For decades, Democrats have been losing rural America by ever-worsening margins. If they could perform even 5% better in rural counties, the political landscape would be transformed. In the 2022 midterm, Democrats did increase their share of the rural vote in several states, and it’s worth exploring where and why.
The recent history is appalling. As late as 1996, Bill Clinton carried nearly half of America’s rural counties, about 1,100 of them. In 2020, Joe Biden carried just 147. In recent elections, Republicans have beaten Democrats in rural counties by a margin of about 47 points.
Why this sickening slide? A core reason is that the few rural-development policies sponsored by Democrats have been no match for the embrace of free trade and outsourcing by the presidential Democratic Party. As factories closed or moved offshore and entire regional economies collapsed, local people begged for relief. But little was forthcoming. In the absence of practical pocketbook help from Democrats, conservative cultural issues filled the vacuum and voters shifted to Republican.
Barack Obama did sponsor the successful rescue of the auto industry. The auto industry was such a high-profile sector that letting it just collapse in a recession was unthinkable for a Democrat. But for every auto and auto parts producer that was saved, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of factories in small towns all over America that government just left for dead.
In much of rural America, industrial production in factory towns anchored the local economy. When the factory went, so did the local society. That included not just jobs and associated unions that once helped reinforce Democratic support, but cherished communities, churches, and networks of local businesses. A loss of community and purpose fueled resentment, despair, and drug addiction.
You can point to state after state that used to send Democrats to Congress, but now sends Republicans. When I worked in the Senate in the 1970s, the entire Upper Midwest elected progressive Democratic senators. So did the Dakotas, Montana, even Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. There is nothing inherently Republican about rural America.
To a great extent, that past Democratic rural support reflected the legacy of the New Deal—the great Western dams, the water and soil reclamation programs, rural electrification, and price supports for farmers. But those memories are ancient history.
As the farm economy changed, so did its political complexion. Federal policies that shifted support to agribusiness wiped out small family farmers, who had tended to vote for Democrats. Some of this was the work of Republicans, but pro-agribusiness Democrats like Tom Vilsack—agriculture secretary under both Obama and Biden—can share the blame.
In the Reagan era, Republicans took advantage of the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion of farmers and ranchers who resented the new environmental laws of the 1970s. The 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act gave the federal government greater direct control of the Western public lands. Environmental rules added regulation of land and water use. In a Republican TV spot from that era mocking a new OSHA regulation requiring restrooms for farmworkers, a cowboy is shown sidling up to a port-a-potty on a prairie landscape.
My doctoral student at Brandeis, Rachel Steele, has just completed a dissertation on Democrats and rural voters, which will be published as a book. With her permission, I’ll quote a couple of her important insights.
The most important is that Democrats have been losing the White working class, but place acts as an intensifier. If White working-class voters feel abandoned by the economy and disdained by liberal political elites, that is doubly true for working-class rural voters. Their communities as well as their livelihoods have been squandered, and they have had little evidence that Democrats cared. “Place itself has become political,” Steele writes.
As late as 2008, according to Steele’s tabulations, 139 rural White working-class counties voted Democratic. By 2016, that fell to six. In 2016, rural White working-class counties favored Trump by a margin of over 51 points. Much of the loss came in the Upper Midwest—Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota—where national elections and control of Congress are determined.
Steele’s extensive interviews with rural working-class voters also reveal a bitter paradox for Democrats. As good jobs have disappeared, people in communities that once took pride in their self-sufficiency express a broad sense that the work ethic has deteriorated along with the job loss. Instead of crediting Democrats for safety-net programs that save people from destitution, many rural working-class voters, who see their neighbors and their children on the dole, blame Democrats for eroding the work ethic. One retired teacher in Elliott County, Kentucky, said ruefully, “Probably the biggest economic boost in Elliott County is welfare.”
This shift of rural support has created a self-reinforcing cycle of political neglect. As rural counties became more and more heavily Republican, too many Democrats wrote them off in favor of campaigning in blue areas richer with potential votes—reinforcing the sense in rural America that Democrats didn’t care about them. Even credible local Democrats who do care about their communities get dragged down by this national undertow.
IN 2022, THE BEST OF THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES resolved to reverse this syndrome. Just showing up turns out to be hugely important, as a sign of respect and commitment.
John Fetterman’s successful slogan and strategy was “Every County, Every Vote.” Fetterman improved upon Biden’s 2020 rural support by 2.4%. According to tabulations by the Daily Yonder, this swing, combined with higher rural turnout for Fetterman, resulted in a net rural gain over Biden of more than 110,000 votes.
In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer campaigned statewide. One of the seats that gave Michigan Democrats a trifecta of governor, House, and Senate for the first time in 40 years was a newly created seat in rural Grand Traverse County. Democrat Betsy Coffia, who won the seat, organized farmworkers, who have been pushing for the right of undocumented migrant workers to get driver’s licenses. Art Reyes, executive director of the grassroots group We the People Michigan, attributes this and other rural successes to long-term rural organizing not limited to a single election cycle.
Rural voters may be conservative on many issues, but they tend to be more libertarian on social questions. In Kansas, they were narrowly divided on the abortion rights referendum. Hamilton County, which Trump won with 81% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020, cast 44% of its vote in favor of reproductive rights. Some of this shift carried over to 2022. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly did much better than Biden in 2020 in several rural counties in an election decided by 21,000 votes.
In Wisconsin, Democratic incumbent Tony Evers won by 3.5 points, mainly by the usual strategy of piling up large margins in Milwaukee and Dane County (Madison). But he was helped by statewide organizing, and Evers improved on Democrats’ past performance in several rural counties. In rural northern and western Wisconsin, he beat Biden’s winning 2020 margins by 1.5 to 3 percent in rural Douglas, Bayfield, and Ashland Counties. And in southwestern Wisconsin, he significantly narrowed Republican margins in Crawford, Richland, Grant, and Lafayette Counties, among others.
