I take it that the political pundits figured out that Democrats don’t do well with rural voters. Over the weekend I saw several analyses commenting on the Democrat rural vote deficit. For example:
- Democrats again lament their weakness in rural areas, but they don’t have an answer to the problem (Dan Balz, WaPo)
- Rural Democrats stare into the abyss after Virginia (Politico)
- Rural voters have turned their backs on the Democratic party (Business Insider)
And on and on. Google “democrats rural voters” and you get many, many recent hits.
This is something I’ve been complaining about on this blog for all the nearly twenty years I’ve been writing this blog. In most of the rural U.S., the only messaging anyone ever hears is Republican messaging. The only points of view people are exposed to are right-wing points of view. Democratic and progressive ideas and positions are not ignored; they are silent and invisible.
And this has been going on for a long time. This is a trend that began during the Reagan Administration, if not earlier. And as people old enough to remember Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman have died off, those areas have gotten redder and redder.
Exactly how this happened would take a book to analyze, but the ending of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of right-wing talk radio have a lot to do with it. The erosion of Union membership also impacts many areas, such as coal mining communities, and is causing rust belt communities to get redder also. Unions were a major disseminator of Democratic Party perspectives back in the day.
Before that, a whole lot of white working-class people abandoned the Democrats because of their support for racial equality, especially Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and corrective policies such as Affirmative Action. Rural areas especially do tend to be homogeneously white.
And, of course, rural areas tend to be culturally conservative, which is another big reason for the rural voter gap. For more, see How the Democrats Lost, Period, from 2006.
Democrats argue, rightly, that working-class conservatives who vote for Republicans are voting against their own interests. Get this bit from Dan Balz in WaPo:
Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies, headquartered in Whitesburg, Ky., said Trump gave rural voters a greater sense of pride in themselves and their communities at a time when their livelihoods, whether through coal mining or family farming, were being threatened — and as some coastal Democrats seemed to be disrespecting them.
“He wasn’t going to bring the coal jobs back, but he elevated them,” Davis said of Trump. “We’ve brought energy and food [to the nation] and served in the wars. Rural people always felt they were in service to the rest of the country, and now there’s a cultural chasm. .?.?. What the Democrats have a hard time understanding is that politics are cultural and not logical. It’s going to take more than a white paper to reverse what’s going on.”
I’d be willing to bet money that if you surveyed people in coal minining areas, current and former, and asked whether coal jobs went up or down during the Trump administration, people would tell you those jobs increased. Maybe not in their communities, but somewhere. Of course, the truth is something else.
In 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made a promise to coal miners at a rally in West Virginia. “For those miners, get ready because you’re going to be working your asses off,” he told them, wearing a white hard hat. “We’ll be winning, winning, winning.”
After four years of the Trump administration, coal has been losing, losing, losing. Not that Trump can take the blame (or the credit). Dismal economics have been inexorably displacing coal as the fuel of choice in the US and around the world. Trump made some attempts to stop the bleeding—easing air pollution laws and propping up ailing plants—and in 2017, falsely claimed those efforts were working. “We are putting the coal miners back to work, just as I promised,” he said.
But, the data tell a different story. The number of people employed by the coal mining industry has fallen 15% since Trump took office in January 2017. Despite job losses that temporarily stabilized during his years in office, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics Data, the trend is continuing. Jobs did not increase, unhelped by Trump’s trade wars and unsuccessful efforts to use the Defense Production Act to prop up coal plants, before the pandemic curtailed coal demand and employment.
So, Trump didn’t do squat for coal mining communities, but he made them feel better about themselves, and they voted for him in 2020. Trump got the farm vote also, even though his trade war with China hurt farmers a lot more than help them, but most of them stood by Trump. This was partly because Democrats never came up with a simple, unified message about the trade war and farmers. Individual Dems were all over the map, and trade is a complex issue. Of course, part of the problem with Democrats promising that we’ll do this, this, and this for you is that there is always a Joe Manchin getting in the way. Democrats need to deliver.
But it seems to me that the first thing Democrats need to do is form some policies regarding farmers and coal miners and other rural folk, and then individual Dem politicians need to get behind those policies. Work up some simple messaging that all Dems can repeat, repeat, repeat. Then buy television ads presenting that messaging, because otherwise it will never be heard by the intended audience. And repeat that over the next few years. I don’t know what else to do. And, whenever Democrats can, they have to deliver something to rural voters. Maybe more rural hospitals, maybe programs to bring new industries to replace coal jobs. Something.
