Days after a Republican donor accused Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Donald Trump adviser, of sexually harassing her at a Las Vegas charity dinner in September 2021, she received an unexpected and apologetic phone call.

The call was from the former president seeking to reassure her, said the donor, Trashelle Odom, who alleged that Lewandowski had repeatedly groped her and made sexually explicit comments at the event.

“I really appreciated him taking the time to call me,” Odom said in a recent interview with The Washington Post, speaking about Trump’s outreach, which has not been previously reported.

Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son, also called to check on her, she said, and promised that Lewandowski would face consequences. He was quickly ejected from his leadership role at a pro-Trump organization, with a Trump spokesman announcing that Lewandowski “will no longer be associated with Trump World.”

But three years later, Lewandowski, 50, is officially back in the fold. The former president recently named him a senior campaign adviser — leaving Odom feeling distraught and betrayed.

“They just undid everything,” said Odom, 35. “I am very worried about his access to other women, and I am worried about the power the campaign is giving him over those women.”

Trump’s team earlier this month touted the “unmatched experience” of Lewandowski and several others brought on board as the former president struggles to find his footing against Vice President Kamala Harris, the newly minted Democratic nominee. People who know both men say Trump is trying to recapture the energy of his insurgent 2016 race by elevating one of his first campaign hires, who famously indulged his most pugnacious impulses with the mantra “Let Trump be Trump.”

“In Trump’s mind, Corey helped him win in 2016, so it makes sense to bring him back,” said Jane Timken, a Republican national committeewomen from Ohio who hired Lewandowski during her unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid in 2022 and described him as a savvy and well-connected consultant. “Nobody’s perfect. Trump trusts his political advice.”

Though aides have presented Trump’s third bid for the White House as a more disciplined, professionalized operation, his embrace of Lewandowski points to an enduring feature of the former president’s approach to politics: his high tolerance for people with professional liabilities so long as they remain loyal to him. In addition to Odom, two other women previously reported Lewandowski to police for unwanted physical contact, records show. He has denied wrongdoing.

Trump’s whole campaign is a test of traditional mechanisms of accountability — for himself and those around him. He is seeking to return to power after a felony conviction for falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal and a civil jury verdict that he committed sexual abuse in the 1990s — wide-ranging legal consequences that he and his allies have converted into a rallying cry and used to cast themselves as victims.

Lewandowski, in a brief phone interview earlier this month, said he didn’t know what his campaign responsibilities would be and to whom he would report. “I’m a friend of the president is what I am,” he said. He did not respond to detailed follow-up questions about the reporting in this story.

In response to questions about Lewandowski’s record and role in the campaign, spokesman Steven Cheung said, “President Trump has a world-class team dedicated to helping elect him once again to the White House.”

Over the past decade, as many Trump advisers have come and gone, Lewandowski has remained faithful — while also faithfully leveraging his relationship with Trump for money and influence, according to a review of his work and interviews with people familiar with it.

Lewandowski has classified his work as consulting and is not registered as a federal lobbyist, which would require him to disclose his clients. But public records obtained by The Post show how he used his connection to Trump to land business contracts. He also has been paid by numerous candidates as they jockeyed, sometimes unsuccessfully, for Trump’s endorsement, according to campaign and court records. And he piggybacked on the former president’s brand by chairing Ultra MAGA PAC, a group purporting to support “America First patriots” but spending only about 2 percent of its donations to directly support Trump-friendly candidates, records show.

The lasting bond between the two men is clear. While campaigning in Lewandowski’s home state of New Hampshire earlier this year, Trump welcomed him to the stage, musing, “Nobody was closer to me.” At another event, Trump called Lewandowski “a very, very good friend of mine who is very powerful actually.” He asked whether Lewandowski would ever leave New Hampshire.

“Only to go back to the White House, sir,” responded Lewandowski, who never formally worked in Trump’s administration.

‘Humiliated and devalued’

Lewandowski said he had met Trump just once before the businessman summoned him to Trump Tower in January 2015 and asked him to manage the 2016 presidential campaign. The political operative and former congressional staffer brought a brash and confrontational style that appealed to the long-shot Republican candidate.

“We hit it off, and if you don’t hit it off with your campaign manager, you have a problem,” Trump told The Post during that campaign.

Trump fired him before Election Day, though. He was arrested on one count of simple battery in March 2016 after grabbing a Breitbart News reporter’s arm as she approached Trump with a question. Lewandowski wasn’t prosecuted. But amid a power struggle with other campaign advisers, Lewandowski was pushed out in June.

Lewandowski continued to champion his former boss in frequent media appearances, and when Trump won, the onetime campaign manager launched a consulting and lobbying shop with another Trump campaign veteran. The following spring, amid media scrutiny of the firm’s offers of access to top administration officials, Lewandowski quit, maintaining that he had not done any lobbying.

About a week later, he incorporated Lewandowski Strategic Advisors. He shared office space and some clients with Turnberry Solutions, a lobbying firm run by two other Trump veterans, according to a person familiar with the arrangement who, like some others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

Lewandowski’s access to Trump was a primary selling point, according to records and interviews.

In 2017 and 2018, for instance, Lewandowski worked for a utility company in Ohio called FirstEnergy as it pushed the Trump administration to bail out its struggling coal and nuclear power plants. The federal money never came through, but a parallel state effort culminated in a bribery scandal in which FirstEnergy was accused of funneling millions to state lawmakers in exchange for a $1.3 billion bailout. The result: a $230 million fine against the company and a prison sentence for the speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives.

Lewandowski wasn’t accused of wrongdoing. But emails and text messages subpoenaed by the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, the state’s consumer protection agency, and released in response to a public records request, show how Lewandowski helped arrange access to Trump for FirstEnergy executives who were later charged with wide-ranging felonies. They have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial. FirstEnergy, in a statement, said the firm has “made meaningful improvements to advance our culture of ethics, integrity and accountability.”

