry Gjersvik, a local Democrat who lost his bid for a House seat in 2018, told Politico.

While Minnesota is not a major battleground state in the upcoming election, national and state polls show support for former President Trump hovering around 60 percent or higher in rural areas and small towns.

But the Harris-Walz campaign is targeting these rural areas ahead of the November election.

Voters who spoke to Fox News Digital in Wisconsin did not support Walz. (Reuters)

Tim Walz said he’s traveled to China “dozens of times,” now his campaign says “more like 15”

“If you can do a few or five points better in those rural areas and multiply that by all the rural areas in those states, that’s a big deal,” said John Anzalone, a veteran pollster and Harris consultant. Walz, he said, “is the first candidate in modern history, perhaps since (Jimmy) Carter, who can talk about small-town America and rural America.”

Politico spoke to a variety of people locally and found that many Freeborn County locals who had previously voted Democratic planned to pull the lever for Trump.

Rich Murray, Albert Lea’s current mayor, told Politico that Harris and Walz will win the state, but the governor “won’t get any votes here,” which wasn’t the case before 2016.

Freeborn County went to Obama twice, and Walz won the county when he ousted a Republican in his 2006 House race. But in 2016, Walz’s support dwindled and the county went to Trump twice.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz arrives at a press conference on new gun legislation at City Hall in Bloomington, Minnesota, on August 1, 2024. ((Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images))

Walz narrowly won the district when he was elected governor in 2018, but when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost Freeborn to Republican challenger Scott Jensen by nearly 15 points, a margin of nearly 30 percentage points over him in his first Congressional election campaign in 2006.

WALZ ROASTED AFTER DECLARING AT THE RALLY: “WE CAN’T AFFORD FOUR YEARS OF THIS”.

When he first entered politics, Walz struck a moderate tone, but as governor he signed bills that included universal background checks, free school lunches and protections for abortion and gender reassignment surgery, Politico reported. Those measures, along with ongoing frustration over his response to the coronavirus crisis, didn’t sit well with voters in places like Freeborn County.

“I call it the Democrats’ ‘smash and grab’ at the Capitol,” Freeborn resident Karla Salier said. “They have tried everything to make us a haven for transgender people and illegal immigrants. They just went crazy.”

However, the shift could be partly due to voter polarization.

“I think voters have changed,” Eric Ostermeier, a politics professor at the University of Minnesota, told Politico. “And I would say that’s the other aspect: voters’ willingness to split their votes has changed.

“Because I think it’s hard for people to say, ‘Well, there’s this one good Democrat, and I’m still going to vote for him, or there is.'” “That good Republican… he’s not that bad.” he said. “That probably means that party is more important than personality.”

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