In other red-versus-vlue news, the gap in covid deaths between Republicans and Democrats continues to grow.
The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America has grown faster over the past month than at any previous point.
In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened.
Some conservative writers have tried to claim that the gap may stem from regional differences in weather or age, but those arguments fall apart under scrutiny. (If weather or age were a major reason, the pattern would have begun to appear last year.) The true explanation is straightforward: The vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing severe Covid, and almost 40 percent of Republican adults remain unvaccinated, compared with about 10 percent of Democratic adults.
I, and quite a few regular commenters here, maha, know you've spent nearly 20 years talking about the need for Democrats to reach the Real 'Murkins in The Heartland.
Unfortunately, I guess, the Democrats don't read a lot of the liberal blogs.
I know one thing for sure: I don't know how to reach those rural voters.
I've never lived in an area that's rural. I'm a child of NY City and its Northern suburbs – with a year in the city of Philly, and 9 in the suburban towns in NC. So I don't know jack-shite about living in the country, or small town America.
Nor would I want to know. Because, as a matter of fact, empty, open spaces kinda frighten me. The family in "In Cold Blood" lived in the sticks. I'm sure the family howled, but nobody heard them in all that empty space.
At least if you scream in the city, someone will almost certainly hear you. Some people heard poor Kitty Genovese after she was stabbed. What's unclear even to this day, is how many heard her and what if anything they did about it (Ms. Genevese died, of course, that night. Btw: Years later, the NY Times admitted it apparently overstated the number of people who heard her screams, but declined to call the police).
All this to say, we have a lot to overcome. For 35+ years, folks in rural areas have been marinating in Reich-Wing propaganda, whether on the Op-ed pages, talk-radio, or Fox Spews.
I'm not sure how much they will listen to us. They hate us enough to believe at least some of us are pedophilic maniacs who kill and eat children, and drink their blood.
I can tell you one other thing: I'm not the right ambassador to the Real 'Murkins in The Heartland.
I couldn't ever get past how stupid, bigoted, and frankly loony, these rural ignorati are to believe that BS. And also, they've proven to me to be rubes of the most gullible sort for believing the Orange Grinch!
But good luck to the politicians who try. (I would warn those brave enough to try, to make sure people they trust know where they'll be every second they're out there. People can't hear you scream out in the country. Better yet – wear a transmitter, so you can be tracked).
I think a campaign to get country folk to vote D next year is doomed. We have to spend a lot of money with a longer view.
For example, in the town(s) where the local hospital closed, it was because of money, not lack of patients. Fewer people with the same medical needs as city folks spread over a wider area is not a good economic model.
Don't tell them to go socialist – tell them that the city folks ought to subsidize hospitals in less populous areas because everyone has a right to health care.
Urge a shift in priorities to give greater subsidies to small farms because the big farms don't need to be taking money from small farms. The actual structure of the bill would do that – and it would seriously reduce the corporate welfare for big ag.
Don't link the campaigns to parties or names. These people are wired to think resentment. The Rush Limbaugh complex. Use it. Make them resent the way big money is running government.
Go after the Richest tenth of a percent. Show how they have gamed the system and they don't pay taxes. TANSTAAFL.
This wil take years – the time to start is now.
GOP has a 5-6 decade head start on building national Party Infrastructure. The Union networks that Democrats were once able to rely upon were destroyed by Reagan (& internal problem).
Meanwhile, the GOP…
(1) locked in long-term funding from it's big donors for it's network of think-tanks (national ones like AEI & Hoover, down to State/Regional once like Yankee Institute).
(2) changed FCC regulations to enable it's network of semi-independent right-wing media, starting with Wash Times & Examiner (funded by Rev Sun Myung Moon to win Reagan's favor), evolving through Limbaugh's Hate Radio to Murdoch's FOX "news".
(3) Subverted previously non-partisan groups like NRA, and religious orgs to become conduits for GOP organizing.
The Clintons & DLC Democrats did build some Foundations to employ professional Democratic when GOP controls the White House, but those are all very urban & coastal, geographically & ideologically. Kinda ironic – but mostly devastating – that the only President from Arkansas did nothing to rebuild the Democratic Party in rural, heart-land "fly-over" States.
Howard Dean tried to push the Party (back?) toward a 50-State strategy, but got fired for it; presumably, the Party's big donors in NYC, Silicon Valley, & LA weren't interested. Since then, the Democratic Party has been left screaming every two years that "This is the Most Important Election in History"; they may have been correct each time, but it's largely because they have lacked good solid long-term planning for decades.
