All that needs to be said
by Tom Sullivan
If you’ve read some of my longer pieces on winning votes in rural areas where Democrats do poorly, Democratic primary candidate for U.S. Senate Jaime Harrison distilled all of that to under two minutes well worth your time.
This campaign is about bringing hope back to folks like this man. I'm ready to fight for him and working people across South Carolina, are you with me?💪🏿 pic.twitter.com/x5c6w8aJ02— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime) November 4, 2019
It’s all that needs to be said about who we are, what we are doing and why. And importantly, whom we have failed and what needs correcting.
If you were not paying close attention, Harrison is running to challenge Sen. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina in 2020.
Senators don’t pave local roads, of course. Local governments do, maybe. The county in Harrison’s story likely has as little money as the man in the shotgun house has political clout. A half-century after I lived nearby, old dirt roads in the upscale South Carolina neighborhood pictured below are still unpaved — by choice. It’s so residents can walk their polo ponies. Hell, it could be the same county.
The late South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings “discovered” the poverty and hunger in his state after a Charleston nun took him the poorest parts of his own home town. The former segregationist joined the war on hunger and co-authored the 1972 legislation that created the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC).
Harrison’s point is nearly a half-century later the problems Hollings attacked are still there — the same legacy of slavery that left a “black belt” across the South.
Image: The proportional geographic distribution of African Americans in the United States, 2000. The original uploader was Citynoise at English Wikipedia. [CC BY-SA 2.5]
The income gap that existed when Hollings became senator is far worse now than it was then. The man in the shotgun house lives it: What is the point of voting if politics doesn’t improve your life?
Republicans hope to provoke even more white, first-time, non-college male voters to turn out for Donald Trump in 2020, especially in Wisconsin. Trump won’t need them in South Carolina. But if Harrison hopes to turn out Lindsey Graham, he’ll need to offer rural voters like the black man living on that dirt road more of a reason to vote than Harrison is black and a Democrat and Donald Trump is an amoral, racist crook. South Carolina has seen its share.
If J.D. Scholten hopes to turn out Rep. Steve King in Iowa, if Iowa Democrats hope to replace Sen. Joni Ernst, if Democrats’ 2020 presidential candidate hopes to put key swing states into the party’s column, if Democrats from sea to shining sea expect to weaken the GOP’s grip on state legislatures ahead of 2021 redistricting, they need to show rural, urban and suburban voters alike that government is more than a way for connected white people to make even more money. Democrats need to deliver material improvements to people’s lives.