“There’s no heavier burden than a great potential,” Peanuts‘ Linus said famously. You know the Beltway conventional wisdom by now. Whatever Democrats accomplish, it’s bad news for Democrats. People expect better and are sorely disappointed when Democrats fail to live up to their potential. And Republicans? They seem always to act like Republicans. They speak of personal responsibility and liberty, but their actions suggest they mean freedom from scruples, from truth, from accountability, from upholding their Constitutional oaths. There is no bottom, as Digby says.
Democrats Thought They Bottomed Out in Rural, White America. It Wasn’t the Bottom.
That was the headline Saturday at the New York Times. And in a rare, less-snarky moment, Twitterati Jeff Tiedrich observed :
What Astead W. Herndon and Shane Goldmacher found in Virginia after Democrats lost the governorship last week is that “old country folk” don’t know and don’t care:
“Look at some of those rural counties in Virginia as a wake-up call,” said Steve Bullock, the Democratic former governor of Montana who made a long-shot 2020 presidential run, partly on a message that his party needed to compete in more conservative parts of the country. “Folks don’t feel like we’re offering them anything, or hearing or listening to them.”
That was the consensus among about 100 attendees of the National Rural Strategy Session Saturday hosted by former Iowa congressional candidate J.D. Scholten of RuralVote.org. But why they won’t listen is the problem. It’s a longstanding joke here in Western North Carolina that Raleigh thinks the state ends in the west at Statesville. (There’s another four-hour drive before you hit Tennessee beyond Murphy.) Zoom conference leaders aren’t waiting for Democrats to show up again in rural places.
“If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.” – Gov. Howard Dean (2006)
For 40 years Democrats have neglected rural areas to focus on bluer cities where statewide campaigns get more bang for their campaign buck. With that approach, they can win statewide races in states with enough of their population clustered in cities. But they lose control of state legislatures whose members are elected in districts, many of them made up of clusters of thinly populated rural counties.
Back in Virginia:
Many of the ideas and issues that animate the Democratic base can be off-putting in small towns or untethered to rural life. Voters in Bath County, many of whom are avid hunters and conservative evangelicals, have long opposed liberal stances on gun rights and abortions. Some Democrats urge the party to just show up more. Some believe liberal ideas can gain traction, such as universal health care and free community college. Others urge a refocus on kitchen-table economics like jobs programs and rural broadband to improve connectivity. But it is not clear how open voters are to even listening.
Rural voters feel neglected and disenfranchised. This message was consistent across reports from rural organizers/polling on Saturday. Progressives need to speak less and listen more. Half of rural voters don’t trust politics or either major party, polls show. Finding trusted messengers is essential in rural organizing, and candidates from the area who know the area, its people and issues. Creating trust does not happen in an election-year push. While many rural concerns are common everywhere, each region has unique ones. Communicating that we understand them is one way to build trust.
Second, rural does not mean White. Many rural areas such as Eastern North Carolina and Southern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are heavily Black. West of the Mississippi River are many regions populated by First Peoples. Progressive organizers in such places need to look more like the people to whom they are reaching out.
Virginia again:
But while some Democratic politicians now recognize the scope of their rural problem, the words of voters in Bath County expose the difficulty in finding solutions. In interviews with a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin, policy was less important than grievance and their own identity politics. And the voters, fueled by a conservative media bubble that speaks in apocalyptic terms, were convinced that America had been brought to the brink by a litany of social movements that had gone too far.
But rural Americans are not all Foxbots, surveys show. There is low trust in national media and national politicians. Many national Democratic initiatives people like they don’t associate with Democrats. And if they think about them at all, rural voters tend to assume policies they like originated with Republicans.
But the politically urgent problem for Democrats is that rural America has moved faster and further from them in the last 20 years than urban America has moved away from Republicans. From 1999 to 2019, cities swung 14 percentage points toward the Democrats, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center report. At the same time, rural areas shifted by 19 percentage points toward the Republicans. The suburbs remained essentially tied.
Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, which looks for Democrats to run for local offices nationwide, said it could be challenging to recruit candidates in deep red small towns — and to lure money into what are most likely losing causes.
“We just have to try and lose by less,” she said. “And ‘investing to lose by less’ is not a fun sell to Democratic donors. But it is what it is.”
This is a chronic problem reinforced by misunderstanding of rural communities (see above).
Rural voters “feel like Democrats look down on rural America,” Montana Democrat Monica Tranel said in her campaign launch video.
Presenter Anthony Flaccavento writes:
In this context, Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” statement and Barack Obama’s description of people “clinging to their guns and bibles” becomes proof, in the minds of many, of liberal contempt. So too the oft-heard refrain from well-meaning liberals, “Why do these people vote against their own interests?”
As I’ve said, that’s a lefty dog whistle for “stupid.” Please stop.
(I may write more about Saturday’s conference once the recording is online.)