Sitting in section E, row 27, seat 5 of the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand on Friday night, I saw a more diverse range of Minnesotans than I normally see in a month. I’m not talking about racial diversity, as Matchbox Twenty was headlining, and you and I and everyone knows the ‘90s nostalgia act brings in a crowd that skews white. I’m talking about diversity of every other sort: geography, age, income, politics, ideology. Leaning back in the green fold-down chair, sipping a 20-ounce Paulaner Oktoberfest too quickly from a clear plastic cup as I waited for Rob Thomas and crew to begin, I watched these people climb the stairs to find their own green fold-down seats, and plop down next to people they may disagree with on every single hot-button issue of the day. But they can all agree on one thing: “Real World” still slaps.
I know the nearly 13,000 people who filled the outdoor venue that night, during a day when over 225,000 people attended the Minnesota State Fair, were wildly different in their outlook and opinions not because I asked them, but because Rob Thomas accidentally coaxed it out of them.
“How about for the next hour and a half of our life, this is our little community, this is our little family,” said the 52-year-old frontman, sporting an all-white getup including a T-shirt that read “Be Good to People.” “We don’t think about anything else that’s going on outside of here, we don’t think about politics, even though this is the home of Walz.”
At the mention of Tim Walz, Minnesota’s second-term governor and now vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket with Vice President Kamala Harris, the crowd erupted in cheers, followed closely by a chorus of equally impassioned boos.
“Shut your fucking boos — and your yays. This is not about politics,” Thomas yelled, quickly quieting the crowd. “Are you not listening? This is about all of us getting together and having a good fucking time and celebrating life while we’re alive.”
Reading those words on your phone or your computer right now, you might be rolling your eyes, thinking this is just another cliché pop star platitude. But whether he meant to or not, Thomas got the essence of the Minnesota State Fair right. Well, half right.
For 12 days every year leading up to Labor Day, it’s not that Americans leave their politics at the gate before entering the 300-acre playground of deep-fried food, animal barns, crop art and beer gardens. It’s more accurate to say that, for this week and a half at the end of summer, we put “our little community” above everything else — whether it be politics, geography, age or ideology.
If you’ve been searching for the antidote to political polarization in this country, you can find it at the Minnesota State Fair. It’s easy to hate your neighbor when they’re a faceless avatar spouting character-limited political opinions on an app whose algorithm feeds on negativity. But it’s also easy to recognize the humanity in anyone — whether they’re wearing a camo Harris/Walz hat, a red MAGA lid, or even an RFK Jr. cap — when you’re all cheering for the high schooler fumbling his way through “Waving Through a Window” at the amateur talent competition at the Leinie Lodge Bandshell. It’s even easier when they’re trying to stuff a ketchup-slathered corn dog (or Pronto Pup!) in their mouth.
If you weren’t one of the two million or so people from all 50 states and 36 countries who attended this year, you may be under the impression that this state fair is a hotbed of political polarization, just like everywhere else in the country. After much speculation and a viral clip from a previous fair visit, Governor Walz did indeed attend on Sunday, chowing down on a steaming pork chop on a stick and suiting up for a shift in the Dairy Building slinging malts and twist cones. National media outlets, from The New York Times to the New York Post, juxtaposed the outpouring of support for the homegrown VP nominee with an anti-Walz booth at the fair, run by a right-wing activist group, which supplied sweaty fairgoers with promotional hand fans emblazoned with the phrase “Never Walz.”
But if you were one of the two million fairgoers like myself — I went on Friday for Matchbox Twenty and the weekend before with my wife and one-year-old — the Never Walz booth most likely served simply as a waypost, nothing more, nothing less. Head northeast from it and you’ll find the Minnesota Farmers Union Coffee Shop, where we bought a honey lavender lemonade; head southwest and you’ll enter the aforementioned Dairy Building, where my wife and I ate a strawberry sundae and my daughter devoured a cheddar cheese stick while we all gazed at 90-pound butter sculptures slowly rotating in a climate-controlled gazebo. The ephemera from the Never Walz group, meanwhile, was strewn across the streets on Friday night, trampled on and ready to be swept up by the clean-up crew. Even the most fervent conservatives don’t want to take those home as a souvenir — they’d rather remember the state fair with a chocolate-smeared bucket of Sweet Martha’s cookies.
It’s said that, in the U.S., we’re always in an election year. Here in Minnesota, as in every other state in the country, we have a tendency to succumb to the unfair labels that are plastered on our own neighbors in this endless red-blue dichotomy. If you live in Beltrami Country, which favored Trump in 2020, you may see Hennepin County through the blue lens that it’s been given by our never-ending political coverage. If you live in Blue Earth County, which favored Biden in 2020, you may see neighboring Waseca County in a red tint.
Thankfully, we have the Minnesota State Fair, which softens and dissolves these labels like a piping hot Sweet Martha’s cookie dipped in a cup of ice-cold, all-you-can-drink milk. I’ve been to Fergus Falls, a city of 14,000 across the border from North Dakota, probably once in my entire life, but I cheered on Dane Mouser, a resident of that city, who won this year’s youth edition of the giant pumpkin competition. Does his family’s politics align with mine? That question never crossed my mind, as I was too busy considering how big of a candle you’d need for a 774-pound jack-o’-lantern. My grandparents are from a small farm community called Bird Island (population 989), which is peppered with plenty of Trump signs every time I visit, but that didn’t stop any Harris supporters from ogling at the incredible showing from that one-stoplight town in the Largest Sugar Beet contest: Dale Prokosch, Connor Elfering and Kya Elfering swept second, third and fourth place.
Much will be made in the next two months about the attendance at various political rallies, but the more illuminating crowd numbers to me are the records that were broken at the state fair this year. Five daily attendance records were set, with the Sunday that Walz attended hitting a flabbergasting 256,015 people.
Americans — and I say Americans, not just Minnesotans, due to the wide range of people who drive and fly in for the festivities — crave connection with people whose lives are different from theirs. They just don’t have any place to bridge that divide; as we’ve known for some time, the internet is certainly not going to be that town square.
The Minnesota State Fair, for 12 days every summer, gives people that excuse to get together with people utterly different from themselves. Can this experience be bottled up and exported around the country? People certainly try. Sweet Martha’s Cookie Jar, one of the most popular vendors at the fair, sells frozen cookie dough in stores around the Midwest. But you really have to be there, shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of people — so close that you can’t see whether they have a Never Walz fan stuck in the back pocket of their jeans or an “OMG GOP WTF” button on their Lululemon waist pack — to truly understand what this fair can offer. And when you get to the counter, ready to hand over a sweaty $20 bill for a bucket of the most delicious cookies you’ll ever taste in your entire life, you can look your line mate in the eye, who has jostled up front next to you, and say, “You first.”
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