A May 2017 email from Michael Dowling, FirstEnergy’s senior vice president of external affairs, identified Lewandowski as an outside consultant retained to “formalize and enhance our advocacy efforts.” In his phone interview with The Post, Lewandowski said that the company “never paid me a dime,” and that he was simply personal friends with Dowling, who is no longer with the company and whose lawyer declined to comment.

A contract reviewed by The Post, between FirstEnergy and Lewandowski Strategic Advisors, indicates that FirstEnergy had agreed to pay Lewandowski $50,000 per month for “strategic advice and counsel.” Lewandowski did not respond to questions about the contract.

The month that the contract was executed, one of Lewandowski’s associates at Turnberry Solutions wrote to Dowling about a meeting Lewandowski was arranging with Trump. “Corey is waiting for the final ok from POTUS on the meeting,” wrote the associate, Mike Rubino, who did not respond to a request for comment.

A year later, FirstEnergy allies shared an article about Trump’s support for a coal bailout. “Boom!!!” wrote Lewandowski, according to the emails. He added, “The WH did the right thing on this … with a little encouragement from us.”

The company’s then-CEO, Chuck Jones, ribbed the Trump confidant for being modest. “That can’t be the articulate, suave Corey Lewandowski I’ve been watching on TV the last year and a half,” he quipped.

The following month, Lewandowski was involved in discussions about arranging for Jones to speak to Trump during a swing through West Virginia, according to text messages among FirstEnergy executives and allies. Jones told Lewandowski and others that Trump seemed supportive when they spoke, telling the CEO, “It’s coming, we’re on it.” Lewandowski reacted positively, writing, “I’m glad he gets it.”

Doing business in Trump’s Washington also meant participating in the MAGA social scene. At a holiday party at Trump International Hotel in November 2017, Lewandowski was accused of slapping the buttocks of a singer and Trump supporter who had made headlines when she wore a “Make America Great Again” dress to the Grammys months earlier.

“I could report you for sexual harassment,” the singer, Joy Villa, recalled telling Lewandowski in an interview with The Post. She said Lewandowski responded, “Go ahead, I work in the private sector” — and then hit her buttocks again.

Villa filed a report with police alleging sexual abuse. “I felt extremely humiliated and devalued,” she said. In an interview on Fox Business at the time, Lewandowski said, “There is a due process and there is a process which they will go through to determine a person’s innocence.” He was not charged.

Villa said her Christian faith has led her to forgive Lewandowski. And as a Republican, she doesn’t want her encounter with Lewandowski to harm the former president’s political prospects. “I’m definitely a Trumper,” she said.

As Trump was preparing to leave office in early 2021, Lewandowski and a business partner made an audacious offer amid the mad dash for clemency in Trump’s final days in power: They would urge the president to pardon Bradley Birkenfeld, a whistleblower and former wealth manager convicted of fraud, according to Birkenfeld’s account to the Atlantic magazine and confirmed to The Post by a person familiar with the discussions. This person said Lewandowski told a Birkenfeld associate over the phone that he would need $500,000 upfront — before a scheduled meeting with Trump on Jan. 5, 2021 — plus $1 million if Birkenfeld landed the pardon.

Birkenfeld told the Atlantic he refused, and no grant of clemency materialized. He declined to comment. Lewandowski contested Birkenfeld’s account to the magazine, saying, “I never asked for money.”

‘Intimidated and frightened’

Lewandowski was prepared to make the most of Trump’s exile from Washington.

On social media, he describes himself as chairman of a political action committee launched in the waning days of Trump’s presidency and aimed at “DRAINING THE SWAMP AND ELECTING AMERICA FIRST PATRIOTS TO TAKE BACK OUR GOVERNMENT,” according to the group’s website.

In early 2021, he also began running Make America Great Again Action, a different pro-Trump PAC that landed a $60,000 contribution from the construction company owned by Odom’s husband, John Odom.

Lewandowski found consulting work for Trump-friendly political candidates preparing for the midterm elections. He became especially active with South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem, helping her raise her national profile and establishing her as a possible running mate for Trump in 2024, according two former Noem aides.

But Lewandowski soon jeopardized his status in Republican politics. In September 2021, he was seated next to Trashelle Odom, a mother of three who was living in Idaho, at a charity dinner at a Las Vegas hotel. According to a police report she later filed, she said Lewandowski drank a half-dozen cocktails while repeatedly touching her hand, buttocks and back and making “multiple inappropriate, aggressive, violent and unwanted sexual comments.”

She said Lewandowski boasted about the size of his genitalia and sexual stamina. He told her he was close to Trump, she told police, and said he could “destroy anyone.” After dinner, she said, he followed her around the hotel and made crude remarks about her body. He later threw a drink at her and called her stupid, she said.

“I was intimidated and frightened and fearful for my safety,” she told police, according to the report.

Noem, who attended the dinner, vowed to sever ties with Lewandowski as a result of the allegations, which were reported at the time by Politico. So did Charles Herbster, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Nebraska who had hired the longtime Trump ally.

Trump did not publicly comment on the episode, or reveal that he had spoken personally to Odom, who declined to go into detail about what the former president told her. But a Trump spokesman announced that Lewandowski would no longer be in charge of the main pro-Trump super PAC.

Lewandowski was later charged with battery. To get the misdemeanor case dismissed, he agreed to attend an eight-hour impulse control course, log 50 hours of community service and “stay out of trouble” for one year, according to court records. He did not admit guilt, but he did issue an apology.

“I want to state to the court that I wish to apologize to Ms. Odom for any discomfort I may have caused her on the evening of September 26th of 2021,” Lewandowski said one year later in county court in Las Vegas, according to a transcript.

