Ron Brownstein makes a pitch at The Atlantic for Joe Biden’s White House to place more emphasis on working directly with city rather than state governments for advancing his priorities. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for example, remains hostile to climate change efforts and, basically, to any initiative coming from a Democratic president. Brownstein cites the eagerness of Lina Hidalgo, chief elected officer of Harris County, Texas (Houston), to partner with Biden on a range of issues from pandemic recovery to transportation to affordable housing in addition to addressing the effects of climate change:
Hidalgo’s enthusiasm about working with Biden illustrates the president’s opportunity to fundamentally rethink the way the federal government pursues its domestic goals. Biden could advance both his agenda and his political interests by channeling his policies through major metropolitan areas, without relying on states as his principal partners, as previous White Houses have traditionally done.
Cities and their inner suburbs need an immediate lifeline from Washington to stabilize their finances after the devastation of the pandemic. But once those communities regain their balance, they could become crucial allies for Biden. By working with big metros, the president would be aligning federal policy with powerful economic, social, and electoral trends—and empowering local officials overwhelmingly sympathetic to his core objectives. If Biden can forge such partnerships, he could both ignite a new wave of local innovation and solidify the Democratic Party’s advantage in the fast-growing, diverse, and well-educated metro areas that have become the bedrock of its electoral coalition.
Brownstein’s premise is attractive. As far as it goes. But as he says, with this approach Biden could advance his agenda and his political interests by improving Democratic prospects in metro areas.
Where Brownstein goes wrong
Biden faces better odds working with metro areas because many are already under Democratic control while Republicans tend to dominate the countryside. The reason state governments are unreliable partners for a Democratic president is that Republicans control 30 state legislatures and 27 governors’ mansions. And that because even as Democrats dominate vote totals in the few large cities Republicans eat their lunch in smaller, more-numerous rural counties.
If all Democrats care about winning is statewide races and the presidency, fine. As growing metro areas become larger percentages of state populations, building Democratic capacity there could help win more statewide contests. Maybe even elect a senator or two in states such as Texas. But emphasis on metropolitan concerns without Democrats expanding their influence in the redder hinterlands could simply exacerbate the urban-rural divide that leaves the GOP controlling a majority of states legislatures and thus state and federal redistricting. The U.S. Constitution’s allocation of senators already gives rural states over-representation in the U.S. Senate. Gerrymandering tilts the balance even more in the GOP’s favor.
Candidates in statewide races care primarily about finding voters in bulk, about getting the most bang for the campaign buck on a short calendar. They concentrate their efforts in big metro areas and rural areas get lip service. State legislators have to win votes in districts whether they trend urban or rural. Out there, Democrats struggle. Presidential coattails are not enough to overcome that. Lavishing even more attention on urban areas will not improve the situation and solidify the view that Democrats couldn’t care less about rural Americans whatever their party.
How well did an American strategy built on holding the cities work in Vietnam?
Brownstein acknowledges the problem but dismisses it where it comes to presidential contests:
More and more, cities and their inner suburbs find their interests converging—while those interests simultaneously diverge from the conservative priorities of the mostly white people living in small-town and rural places away from urban centers. As November’s presidential results demonstrated, if you draw an imaginary beltway around almost any major metropolitan area, Democrats are growing stronger inside that circle, while Republicans are consolidating their position outside of it. Tabulations by The Daily Yonder, a website focusing on rural issues, found that Biden not only won the counties anchored by the nation’s biggest urban centers by a crushing 13 million votes, but also carried their inner suburbs by more than 4 million, and even won midsize urban centers by 1.5 million or so. (Those three categories of communities provided almost four-fifths of all Biden’s votes.) Trump dominated the smaller places beyond those centers, but that wasn’t nearly enough for him to overcome Biden’s advantage in the metro areas.
Again, if your electoral calculus centers on Biden’s agenda and Biden’s political interests, a metro focus makes sense. But if Democrats in the states want to control more of their legislatures and to grow their benches for winning Senate seats and governorships, they must work to narrow the urban-rural divide. They must start winning more outside urban centers.
As much as grassroots Democrats now want to be like Stacey Abrams, her approach is radically different from that of campaigns and parties. Her New Georgia Project Action Fund organizes on a 365-day basis rather than on election cycles. They build relationships for the long haul in exurban areas.
“We do what they don’t,” Kendra Davenport Cotton, New Georgia COO, said in a recent Zoom call. On “Building a Grassroots Strategy to Elect Democrats in NC: How Georgia Did It,” she made clear New Georgia encourages black and brown citizens to be lifelong voters. They focus on voter registration and activation more than election-year mobilization. Thus, New Georgia organizes where campaign-focused candidates and the Democratic Party do not and finanacially most likely cannot. New Georgia organizes where they find concentrations of black and brown voters campaigns may not see as having sufficient return on short-term investment. The approach is effective if not as replicable by state and local party committees whose mission is winning elections, bang for the buck.
Referring to how Republicans gerrymandered Georgia, Cotton says [timestamp 26:05], “They carve that metro up and they say, we will give all the black folks metro Atlanta and we’ll take the rest of the state. And so [by focusing] all this intensive work in the larger, more metropolitan counties … that’s when you wake up always crying on the day after the election when all of these rural votes come in and you lose by 10,000.”
Where the radicals are
Matt Cohen of Mother Jones acknowledges the most radical Republicans are in state houses where they dominate. “And if extremism is what helps Republicans win elections at the state level, that’s what the party will ultimately embrace,” he writes, citing Carolyn Fiddler, the communications director for Daily Kos. One might surmise the majority of those represent rural districts. Higher turnout in the cities won’t end their tenure, nor will widening the urban-rural divide.
It is not that Brownstein’s strategy has no merit. It does. It just will not address the longer-term radicalism that inspired it and elects Republican governors such as Abbott and Ron DeSantis (Fla.) while leaving Democrats Roy Cooper (N.C.) and Tony Evers (Wis.) facing radicalized, GOP-dominated legislatures.