In late September, I wrote a piece exploring Democratic rural strategies at the level of county party chairs, guided by a highly effective national mobilizing project called Rural Power Lab. One of my interviewees, Bill Crawford, party chair in Waushara County, had organized direct voter contact efforts in four rural Wisconsin counties. This year, all four outperformed 2020. “Adams County blew it out of the water coming in with almost 4.5% better than their 2020 results [for governor],” Crawford wrote me in an email.
Down Home North Carolina, a multiracial organizing collaborative, has been doing door-knocks and voter conversations for the past two years. In rural Cabarrus County, their endorsed candidate, a Black nurse named Diamond Staton-Williams, won election to the North Carolina House by 625 votes. In rural Person County, Down Home members elected a local Black farmer, Ray Jeffers, to the North Carolina House, defeating a 12-year Republican incumbent.
Wins like these not only increased Black representation, they also blocked Republicans from achieving a supermajority that could override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes of bad legislation. His vetoes will now stand. These efforts also helped elect several down-ballot candidates to school boards and other local offices. In rural Granville County, which is 40% Black, Democrats succeeded in electing the first Black sheriff in the 276-year history of the county.
The point is that if Democrats can improve rural performance by even a few points, several purple states become a lot bluer, and more Democrats get elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local public offices in red states as well as blue ones.
The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative has just published a comprehensive report on strategies and lessons learned, called “Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America?” Among the findings: Successful candidates are hyper-local, fluent and credible on local issues. There is no substitute for personal contact with voters, especially the “deep canvass,” which entails a great deal of active listening. Beltway consultants, with little local knowledge, are useless. (The full report has chapter and verse.) This seems like only common sense, but it flies in the face of a good deal of national Democratic strategy, which relies on expensive consultants and overuse of TV ads, as well as one-size-fits-all messaging, and goes silent between elections.
In sum, there are plenty of good organizing models. But this is long, slow, patient work. Though it yields dividends in campaigns, the people who do it best point out that it has to be for the long haul and not only in election years.
It’s also the case that there is a latent economic populism on the part of rural voters who have a gut sense of who in the economy is destroying their livelihoods. The original populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, after all, was a farmers’ movement, directed against bankers, railroad monopolies, and “furnishing merchants” who kept farmers in perpetual debt. Today, the enemy is giant companies that prohibit farmers from producing their own seeds and farm equipment behemoths that won’t allow farmers to repair their own tractors, as well as hedge funds that buy up farmland and bid up its price beyond what locals can afford.
Democrats are a lot better than Republicans on these issues, but not consistently enough. Polls show that rural voters are more conservative on some issues like guns, but very populist economically. In one recent poll, about 81% of rural voters support a minimum tax on large corporations. And 88% support allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. The challenge is for Democrats to demonstrate greater credibility on the issues that enlist rural voters as economic progressives.
According to RuralOrganizing.org, 87% of rural Americans polled believe “the government mostly reflects the will of the rich and influential.” And 69% believe that the economic system “is rigged for the wealthy and the powerful.”
In a poll of rural battleground states, 65% supported the statement that “healthcare should be made freely available to all Americans.” This view tracks their experience. Since 2005, 183 rural hospitals have closed; and according to Pew Trusts, nearly 80% of rural counties are short on primary care doctors, and 9% have none. Democrats just have to do a better job of connecting these dots.
IN FACT, DEMOCRATS BOTH AT THE NATIONAL and the state level have sponsored many policy initiatives that could improve life for rural people. A White House fact sheet on Biden’s rural jobs policies includes several smart initiatives scattered across the federal government, each at the $5 billion to $15 billion level, including rural infrastructure, rural broadband, “regional innovation hubs,” and targeting of new industries to depressed rural areas.
The problem is that even Biden’s scale of ambition, larger than any rural policies we’ve seen in many decades, may not be visible enough to make a dramatic political difference anytime soon. Economic policies let rural economies collapse for so long that building back better will take a very long time. And even vividly effective policies associated with Democrats, and ones that spring from the legacy of the New Deal, are not being utilized to partisan advantage.
Exhibit A is Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thanks to the legacy of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the quintessential Roosevelt rural-development program, Chattanooga has a public power company, EPB. Beginning in 2010, EPB decided to create the nation’s fastest and cheapest broadband, both as a convenience to residents and as a magnet for economic development. And the strategy worked. Chattanooga has become a national center for tech companies that need very high-speed broadband, with speeds up to 10 gigabits, and soon to be 25 gigabits. According to one study, the economic-development value realized exceeds the costs of the project by over $2.20 billion, or a factor of 4.42 to 1. Consumers pay just $57.99 a month for a package that includes internet, TV, and phone. According to the FCC, approximately 35% of rural Americans lack access to high-speed internet at all.
Here, seemingly, is the perfect commercial, both in ideological and in partisan terms. Chattanooga’s internet is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than the service in surrounding counties that is provided by traditional cable and phone companies. Ergo, public investment and provision is often superior to private. Conversely, thanks to corporate lobbying, Tennessee’s Republican legislature passed legislation prohibiting public internet outside of Chattanooga. Ergo, Democrats are on the side of regular people and against powerful special interests—with a potent, down-home illustration.
The speech writes itself. But Biden has not gone to Chattanooga to make that speech. And in the 2022 midterms, Chattanoogans voted Republican by their usual margin.
There is a lot of work still to do. But thanks to the successes of 2022, Democrats have some role models—if they will only follow them.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect (prospect.org) and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. Like him on facebook.com/RobertKuttner and/or follow him at twitter.com/rkuttner.
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2022
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us