But the repercussions faced by Lewandowski were limited from the outset. Noem continued to rely on Lewandowski as an adviser, according to someone involved in her political operation at the time. (A Noem spokesman did not respond to questions about the episode.) Lewandowski also continued to raise money through the PAC founded in the twilight of the Trump administration and now called Ultra MAGA PAC.

Among the PAC’s first moves was backing the congressional campaign of an Ohio coal lobbyist, Mike Carey, whom Lewandowski has described as a longtime friend. Otherwise, Lewandowski’s PAC has spent little on candidates. Of the roughly $2.35 million collected since 2021, only about $55,000 — or 2 percent — went directly into races, while most of the money was spent on fundraising.

“We see this every election cycle — groups that are raising money through direct mail and then turning around and spending all of their money on that,” said Andrew Mayersohn, a researcher at OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign finance. “There’s very little evidence of actual campaign activity.”

Lewandowski has also worked directly for candidates seeking Trump’s blessing. In 2022, he sued Eric Deters, whose bid for governor of Kentucky he had been advising, claiming that Deters owed him about $36,000. Deters countersued “the scoundrel who is Corey Lewandowski,” also claiming breach of contract, according to court records.

Deters had paid $75,000 to mingle with Trump at the Kentucky Derby, he said in court filings. Trump later endorsed one of his opponents.

“The only reason I hired Corey Lewandowski was to get the Trump endorsement,” Deters said in a recent interview. “That was the whole ballgame.”

Lewandowski said in court filings that he told Deters he could not guarantee the endorsement and that the candidate was to blame for failing to secure Trump’s backing. Both suits were dismissed, and Lewandowski continued to land high-profile campaign work, including advising Jeff Landry’s successful bid for governor of Louisiana in 2023.

Earlier this year, Lewandowski inched closer to the presidential race, receiving about $81,000 for advising the Republican National Committee. At the GOP convention in July, he reminisced about his last Trump campaign job while exuding confidence about the present, telling The Post, “I wouldn’t change one minute of the ’16 campaign if I could. But I’ll tell you what, I like the spot that we’re in today in 2024.”

A month later, he joined the Trump campaign.

Lewandowski soon became involved in the campaign’s latest imbroglio. He posted a photo of Trump flashing a thumbs-up in a section of Arlington National Cemetery where his campaign had been told not to take photos, according to defense officials. An employee at the cemetery reported a brief altercation with two campaign workers when she sought to stop the campaign from taking photos. The woman filed a complaint but declined to press charges.

Odom, meanwhile, is still a registered Republican but no longer involved in politics. She and her husband have since divorced. She declined to discuss the presidential race and said she rarely reads news articles because the publicity generated by her encounter with Lewandowski was so painful.

“I think he faced repercussions for a short period of time, but in the end it didn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t mean to sound like a victim because I hate that word, but this was something I was forced to go through, and I never want any other woman to have go through the same thing.”

Clara Ence Morse and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

CHARLOTTE — Vice President Kamala Harris spent the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in this Southern city, comparing the people fighting for abortion rights today to the civil rights activists who refused to leave whites-only lunch counters six decades ago.

“We — all of us — are now called upon to advance the promise of freedom, including the freedom of every woman to make decisions about her own body, not the government telling her what to do,” Harris said in June.

But once Air Force Two had flown back to Washington and Democrats here began urging their family, friends and neighbors to vote for her and other Democratic candidates, their cold calls to strangers and polite post-church conversations rarely touched on abortion, Democratic volunteers say.

“We know that’s not a winner down here,” said Rosemary Lawrence, a longtime Democratic activist who is on the social justice ministry at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Charlotte. While she personally supports both Harris and reproductive freedom, she said, very little of her phone banking focuses on abortion.

“When we tend to see something as not being popular, we tend to shy away from discussing it, which is not good. But that’s basically where we are,” Lawrence said. “I have not heard anyone [locally] try to make it an issue, and I’m here in the middle of it. We’re making telephone calls tonight, in fact, and I know that’s not one of the talking points.”

Since the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022 overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, Harris — first as vice president, now as the Democratic presidential nominee — has been the leading voice of a party trying to make abortion access a top voting issue.

Democratic strategists say Harris’s potential to be the first female president gives her a powerful voice on reproductive freedom. The issue fueled the party’s success in the 2022 midterms, they add, and they hope it will pull Democratic and independent voters — including suburban women — to the polls in November.

But that strategy is murkier in this Bible Belt state, according to 16 Democratic leaders, voters and activists interviewed for this article, some speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss political calculations. Abortion, they say, is a far more nuanced subject here.

Many were hesitant to criticize the strategy of the party’s standard-bearer, and they conceded that a full embrace of abortion rights could be more potent in other parts of the country. But in North Carolina, the social justice movement that undergirds Democratic politics was incubated in the Black church, which is often socially conservative and still sponsors efforts to get “Souls to the Polls” each November.

This illustrates the fissures in a Democratic Party that includes democratic socialists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on its left flank and President Joe Biden, whose Catholic faith has sometimes conflicted with his party’s abortion rights stance, in its more traditional wing. To win, Harris needs to motivate urban liberals as well as at least some social conservatives unhappy with Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Democrats hope Harris, the first Black woman and person of Asian descent to be vice president, can rebuild the multicultural coalition assembled by former president Barack Obama, who narrowly won North Carolina in 2008. Obama went on to narrowly lose the state in 2012, and it went for Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

But it may not be easy; Harris is a California Democrat who had difficulty corralling the support of Black and Southern Democrats in her 2020 presidential bid.

State Rep. Diamond Staton-Williams, a Democrat and a professional nurse, stressed the sensitivities of the issue in North Carolina. In 2023, Staton-Williams told the story of her own abortion on the floor of the North Carolina General Assembly as it debated a ban on most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy — a sweeping measure that ultimately passed over the veto of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

Staton-Williams said most of her conversations on the subject are low-key, especially because many of the contacts in her phone are people from church.