Hi. As a D who lives in rural Trump country (red upstate NY farm country), I ask you to watch how the party treats the current post-Cuomo governor. Woman, from far west NY city, good personal history, opposed to urban-based gun laws that do not consider rural gun owners (huge opposition [big road signs] to Cuomo’s Law, knows rural concerns having travelled heavily in upstate as Lt Gov…now already facing primary challenges from NYC metro hopefuls.
Additionally, in local ‘small town’ elections, there is almost no Dem presence in elections. Even Congressional seats routinely go to Republicans. (Though we did have a open minded rep in the late (R) Sherwood Boehlert, and we currently have a good Dem in Antonio Delgado) week, last week many local races had one Republican name on ballot, in position after position. There’s no local media, TV or print, …the only union presence is in public jobs,… the major discussion forum is Facebook,… there’s no civic organizations (think LWVs) that sponsor discussions…and the Dems that do hold local positions on school boards, zoning boards, etc. do so invisibly. The Demo party is figureheaded by the former Gov, the DC Senators who have little cred here, and the downstate theoreticians: none of these connect west of the Hudson.
If Dems want to have a rural presence, the party needs to just Be Here: get local organizers on the ground, listening and facilitating growth. If organizing works in urban neighborhoods, then make it work in the agricultural communities.
Oh how strange is rural America. One of my friends came from an isolated area of the state to the small city close to my place. We always joked and chatted about local customs, and he remarked that he found out from the attitude of the locals, that he was the wrong color of white. He would talk about customs in his home area, and noted than you could just go over a few hills and travel a few miles and find the people to be quite different than the ones in your area. On of my former colleges came from California and married into a farm family in the south western part of Kansas where we worked at the time. She said she was still considered an outsider by the community, and thought she would continue to be treated that way for the rest of her life. Who can be expected to put up with a person who knows the names and pronunciations of several different types of wines?
Rather than a social curiosity about how other groups do things and a willingness to adopt different ways, there is a prevailing tendency toward xenophobia. It is not unusual for their to be ongoing hostility to a neighboring community that dates back generations. As populations decline they are often forced to cooperate with "their enemy" just to have basic social services like schools and emergency medical services. Such cooperation is seldom without grudges.
I guess it was no wonder they gravitated to hate radio, and now they have developed political attitudes and behavior that are self-destructive if not just flat lethal. If they were in urban Texas they could tempt fate at a bizarre "music" event. Oh you can just feel the Thanatos everywhere.
Not sure if the Fairness Doctrine would have helped. All it really did was allow networks to exist on their willingness to provide programming for the public good (i.e. news) It never was about presenting both sides of an issue–unless the station owner went on air to broadcast an opinion. I think what really started the downward spiral was when Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act that allowed single ownership of multiple outlets. What would save us from this now, is enforcement of the Antitrust Act.
Wealthy democrats (yes, there are some) would serve the country well if they opted to buy up many of the small radio stations and started broadcasting a progressive message. As it is, wealthy conservatives are creating many hispanic radio stations into conservative outlets directed to Hispanics. And it's working. If you look at some of the polls in the recent elections, Hispanic voters were a big gain for many conservatives.
When all is said and done, the problem is that Democrats aren't aggressively active in reaching out to voters. It's as if conservatives know that there's a bunch of rubes out there that will buy their garbage, but liberals feel that people are smart enough to know better. The thing is, there's plenty of progressive programs out there, there just needs to be an outlet that will put it on the air to a larger audience.
You never really appreciate the finest art until you see it in person. When I got face to faces with the American Gothic at the Chicago Art Institute, I finally understood the incredible statement it still makes about rural America. Nothing but the purest of reality.
J,
We're neighbors.
Delgado's my Congressman as well!
So…is your neighborhood like mine?
J,
I don't really know.
I'm in an assisted living facility.
My sister and her family live in New Paltz, and that's a great town.
But that's a college town, and they're different from their surroundings, usually.
Like when I lived in Chapel Hill, NC, another college town. Once you left NC's Chapel Hill/Durham/Raleigh Research Triangle Park area, you were back in the old deep South – only more modern.
Imo, NY's like that, too. You have NYC, Albany, and Buffalo (and a few other old rust-belt towns/cities), and the rest of the state is Alabama, only with colder winters.