“We pretty much own rural and small town America,” bragged Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell in 2022, and he was right: According to data from the Pew Research Center, 59% of rural Americans voted for Republican House candidates in 2018, then 65% voted for Donald Trump in 2020, then 69% for Republicans in 2022. The numbers for White rural Americans are even higher. What used to be a small GOP advantage in rural areas has widened into a chasm.
This development has been great for the Republican Party: Not only can it leverage rural support into wins in the Electoral College and competitiveness in the US Senate that it wouldn’t otherwise enjoy if all votes counted equally, it can use its support in rural areas within states to secure and maintain power through gerrymandering. But it hasn’t been so great for rural people themselves.
That rural areas often lack political competition is not news to many people. But that fact is usually presented as a problem facing Democrats. They are scolded for having abandoned rural areas, which is often true. And it isn’t hard to understand why they did: When parties and candidates have scarce resources, there isn’t much to be gained from spending time campaigning in a place where, at best, they might reduce their margin of defeat from 30 points to 25 points.
The flip side of this situation is far less often remarked upon: Republicans, too, have largely abandoned rural areas. They’re still winning all the elections — indeed, many rural voters are represented by nothing but White Republicans in every office from US senator all the way down to dog-catcher — but they know that they don’t have to do much to keep winning. They don’t have to campaign very hard, and they don’t have to worry that they’ll be turned out of office if they don’t make tangible improvements in their constituents’ lives.
This was one of the messages we heard repeatedly as we reported and wrote our new book “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy”: As much as people say they hate politics, if anything there’s too little of it in rural America.
In Mingo County, West Virginia, for instance, we spoke to Truman and Letitia Chafin. He’s the former county Democratic chair and state Senate majority leader; she’s a prominent lawyer. The machine built by Senator Robert Byrd that was deeply enmeshed in people’s lives is gone, they said, and the Democratic Party is almost a memory. “We don’t have the organization down here to help Joe [Manchin],” Truman told us, when it still seemed that the Democratic senator might run for reelection (he eventually decided to retire). “Republicans don’t have a good system either,” added Letitia, “but they don’t really need one.”
They sure don’t; Trump won 85% of the vote in Mingo County in 2020, and there’s no reason to think he’ll do any worse this year. But the county’s loyalty to the GOP hasn’t done much for it: The county is losing population (down 12% between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses), coal jobs are still dwindling, the area was devastated by the opioid crisis, and poverty is still rampant.
There are analogues to Mingo County’s story — economic, political, and demographic — in rural places all over America. So if it’s clear that voting more and more heavily for Republicans isn’t offering rural Americans a path to a better future, what would?
It’s a complicated question, and though we’re both liberals, the answer we arrived at in writing “White Rural Rage” isn’t just that rural people should start voting Democratic. What’s needed instead is a genuine rural movement, one that could bring political competition back to rural America.
The most striking thing about the place of rural Whites in the Republican Party is that, despite being the linchpin of Republican power, they have no coherent set of demands. Every other part of the GOP coalition — evangelicals, gun rights advocates, big business — knows exactly what they want government to do and makes sure the people they help elect know it too. When Republicans come into office, every part of that coalition is sitting at the table, making sure its demands are met. The officeholders know that if they don’t come through, they might not be able to count on the same support in the next election. The Democratic coalition works the same way.
Unfortunately, too many rural Americans are not even at the table, because they aren’t making demands of the politicians who depend on them on election day. If they could create a movement with a real agenda, Republicans would have to address it — and Democrats would be eager to show that they could speak to the agenda, too.
Days after the book published, we tracked down Shawn Sebastian, director of organizing for RuralOrganizing.org, a progressive group that works hard to mobilize and educate rural voters. We asked Sebastian about the possibility of building wide-ranging coalitions to empower rural voters.
“There are leaders in rural communities who are trying to solve local problems with local people – they’re the ones fighting to build a local nursing home because there isn’t one within three hours of where they live, they’re working to make sure their hospital doesn’t shut down, and they’re the ones ensuring people have clean water to drink,” he told us. “These local rural leaders hold relationships across ideological differences in their communities and do the hard work of cooperating with their neighbors to get things done … These rural leaders are doing this work without resources – for every dollar Democrats spend in rural counties, Republicans spend $14.”
If political competition returned to rural America, votes would be up for grabs, activists could be more influential, and politicians could be held accountable for what they deliver. That’s how politics is supposed to work. But in too many rural areas, there isn’t much politics to speak of.
And if a real rural movement was built — especially if it was a multiracial movement, including the 24% of rural Americans who are non-White — politicians at the national level would have to listen, too. Right now, rural people have a particular kind of power: Their votes often count for more than those of people who live in cities and suburbs, and they’re flattered by politicians touting “small-town values.” But they don’t have much to show for it. The answer is for them to use the power they have, and start demanding something more concrete. If they could do that, the whole country would benefit.
Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman are co-authors of “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy” (Random House, 2024). This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. For more rural reporting and small-town stories visit dailyyonder.com. See the linked version at https://dailyyonder.com/commentary-lack-of-political-competition-harms-rural-americans/2024/03/06/
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2024
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