“It’s not me being out there like Jane Fonda or something,” she said, speaking of the Oscar-winning actress who has been at times controversially outspoken about abortion and other liberal causes. “It’s different, and the approach is different. It’s just like code-switching. If I lived in [Los Angeles], my conversation is absolutely going to be different. But we also know you’ve got to read the room, you’ve got to know your audience and know who you’re talking to.”

Aimy Steele, director of the New North Carolina Project, which focuses on minority voter engagement, said she supports abortion rights — but she is also a pastor’s wife, and “as a church girl, it’s always going to be a taboo.”

“In North Carolina, the [Harris] campaign should absolutely acknowledge that the Lord and Jesus Christ is centered in this Bible Belt, and they’d better acknowledge faith and they’d better acknowledge that people do care about their faith, and their faith informs decisions,” Steele said.

Nationwide, support for abortion rights is strong among all Democrats, but polls suggest the party’s Black members embrace it less. In a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll, for example, 96 percent of White Democrats opposed the Dobbs decision, compared with 85 percent of Black Democrats.

The abortion rights issue has been powering Democratic wins since Dobbs, and Trump has been moderating his position on it, although it was his Supreme Court appointments that enabled the ruling.

“President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion and has been very clear that he will NOT sign a federal ban when he is back in the White House,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary. “President Trump also supports universal access to contraception and IVF. Contrarily, Kamala Harris and the Democrats are radically out of touch with the majority of Americans in their support for abortion up until birth and forcing taxpayers to fund it.”

The Harris campaign on Friday announced a “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour, starting with an event Tuesday in Palm Beach, Fla., near Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago. In a statement, the Harris-Walz campaign said that abortion bans have hurt North Carolina women, particularly those facing with maternal health disparities, and that Harris is fighting to prevent a further erosion of their rights.

“Women in North Carolina know we’re living under an abortion ban that’s putting lives at risk, exacerbating the Black maternal mortality crisis, and making providers flee the state, all because of Donald Trump,” the statement said. “We know things will only get worse if he’s re-elected.”

Harris’s allies concede that abortion is a complicated issue for many voters, including in North Carolina, but noted that overall reproductive rights are hugely popular her as well as nationally.

“Just the word ‘abortion’ makes a lot of people bristle, but it is something we have to talk about,” said Claire Kempner, who noted that she is running for a statehouse seat because of North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban. “I do not think I’m unique. I am one of many who got more involved because of abortion.”

Harris and her supporters also say Dobbs’s impact is spreading far beyond abortion. In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are people, meaning anyone who destroys them could be legally liable. That, in turn, imperils in vitro fertilization, affecting hundreds of thousands of would-be parents seeking to conceive a child.

Trump announced on Thursday that as president, he would require the government or private insurers to cover all IVF costs, though he did not provide details. But Harris issued a dark warning about Trump’s priorities during her Aug. 22 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.

“He and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress,” she said. “And get this. Get this. He plans to create a national antiabortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put, they are out of their minds.”

That reference to an “antiabortion coordinator” comes from Project 2025, a document assembled by a coalition of conservative groups as an agenda for the next Republican administration. The document calls for the naming of a “special representative for domestic women’s health” to “provide a clear focal point for all issues related to protecting life and serving families.”

Trump has sought to distance himself Project 2025, but many of its proposals were written by his allies or veterans of his administration.

At the convention, Harris’s warning was met with thunderous applause. For many North Carolina Democrats, the excitement over her candidacy could overcome concern over social issues. Even so, some voters’ discomfort with abortion rights could have a real impact in the state, analysts said.

“It’s almost a crosscutting pressure,” said Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. “People are saying, ‘We’ve got this historic candidate, we are in her lane, but maybe there’s an issue that is maybe pulling us back.’” He added, “The issue of abortion, the issue of gay rights, are kind of those trepidation policies where people may be supportive but are not going to go full-out, or even perhaps may have some hesitance.”

Democrats have won some statewide elections in North Carolina — the governor and attorney general are Democratic — but the state remains strongly Republican, especially in presidential races. Since 2008, Democrats have been tantalized by the prospect of recapturing its electoral votes.

Harris has visited North Carolina a half-dozen times this year, and two of those trips focused on abortion rights, which has been part of her vice-presidential portfolio since 2022. After word leaked in May 2022 that the Supreme Court was about to overturn Roe, Biden’s then-chief of staff, Ron Klain, asked Harris to be the White House’s chief messenger on abortion.

Since then, Harris has toured an abortion clinic in Minnesota and engaged in a reproductive freedom tour across the country. She visited Tallahassee to criticize Florida’s decision to beef up its abortion ban. Over the past two years, and especially after becoming the Democratic nominee, she has crystallized her argument, framing abortion rights as one of the many freedoms Republicans would ostensibly curtail if given the chance.

Steele, the leader of the voter engagement group, said that mixed emotions about abortion notwithstanding, many Black women in North Carolina support the cause of putting Harris into the White House. “If we support VP Harris, then there’s this thought that maybe we will not be favored by God, right?” she said, conveying the views of some she has spoken with. “But we’ve also never had a Black female president.”

Steele said Black churchgoers often stress that they are electing a president, not a pastor. “They say, ‘You know what? That’s between her and God, and me and God. We’re going to allow her a pass. We understand what we’re supposed to do. We understand the assignment.’”

Emily Guskin contributed to this report.

NICOLLET COUNTY, Minn. — The political divide in the congressional district Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz once represented is now so stark that it’s hard to imagine one person representing the whole area. In this expanse of southern Minnesota, a few small, sleepy cities stand their ground in a sea of rural red that stretches from the South Dakota border to the bluffs above the Mississippi River.

