In this hard-fought US election, vice presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz were picked to sway Midwestern and rural voters who might have been hesitant about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. In Nebraska, due to an electoral quirk, such voters could be crucial.

As an expert breeder, Wade Bennett can tell you the precise lineage of each of the 140 Charolais cattle he raises on a small farm on the edge of Nebraska’s rolling Sandhills.

Despite being a staunch Republican, however, he is less certain of the pedigree of the man once again vying for his vote.

Donald Trump, he says, would probably be “kicked” off his voting shortlist if other conservative options were available.

Nebraska, one of the least populous states, like much of rural America, is not only deeply Republican but also deeply Christian. And some here, like Wade, are uncomfortable with what they see as Donald Trump’s personal, moral failings.

But with Kamala Harris and a few minor party candidates the only other options in November, Wade is putting aside his scruples.

“Even as a Christian,” he tells me. “It is what it is.”

He focuses not on Trump’s character, but on his policies — and he likes the promises he hears to crack down on illegal immigration, lower the cost of living and impose more tariffs on trade.

However, even his slight hesitation is enough to give Democrats hope.

The rightward shift of rural America over the past 25 years has been remarkable.

According to the Pew Research Center, Republicans had a six-point lead over Democrats among registered voters in rural areas in 2000.

But by 2024, they had built a massive 25-point lead.

Although only a fifth of Americans live outside major cities, the strength of their shift toward Donald Trump was key to his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But for Democrats, the rural vote is still worth fighting for, especially when even small gains in already tight states could make a difference.

So it’s no coincidence that both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump now have running mates whose white rural roots are being used to argue who is best positioned to speak for this country’s great Midwest.

Vice presidential candidates typically don’t have much influence on how people vote, but when Tim Walz and J.D. Vance meet Tuesday night in a prime-time televised debate, they hope their different backstories and views resonate with voters still unsure about Harris. a Democrat from California, and Trump, a real estate developer from New York.

Walz, the current governor of Minnesota, was born in small-town Nebraska and has made much of his background “working cattle, building fences.”

His time as a teacher and football coach before entering politics, and his subsequent record in Minnesota, where he provided tax breaks to families and free school meals, are exactly the kinds of things that Democrats hope will resonate with struggling voters at the countryside.

Senator Vance of Ohio, on the other hand, is a man who has also made much of his rural roots, but with a much less optimistic framework.

Vance rose to national fame with his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, the story of his family’s origins in eastern Kentucky, their struggles with poverty, his mother’s battle with addiction, and the unemployment and misery of Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.

Where Tim Walz has emphasized individual freedom and what unites Americans, Vance has focused on a “ruling class” that he says has failed working families in small communities across the country.

In writings and in interviews, he has emphasized the need for individual responsibility, rather than welfare, although he does not support cuts to programs such as Social Security. And he reiterates Trump’s vision of protecting American jobs and workers with tariffs and border walls.

I meet 42-year-old Shana Callahan casting for catfish under a setting sun at the Two Rivers Recreation Area, just outside the city of Omaha. Once again, the cost of living is never far away.

“Everything costs more, everything sucks,” she says.

“I drive an F-150 and when Trump was in office I paid about $55 for a tank of gas. Right now it’s somewhere between 85 and 109, and you know, the cost of groceries and everything has just gone through the roof.

There were structural reasons for the depressed oil market during part of Trump’s presidential term, not least the Covid crisis, and prices started to rise sharply before he left office. Some economists also say President Joe Biden’s 2021 stimulus spending has contributed to broader inflation.

But economics is a feeling in the US election, not a graph on a page, and Shana has made up her mind.

There is nothing, she tells me, that could convince her to vote for Kamala Harris, especially not the local backstory of Tim Walz and his claims to represent people like her.

“First of all, the man is a lunatic,” she says. ‘I can’t respect him. He gets on the crazy stage and says, ‘Oh, go, coach.'”

