‘Everyman,’ ‘dictator’ Tim Walz divides Minnesota State Fair

FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. — Not far from a stand selling deep-fried hot dogs and steps from a booth dedicated to the Minnesota Vikings is one of the most popular displays at the state fair in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, one of the largest in the US.

The “Never Walz” booth — sponsored by grassroots political party Action 4 Liberty — boasted long lines Thursday as attendees waited for the chance to spin a wheel marked with several of the Democratic vice presidential nominee’s most controversial initiatives.

After taking a spin, fairgoers would walk away with either a “Never Walz” handheld fan or a T-shirt depicting former President Donald Trump holding a copy of the Constitution and bearing the legend “Never Surrender.”

“The wheel is constantly spinning. It’s never stopping,” Action 4 Liberty organizer Jesse Smith told The Post, saying that between 5,000 and 10,000 fair attendees stop by the booth daily, with 90% having a positive reaction.

Newly decorated for 2024 after Vice President Kamala Harris picked Walz to be her running mate earlier this month, the “Never Walz” booth features the 60-year-old governor holding a tampon with a “boys bathroom” sign on it while standing in front of the burning Minneapolis skyline — a nod to his support of period products in boys bathrooms and his response to riots that followed the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020.

Walz is the first Minnesotan to appear on a major party ticket since Walter Mondale was buried in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election landslide — and Republicans as well as Democrats are excited about it, for different reasons.

“Minnesota is really fired up and ready to see a change because we’ve lived under Walz’s dictatorship,” Republican Party of Minnesota Deputy Chairwoman Donna Bergstrom told The Post at the party’s booth, appearing to reference the governor’s COVID restrictions — which included a hotline set up to allow nosy neighbors to snitch on each other.

“We’re really glad he’s on the national stage on the one hand so that all of America can really see how unready he is to be our vice president.”

May Lor Xiong, a longshot GOP congressional candidate who wants to represent a district including St. Paul in DC, said she was “hoping” that “there will be a big Republican turnout” along with independents and Democrats to rebuke the state’s leadership.

However, Minnesota has gone Republican in just three presidential elections since the end of World War II, and at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor booth, some fairgoers clad in Harris-Walz shirts raced to stick blue pins in a map of the state to show their support for the ticket.

“There’s a lot of excitement but I’m not sure it’s just him,” said DFL booth worker Julius Jones, who described Walz as an “everyman” and compared him to “your uncle down the road.”

“Everybody is excited for Kamala because this is going to be a historic election,” he added

“I think he’s got his base here,” fellow booth worker Pam Bandy added of the governor.

“What I’d like to see is him grab outside of Minnesota,” she said, referring to the key battleground states of Wisconsin and Michigan, which both campaigns are heavily targeting.

Pam Parker, a member of the DFL’s senior caucus, told The Post that Harris and Walz have the most value as younger faces of the Democratic ticket.

“They’re going to have the energy, and poor Biden didn’t have it and it did seem like he was getting more frail,” Parker said. “His brain was working fine and I don’t think people gave him enough credit for that.”

Other DFL booth patrons agreed that the party’s ticket was less a break from Biden than it was new packaging.

At the Libertarian stand, workers were also anti-Walz, but had no love for Trump either.

Libertarian Party of Minnesota Treasurer Joseph Gamache argued that their candidate, Chase Oliver, will get a boost from voters who would have backed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before he dropped out and endorsed Trump last week.