Democrats have expressed hope that putting Walz, a Midwesterner who grew up working summers on a Nebraska farm, on their ticket will help them win over rural voters. But a close look at Walz’s former district — a prime example of how America’s huge urban-rural cultural divide shapes the nation’s politics — shows just how difficult that task will be.

In the 18 years since Walz made the life-changing career change from high school teacher to politician, Minnesota has grown more liberal as a state, but the district that gave him his start has lost almost all of the blue precincts that once dotted its farmlands. The cities in the 1st Congressional District have grown, but in the expansive rural heartland (pigs outnumber residents of the district seven times over, according to 2022 census data), populations have decreased and the people remaining have grown more conservative.

The major upset that Walz delivered in 2006 in his first run here — he beat an incumbent Republican by six points, becoming only the second Democrat in a century to flip the seat — seems even unlikelier now.

A Republican took back the district in 2018, the same year Walz was elected Minnesota’s governor. Walz lost here in both his statewide campaigns, and Republicans are expected to win here again in November. In the district’s cities, many voters — often Walz superfans — want liberal representation, but rural voters are trending ever more Republican, and they are angrier at the left than they were when Walz was their congressman.

Tales of Walz’s days as a teacher and high school football coach trip off the tongues of almost everyone in Mankato, the college town where he and his family lived, but mentions of Walz were widely met with a roll of the eyes this month at the Nicollet County Fair. Mankatoans feel energy and pride for their governor, but at the fair just 20 minutes outside town, some people were more excited by the prospect that if Walz becomes vice president, he might finally leave the state.

“I am not a Walz fan,” declared John Luepke, a farmer and former Nicollet County commissioner. While watching 4-H children show their chickens — “the equivalent of Little League in Minnesota,” an onlooker explained — he quickly deployed one of the Minnesota GOP’s favorite Walz attack lines.

“We had a $17 billion surplus and he just … spent it. It’s not like I got any rebates,” Luepke said.

As part of last year’s budgeting process, Walz agreed to spend almost all of the projected $17.5 billion surplus over the next two years, directing it toward K-12 education, infrastructure projects, and tax cuts and credits for working families. GOP lawmakers said the size of the surplus was evidence of overtaxation and accused Democrats of squandering the money and setting the state up for deficits.

In rural Minnesota, even some voters who liked Walz’s work in Congress complain that as governor he was far too liberal. Some conceded, though, that he knows more about agriculture than most vice-presidential or presidential nominees.

In the livestock enclosure, farmers grumbled over new agricultural controls — designed to curb water pollution — that have affected farmers under Walz’s governorship, including permits for feedlots and increased regulation of the spread of manure and fertilizer.

“Ninety dollars to vaccinate a farm cat!” Luepke exclaimed. Last year he had been able to buy the shots over the counter, he said, but this year he would have to take the cat to the veterinarian for a “wellness check” first, bumping up the price. “They’re farm cats. There are predators and roads — they only have about a 50 percent chance of making it to a year or two old,” he said. He said he wouldn’t have the same problem in South Dakota, where he bought the cat from a farm store. “This state wouldn’t even let them be sold in stores like that,” he added.

The biggest problem, according to the farmers — amid low crop prices and waterlogged fields — is high taxes and high government spending.

“We have some of the highest income taxes in the country. South Dakota doesn’t have any revenue tax,” Luepke continued, to nods from the farmers around him. “Iowa has very little. Wisconsin isn’t too bad either.” Minnesota has the highest top corporate tax rate in the country and the sixth-highest top bracket for income tax, but the state has lower taxes on poor families than many other states do.

Voters here are quick to relay the attacks local Republicans use against Walz — particularly, in a community of family farms that prides itself on pinching pennies, a school food-voucher program fraud scandal that they say falls on Walz’s shoulders.

In one of the largest pandemic-related fraud cases in the country, 70 people have been charged in an alleged scheme to fraudulently claim more than $250 million in federal funds. Walz had no direct role, but critics have said that, as governor, he should have prevented it.

Many voters in the rural areas of Walz’s old district no longer credit him for his moderate voting record in Congress and his time on the House Agriculture Committee.

“They’re portraying him to the whole United States as a moderate,” said Rose Oachs, a 76-year-old retired public health nurse, who was visiting the pig enclosure. “And as far as living in Minnesota all my life, I don’t feel he’s a moderate. He’s far left.”

But southern Minnesota has changed over the past two decades.

“The district was divided when he won in 2006,” said Nick Frentz, a state senator from North Mankato who belongs to the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Minnesota’s state-level affiliate of the national Democratic Party. “But by the time he’s running for the final of his six terms … it’s red red, but he wins. Barely.” By 2016, Walz — who in 2008 won by nearly 30 percentage points — hung on by less than one.

Election maps show the rural parts of Walz’s district growing increasingly Republican during his six terms in Congress. The cities and area colleges and universities have grown, helping Democrats. (Rochester, the district’s biggest city, grew by more than 17,000 people over Walz’s 12 years in Washington, according to census data.) But rural areas have struggled economically and lost population, Frentz said.

For Walz’s supporters, his ability to flip and hold on to a red district that was growing more conservative is evidence that he can appeal to a large swath of the electorate, including voters who disagree with him on some issues.

People Walz regularly interacted with as a congressman said he held on to his district by reaching across the aisle, maintaining a moderate voting record, staying involved with agriculture and taking the time to speak to constituents who disagreed with his politics. Being endorsed by the National Rifle Association — which later rebuked him after he changed his position on gun rights — and serving in the National Guard also helped, Frentz said.

Since being elected governor in 2018, Walz has signed a laundry list of Democratic priorities approved by the narrowly divided state legislature, including legal protections for abortion rights, free school meals, a child tax credit, legal marijuana and protections for gender-affirming care.

That record excited liberal Democrats but drew opposition from many voters in his old congressional district.

