American Letter | Butte, Nebraska

The two women are chatting in front of the post office, one of the last addresses still open on the main street.

The windows of the old shops are all boarded up, and that’s not something new. If the concrete street weren’t so wide, there wouldn’t be as much of this feeling of emptiness.

“It’s quiet…

— Ah, that’s sad. If you had seen what it was like when I was little. There was no way to park!

The two 70-year-old women reconstruct for me the Butte of the 1960s and 1970s, pointing out buildings that have disappeared. Here, the grocery store—actually, there were two. The gas station. The dairy. “We used to buy eggs there, remember?” A woman sold fruit and nuts. The restaurants, of course…

Butte, Nebraska, isn’t so different from small towns all over this country. The jobs have fled. The old people have stayed.

Small Town America is dying, and with it a certain idea of ​​the United States.

“We weren’t rich, but we were comfortable,” Denise Holme told me. “I’d like to see the old days come back, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Oh yes, Make America Great Againthat speaks to me,” she says, her eyes full of round-winged pick-ups with four teenage girls in the back.

“When I was at high school“It was crawling here in the evening!” she said, bursting into laughter.

It is in this same high school that Tim Walz graduated in 1982. The high school has closed. The school has a few students from kindergarten to fourth grade. After that, you have to go to Spencer or another town. Like to get gas, buy groceries or buy paint.

If the Democratic vice-presidential candidate was chosen by Kamala Harris, it was in particular to give the reply to the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, whose bittersweet eulogy of the life of hillbilly is famous.

Walz wants to embody another version of the “deep” white America of small towns. He always returns to his roots in his speeches. His birth in West Point, Nebraska, his high school graduation in Butte, etc. It was as an adult that he moved to Minnesota.

Tim Walz loves his village. His mother still lives here. But his village doesn’t love Tim Walz so much. At least the politician doesn’t.

“You don’t want to know what I think of Walz!” says Jolene, who is leaving the closed post office with the letter she was going to mail. I hold her back.

“On the contrary, I want to!”

— I didn’t like what he became. How he let the riots get out of hand in Minneapolis [à la suite du meurtre de George Floyd, en 2020]. Here, we respect people’s property. To be governor, he plays the progressive.”

She’s leaving.

“Butte, 326,” the sign says. The census is more up to date: 286 souls. You can’t change the sign every time someone leaves or dies in this village planted at the foot of a rare hill in this flat country.

Fifty years ago, there were twice as many people. This is not a factory that has been relocated or put out of business. Nebraska is a vast corn and soybean field where cattle graze on the former plains of bison and pronghorn antelope.

Agriculture is what keeps the village alive. But from family farms, we have moved on to megafarms. Machinery, also giant, replaces labor.

“I have 600 acres where I grow corn for ethanol as a side hustle, and I don’t hire anybody,” Jess Reisman, a 37-year-old lineman and father of four, told me. He’s here to pick up two Miller Lites while his wife waits for him to get home. He has no nostalgia for the good old days, having only known Main Street as boarded-up.

“This is God’s country, here, everybody knows everybody. There’s fishing, hunting nearby, it’s quiet, people respect each other. Nebraska is the best place in the world.”

He, too, is not a fan of Walz as governor or of “his abortion policies.”

The “corner bar” is run by Renée Brewster. She has a small fleet of trucks for agricultural products with her husband, and it is a bit of a civic duty that she runs this bar, which barely survives. “It’s important to have a meeting place.”

The city owns the century-old building and is managing to cover its costs.

“My grandfather bought the bank in 1962 and my brother owns it now,” Scott Brewster tells me. Because yes, you can buy a bank. A very, very small bank. It’s in a bungalow near the post office.

“My brother went to school with Walz, he’s a good guy. He often comes to the party pancakes early summer. We shake his hand, but we don’t talk politics. His whole class went to visit him at the governor’s mansion in Minnesota, but I bet very few would vote for him. That’s okay, you don’t judge people by their political views.”

His own opinions place him on the side of the Republicans.

“Farmers, it may seem contradictory because they receive a lot of subsidies, but they distrust the government. They have learned to fend for themselves, without being told what to do by officials.”

The night before, at West Point, I met Clint Elsfel, the proverbial “guy sitting at the end of the bar.” He explained to me in another way his disdain for “big government,” a synonym for Democrats.

“My great-great-grandparents came to Nebraska from Germany. A lot of Germans here. They had a wagon. If you could stay on a piece of land that was given to you for a year, you could keep it. I still have the same farm, with 3,000 head of cattle. You know why there aren’t many trees here? When the temperature goes from 20 to -20 in an hour, they split, they burst! That’s what winter is like in Nebraska: Chinook in the morning, freezing wind in the afternoon. The bureaucrats in Washington, with their books and regulations, they don’t have a clue.”

“You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?” his friend Randolph asked me.

— I don’t vote here, you know…

— I don’t mind that you’re a Democrat. Hey, Justine, a beer for the guy from Montreal.

Nebraska, a state of just 2 million people, could play a historic role in this tight election. The Midwestern state shares with Maine this particularity: its five votes in the Electoral College do not all go to the presidential candidate who won the majority of the votes. A distribution by districts takes place, so much so that in the last four elections, Democrats have managed to snatch one vote in five in this very red state. It is not for nothing that Tim Walz was in Omaha on Saturday to try to keep for his party the “district number 2” which includes the largest city in Nebraska…

Local Republicans have been trying to abolish this feature for a long time, and they have not yet given up on doing so for 2024, in order to return to a system winner-takes-allas before 1991.

If the election is decided by a vote or two, all eyes will be on the state on November 5.

On the porch of her home in Butte, where she was born, Denise Holmes tries to convince herself that young people are slowly returning to Butte. “There are carpenters, plumbers who have set up shop,” she tells me. “Others who are teleworking.”

“It’s so beautiful here. If you could see the sun rise or set in the fields… We’re fighters. We don’t count on anyone else. And it’s peaceful. Very peaceful!”

Dead quiet.

I ask Lyle, her husband, what he thinks about it.

“I’m a bit deaf, I’m not a big talker. It’s better to ask Denise.”

He went to show me the Walz house, two blocks away. Black clouds were coming and going in the sky.

I drove back up to Missouri. There was a huge rainbow in the blond field. It wasn’t corn, it was corn. A red sun crashed into South Dakota like a giant raspberry, and I thought fondly of the homemade pie I’d been served that very day somewhere in the outskirts of Stanton, Nebraska, because nostalgia is contagious.