However, the story of JD Vance being raised by a grandmother due to the opioid crisis – which she knows from the film version of his book – resonates deeply.

“The beginning of the movie is like your family will always support you. I mean, that’s kind of how it goes around here.”

“I’m only 42 and I’ve had three friends die from fentanyl.”

Shana lives in the one small part of this vast, rural state that may have an outsized impact on the November election outcome.

In the American system, each state is allocated a certain number of votes in the so-called electoral college. Presidential candidates must receive 270 votes to win the White House.

Unlike most of the rest of America, where all of the Electoral College votes in each state go to the winner of the popular vote, Nebraska does things differently.

Three of the five votes are decided by whoever wins three individual districts.

Nebraska is a reliably Republican state, but the second district – worth one vote – went to Trump in 2016 and to Biden in 2020, and this time there is a scenario in which whoever wins the state could win the entire election.

If Harris wins the Rust Belt swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and Trump wins the Sun Belt states of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada, the second district would provide the sole tie-breaking vote.

District Two is a microcosm of America, with the heavily Democratic-leaning city of Omaha balanced by the Republican-leaning suburbs and rural areas beyond.

In their backyard in downtown Omaha, Jason Brown and Ruth Huebner-Brown spray-paint giant blue dots onto plain white lawn signs.

“We are kind of a small swing state within a state,” says Jason. “It could absolutely, you think, be a historically changing moment. This really could be the ultimate voice that matters.”

In an effort to keep the “blue dot” blue, the Harris-Walz campaign has spent vastly more than Trump-Vance here, pouring millions into TV advertising.

Ruth tells me she thinks it has an effect on thresholds.

“When they talk about Walz, he is very recognizable. He’s, you know, one of us. And you know, they just trust him.

“And I think a lot of people are very tired of the division and the bitterness, and he is anything but that.”

There is a lot of division in Nebraska.

Even here, deep in rural America, you can hear unsubstantiated claims that large numbers of immigrants are illegally claiming Social Security benefits or engaging in voter fraud.

One Republican voter admits that his belief in such claims is not based on facts, but on what he has heard, with echoes of J.D. Vance’s similar justification for his promotion, without evidence, of the claim that Haitian migrants eat pets in Ohio.

A soybean farmer tells me Kamala Harris is a “DEI tenant”; another says it is white people who are discriminated against in America today.

Yet there are also signs of groupthink on the Democratic side: bewilderment at their opponents’ choices and a willingness to see all Republican voters as motivated by the narrow politics of prejudice.

But there’s something else unique about Nebraska’s electoral system. The state legislature is nonpartisan, meaning it neither recognizes the party affiliations of its elected members nor organizes them around formal party voting blocs.

In the city of Hastings, Michelle Smith is seeking a seat in the local legislature.

She’s a Democrat fighting for votes in a very red district, but, she says, the system encourages compromise.

“My own father is one of those people who is going to vote for Donald Trump, and I understand it,” she says.

“I am an entrepreneur. I paid less taxes when Donald Trump was president. Our prices were lower in the supermarket.”

How does she campaign?

“I bring it back to the local issues. I’m not a national candidate. I’m a local candidate and I’m doing my best to make things better here in Nebraska.”

For now, Nebraska is in the national spotlight.

There has been a last-minute effort by the Republican Party to leave nothing to chance, with several lawmakers pushing for a move to make the state a winner-take-all system.

Barring the completely unexpected, this would mean that all of the state’s Electoral College votes would go to Donald Trump.

However, it foundered on the opposition of a few local Republican senators, who refused to bow to pressure so close to the election, and what they saw as the interests of the state – given the rare bit of political power the system offers – than that of national party politics.

Even Lindsey Graham, the powerful Republican senator, flew in to meet those left behind, but to no avail.

“It was interesting,” he reportedly said in Washington. “They have a different system. Everyone is like a mini governor.”

Whether or not Nebraska plays a major role in November’s deeply divisive battle, it can provide an alternative to it.