Walz didn’t abandon his rural roots, Frentz argued. “Those in the 1st District who had Tim as a congressman and were willing to vote for a Democrat, even with conservative leanings, sometimes they’re disappointed at the stuff that passes at state level that he signs,” said the legislator, who has known Walz for 20 years. “But he doesn’t just represent the … people in the district anymore, and part of the state is a good deal more liberal than down here.”

Even in this now GOP-held district — the Republican incumbent, Brad Finstad, won by 12 points last cycle — tens of thousands of people still vote for Democrats. Although Finstad benefits from how red the rural areas have become, he has to win enough votes in those places to offset the growth of the district’s blue cities.

In Mankato, many people are enjoying watching their high school coach rise to the national stage. On a chalkboard at a local bar that lets people buy each other drinks for the next time they come in, someone has bought Walz a beer, marked with a heart “for democracy.”

Walz’s long tenure coaching and teaching has made him a firm fixture of the community. Every person in Mankato who spoke to The Post either knew Walz personally or knew someone who did.

Nick Maxwell, a personal injury lawyer, moved to Mankato shortly after Walz was first elected to Congress. “There was a lot of excitement at that time and it just carried over … which was interesting because as soon as he stepped out to become the governor, we lost that seat,” he said. “That’s what you see at a macro level: He’s just got something extra that resonates with people and a way of speaking that people can grab on to.”

Walz’s “authenticity” as a politician who behaves like a “normal person” has allowed him to heal rifts between communities that have grown apart, Angie and Dan Bastian, longtime friends and neighbors of the Walz family, said in an interview. Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats were right to bet that Walz could bridge divides between rural and nonrural communities nationwide, too, they argued, and offered an example.

Last year, they said, Walz unexpectedly showed up at the wake for Dan Bastian’s father. Bastian’s rural family whispered and stared. Some were not happy. But Walz talked to everyone anyway.

“He wants to listen, he wants to incorporate. He’s firm on his ideas and his policy, but he is very open to bringing people together,” Angie said. “He talked to them. He built a bridge. That’s his magic.”

Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began in late October, Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser, Phil Gordon, feared that neither the Israeli military strategy nor key parts of the planned U.S. response would work.

Gordon worried that the only way to accomplish Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas entirely was to destroy Gaza along with it, with all the humanitarian tragedy that would entail, according to a person close to him who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Gordon did not believe the United States could influence Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he had dealt with during Israeli-Palestinian peace talks a decade earlier, the person said.

It is widely expected that Gordon would be the national security adviser in a Harris White House, should she win, and his personal views, which have not been previously reported, have largely aligned with Harris’s as the Israel-Gaza war has unfolded, according to several people familiar the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private relationship. The two have worked hand-in-hand to formulate Harris’s remarks at numerous inflection points in the war, providing clues as to how she could reshape U.S.-Israel policy if she wins the presidency.

Harris would probably conduct a full analysis of U.S.-Israel policy to determine what is working and what is not, according to several people familiar with her thinking, with Gordon leading the effort. It is unclear what would come of that process, but those familiar with conversations between Harris and Gordon say she could be open to imposing conditions on some aid to Israel, a policy that President Joe Biden has largely rejected.

Biden has taken some steps that Harris could build on to pursue such a policy. In February, Biden issued a memorandum requiring countries that receive U.S. weapons to adhere to certain standards, including abiding by international law and facilitating transport of U.S. humanitarian assistance, which critics say the president has not enforced. He also briefly suspended a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs this year.

The Israel-Gaza war has deeply divided Democrats since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, when militants killed about 1,200 people and took some 250 hostage. Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, creating a humanitarian crisis and widespread hunger in the enclave.

Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has faced pressure from activists to break from Biden’s Israel policy — but she has declined, not least because she is still his vice president.

But if she wins the Oval Office, she could set her own course. And as she formulates her foreign policy, Gordon has become one of her closest and most trusted advisers, helping to guide her through issues from the Middle East to the war in Ukraine.

Harris’s office said it would not discuss her potential policies should she become president. “We are not going to address hypothetical policy questions. She remains the Vice President of United States and stands by the Biden-Harris Administration policies,” Dean Lieberman, Harris’s deputy national security adviser, said in a statement. “The Vice President has made clear she will always ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists. She will never leave Israel unable to defend itself.”

While Harris has not articulated the specifics of her foreign policy, she is expected to largely continue Biden’s approach in many areas if she wins, including supporting Ukraine against Russia, pushing back against China’s assertiveness and seeking to build international alliances.

The area where Harris is most likely to differ from Biden, allies and analysts say, is on Israel. Despite her public support for Biden’s position, her private comments and concerns as the war has unfolded suggest she would be open to challenging Israel more directly, according to people familiar with her views who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“The best-developed [policy] in terms of what could change is on the Middle East, because they know what’s not working,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO who has known and worked with Gordon for decades. “There is plenty of evidence that a Harris administration and Phil would urge a fresh look at how we approach our overall Middle East policy, which they’re pretty clear now has to have an end state for the Palestinians at its core.”

Biden also supports a Palestinian state, but many activists say he has done little to promote it or to hold Netanyahu accountable for undermining its viability. Several current and former administration officials also said Harris has spoken more forcefully and explicitly about the need for a Palestinian state and self-determination.

Gordon’s résumé is in many ways typical of Washington insiders. He served as director of European affairs at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, then as assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama, eventually becoming a Middle East specialist in the White House during Obama’s second term.

One former official joked that Gordon stands out because he is not part of the “pale, male and Yale” crowd that composes much of the U.S. Foreign Service. Gordon graduated from Ohio University before earning a PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. That scholarly background, associates say, informs much of his methodical, dispassionate and even academic approach to foreign policy.

While Gordon’s former and current colleagues say he is not political, he was one of the first people to join Obama’s 2008 campaign, even as much of the Democratic establishment favored Hillary Clinton at the time. In 2019, Gordon became an informal foreign policy adviser to Harris’s ill-fated presidential campaign before advising Pete Buttigieg.

“Phil finds candidates he believes in,” said Frank Lowenstein, a former State Department official who has worked with Gordon. “He makes up his own mind about people he thinks would make great presidents and gets on board early.”

When Biden won, early supporters or longtime advisers received most of the top foreign policy jobs. Gordon became Harris’s deputy national security adviser and ascended to the top foreign policy job in her office in early 2022.

While Harris and Gordon did not initially have a strong personal relationship, associates say they have steadily become closer as the vice president has taken on a more prominent foreign policy role. She has met with European leaders as part of the administration’s effort to build a pro-Ukraine coalition, and she has traveled several times to southeast Asia to bolster alliances against China.

In many ways, Harris’s view of foreign policy is informed by her background as a prosecutor, according to aides and allies. She often focuses on whether countries are abiding by international humanitarian law and the “rules-based order” — an approach that can be particularly thorny when it comes to Israel.

That lawyerly approach has informed many of Harris’s most noteworthy comments about the war, including an assertion that Israel has a right to defend itself “but it matters how” and a statement that there are “no excuses” for not allowing more aid into Gaza.

Unlike Biden, Harris has not stressed or even publicly noted publicly that Hamas embeds its fighters among civilians — not because she does not believe it, but to avoid giving Israel cover for the high casualty rate, according to two people familiar with the thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private strategy. She has strongly condemned Hamas for a litany of other actions, including sexual violence on Oct. 7 and killing civilians.

Still, the specifics of how Middle East policy would change under Harris remain unclear. Much depends, of course, on whether the Israel-Gaza war is still raging. And several Middle East veterans cautioned that changing U.S. policy toward Israel can be politically difficult.

Aside from imposing conditions on aid, there are other steps the United States could take to change the nature of its relationship with Israel. They include legally recognizing rulings from international bodies, including a recent one from the International Court of Justice, which in July said Israel should end its occupation of Palestinian territory, evacuate existing settlements, stop building new ones, and pay reparations to Palestinians who have lost land and property.

Lieberman said Harris “will continue to stand up against anti-Israel bias in international organizations.” He added that Harris has been clear that her priority is finalizing the cease-fire and hostage release deal that she and Biden have been seeking for months, and that “more must be done to protect Palestinian civilians and to deliver humanitarian assistance, and international humanitarian law must be upheld.”

For now, Harris opposes cutting off offensive weapons to Israel, something many progressives want. A group of pro-Palestinian activists in Michigan that Harris briefly spoke to this month urged an arms embargo of Israel after the interaction. But Gordon, in a rare statement from his official X account, clarified the following day that Harris did not support such a policy.

“@VP has been clear: she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups. She does not support an arms embargo on Israel. She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law,” Gordon wrote.

If Harris wins the White House, Gordon may have a bigger impact on foreign policy than Biden’s aides do. Biden came into the presidency with more than 50 years of foreign policy experience, including as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and he is supremely confident in his own judgment, according to numerous current and former White House officials.

On certain issues, including his reluctance to withhold aid from Israel or to allow Ukraine to strike deeper into Russia, Biden has been immovable, much to the frustration of some aides. Having a president so knowledgeable and confident of his own instincts can be an asset, since it provides clarity and direction, they say, but it also carries risk.

“That experience is double-edged sword because Biden always thought he knew more than everybody and was intransigent,” one outside adviser said. “Most presidents use the policy process to present them with choices and manage debate and make a decision. I expect Phil would play the role of honest broker among a group of advisers.”

Gordon, by nearly all accounts, is the person Harris trusts most when it comes to global affairs, and his quiet, deliberate style has endeared him to her. Former associates said he is loyal and has no problem voicing his opinions in private but will fully back the administration’s policy in public.

That approach was evident when Israel launched its ground invasion of Gaza in October. Gordon was at a meeting with Sullivan and several former national security aides, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

While the other officials were almost entirely focused on dissuading Israel from a full-scale assault, Gordon was already asking about the “day after,” one of the people recalled. How does this end? Gordon asked of the military campaign. How will the United States advance a two-state solution once the war is over?

The questions struck some in the meeting as overly academic and theoretical, given that the war was just beginning, according to one of the participants. But they ended up being prescient. And now everyone is asking about “the day after.”

Republicans from Donald Trump down, facing the first presidential election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, are still struggling to find their footing on the issue, caught between a conservative base and a majority of Americans who support abortion rights.

Trump has sought to moderate his position but carries the baggage of helping to overturn Roe, the landmark abortion rights case, and this week he opposed an abortion rights measure in Florida after months of equivocating. Running mate JD Vance, like a host of other GOP candidates, has softened his stance — but found his past support for sweeping abortion restrictions hard to escape. And party leaders have been evasive on key policy questions such as their plans for abortion pill access.

“They have looked like a three-ring circus that’s badly managed,” said Chuck Coughlin, a longtime consultant to GOP candidates in Arizona, who laughed when asked if Republicans had corrected the problems with abortion that plagued them in the 2022 midterms. “It’s just terrible the way they’ve handled the whole thing.”

Trump, Coughlin said, wants to “jettison his legacy, which he can’t jettison. … He’s a deer in the headlights.” Trump has boasted of appointing three justices to the Supreme Court that cemented the majority behind the June 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.

Led by Trump, Republicans in competitive races are rushing to frame abortion as a states’ rights matter, hoping to convince voters that the issue is not truly on the ballot this year. That is a sharp pivot from the message many in the party have pushed for decades — that abortion is murder and should be widely banned.

Many Republican strategists have successfully urged GOP candidates to moderate their public positions, and especially to distance themselves from an Alabama state court ruling that embryos are children, threatening access to in vitro fertilization. But as Republican-dominated states adopt sweeping abortion restrictions, these candidates have struggled to address their unpopularity.

Trump in particular faces the reality that while he touts his role in the Dobbs decision, that ruling is broadly unpopular. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in August found that 62 percent of Americans oppose it while 35 percent support it. And 59 percent said the abortion issue would be important as to which candidate they voted for.

Many Republicans are hoping that other topics, like the economy and the border, will take precedence for voters, and they cite polls showing broader voter interest in those issues than in abortion.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that women voters will compare the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and that under Trump, “the economy was better, groceries and gas cost less, our neighborhoods were safer, and young women like Laken Riley were still alive” — a reference to a Georgia student allegedly killed by someone who entered the country illegally in 2022.

At the same time, Republicans are cognizant of the political risk that abortion poses for them.

The reproductive rights issue powered Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, when the party did far better than anticipated and avoided a widely predicted “red wave.” Last year, Democrats, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, relied on the issue to help them prevail even in Republican areas.

Ballot referendums have only underscored that electoral potency. The abortion rights position has won all seven times it appeared on a state referendum, including in such conservative places as Kansas, Ohio and Montana.

In response, Trump has called abortion a matter for states to decide and removed some antiabortion language from the GOP platform. He recently promised that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights,” and he proposed requiring the government or private insurers to pay for in vitro fertilization, stunning other Republicans who questioned the expensive idea.

And this week, Trump criticized a six-week abortion ban in his home state of Florida as too strict, suggesting he might vote for a November ballot measure that would overturn it. A day later, however, after conservative backlash, Trump said he would actually vote “no” on the measure so that the six-week limit would remain.

That prompted an immediate statement from Democratic nominee Kamala Harris saying, “Donald Trump just made his position on abortion very clear: He will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant.”

The Florida ballot measure would overturn the six-week law by legalizing abortion until a fetus can survive outside the womb, and afterward if the woman’s health is deemed at risk. Trump said he believes that would allow abortions too late in a woman’s pregnancy, though he said he also thinks people “need more time” than six weeks.

The evolving explanation underscored the challenge that sweeping state-level abortion laws present for GOP politicians up and down the ballot. And it’s not clear that it reassured people on either side.

Republican moderates worried that the former president had tied himself to a six-week abortion ban that many centrist voters would find unpalatable. At the same time, some conservative activists were not enthused, given Trump’s back-and-forth on abortion in recent months.

“He’s handled abortion so poorly this election — I wasn’t surprised,” said antiabortion activist Abby Johnson, who spoke in support of Trump at the Republican convention in 2020 but this year does not want to endorse him.

Republicans in some tight congressional races, meanwhile, are backing off their previous sweeping antiabortion stances, with mixed success. In Arizona, GOP Senate nominee Kari Lake this year joined calls to repeal a total abortion ban, despite once calling it “great.”

“It’s risky to switch positions, because voters can see through that,” said Bill McCoshen, a GOP strategist in swing-state Wisconsin. He urged, “Defend your position, don’t keep moving left.”

But many in the party have calculated it’s a risk they need to take.

Vance brought his own record to the ticket: In 2022, he said he would “like abortion to be illegal nationally,” and in 2023 he signed a letter supporting a ban on the mailing of abortion materials, such as medications that terminate a pregnancy. After the 2022 midterms, Vance said he recognized that Republicans needed to rethink their approach to abortion, calling red-leaning Ohio’s popular vote for abortion access a “gut punch,” and as Trump’s running mate he has ruled out a national ban.

But Democrats have plenty of sound bites to deploy against Vance, and his derisive comment dismissing “childless cat ladies” as people with no stake in the country’s future has further alienated some women who distrust the GOP on reproductive issues.

Harris and other Democrats are increasingly framing the abortion and reproductive rights issue as part of a broader argument. Trump and the GOP, they say, are determined to take away Americans’ rights — whether by limiting the availability of books, restricting what can be taught in schools or intervening in private medical decisions.

Republicans say Democrats have misrepresented their views. Vance spokeswoman Taylor Van Kirk accused Harris of “lying about these issues because she has no other option.” Trump and Vance, she said, “have made it abundantly clear that under their administration, abortion policy will be set at the state level, and every woman in America will have access to IVF.”

But some Republicans are uncomfortable with their party’s position as well.

Katrina Shealy, a GOP state senator in South Carolina, suggested her party should listen more to women on reproductive issues. Shealy joined the two other Republican women in the South Carolina Senate to oppose a six-week ban in the state. The bill passed anyway, and now all three legislators have lost to GOP primary challengers.

“They got rid of all the women,” she said.

Harris aides, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy, said they see abortion access as a winning issue for Democrats even in states with larger swaths of conservative voters, such as North Carolina and Georgia. They said Harris plans to lean harder into the issue of reproductive freedom in the final months of the race.

On Friday, her campaign announced a “reproductive freedoms tour,” including more than 50 stops through the battleground states likely to decide the election. The first stop will be in Florida, a short distance from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s sprawling home and private club in Palm Beach.

People in at least eight states will vote in November on whether to embed the right to an abortion in their state constitutions. Democrats hope a surge of support for those ballot measures will help their candidates, particularly in swing states like Arizona and Nevada.

In her most recent campaign stop, in Savannah, Ga., Harris warned that Trump would sign a national abortion ban — even though his campaign says he would not — and emphasized his role in ending Roe, saying his Supreme Court appointees paved the way for a “Trump abortion ban” in many states.

North Carolina state Sen. Natalie Murdock, political director for the Harris campaign in the state, said she has been having “holistic” conversations with voters about reproductive freedom, emphasizing that the issue is broader than abortion itself.

“People are saying that MAGA extremists, Republicans, are not going to stop with abortion,” Murdock said. “They are seeking to control women’s bodies.”