Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo
On the presidential campaign trail, Joe Biden sits with former secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack during a meeting with local residents, December 2, 2019, in Emmetsburg, Iowa.
Joe Biden really, really wanted Tom Vilsack to head up the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). So much so, in fact, that he appointed Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a position she has no experience or evident interest in, just to clear the road for him. On Tuesday night, those appointments were made official.
Vilsack served two full terms as Obama’s agriculture secretary, where he functioned as a henchman of the very biggest agribusiness giants, including the incredibly dubious distinction of presiding over a USDA that “sent a lower share of loan dollars to black farmers than it had under President Bush,” according to an investigation by The Counter. After eight years of refusing to protect small farmers from companies like Cargill and actively foreclosing on Black farmers, he crossed over into the private sector to work as a well-remunerated lobbyist for the dairy industry, as a foremost representative of the corporate titans who have made life nearly impossible for farmers nationwide.
Biden running it back with a former Obama appointee is no surprise. Vilsack endorsed Biden’s doomed presidential run in 1988, when he was mayor of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and has stumped for him all along the way. Biden’s starry eyes for a corporate Cabinet appointment is entirely in character. But to appoint an agriculture secretary who has long been loathed by rural voters is not just a needless error on policy; it’s a political catastrophe that shows that Biden’s Democratic Party remains unserious about winning future elections, and would rather gratify corporate donors and old friends than ensure its own future electoral success.
For every year since 2008, Democrats have ceded ground at record rates among rural voters. The collapse of rural support for Dems reached a new and almost inconceivable nadir in this last election, despite the added “ingenuity” of Senate losers Joe Donnelly and Heidi Heitkamp’s One Country Project, a rural-outreach program that looked from the outset like nothing more than an attempt to secure Heitkamp a Cabinet seat.
Vilsack was part of the failed strategy as well, as a top rural adviser to the Biden campaign. Biden went on to win 42 percent of the rural vote; in the crucial swing state of Texas, where Democrats thought they might break through, Trump won a mind-blowing 74 percent of the rural vote, increasing not only his vote total but also his vote share over 2016. “Vilsack led Biden’s unimpressive rural campaign in 2020. As far as I can tell, our organization made more calls to convince rural voters to vote for Biden than the Biden campaign did for itself,” said People’s Action Director George Goehl in a statement.
The overwhelming response of Democrats to this runaway drop in rural support has been plain disinterest. We’ll make up the difference in cities or suburbs, they say again and again. Even if that six of one, half dozen of the other approach was working (and there’s plenty of evidence that it is not), it is brutally ignorant of the reality of the American political system.
Rural voters are inordinately powerful, as we (should) all know by now, a by-product of the anti-democratic makeup of the Senate, the nature of districting in the House, and to some degree, the structure of the Electoral College. One rural vote is not equivalent to one suburban vote. That has never been the exchange rate of American politics, and with every passing year, rural votes amass more and more influence. By the time Joe Biden is up for re-election, after another round of redistricting, rural votes will be more commanding still.
The inequality in that structure of American democracy happens to be the linchpin of Republican minority rule: They know well that the power of a rural voter is stronger than that of an urban or suburban one. They’ve been perfectly content to watch Democrats run up the score with empty vote share in California, knowing full well that their strength in rural areas means they can maintain conceivable majorities with just 45 percent total haul, so long as they maintain that crucial rural support. “If Democrats keep letting people fail upwards like this, they will never stop the bleeding. By 2040, the more rural half of this country could control 84 Senate seats. How does permanent majority leader status for the head of the Senate Republicans sound to you?” asked Goehl.
The last time Democrats were really competitive in these regions came during Barack Obama’s initial run in 2008, when his campaign rhetoric promised swift and decisive action on agribusiness monopolies like Cargill and Monsanto that had pushed and benefited from economic conditions that have plagued farmers for years. That messaging was strong enough to deliver agriculture-heavy states like Indiana, where Democrats haven’t even sniffed a competitive margin since.
To appoint an agriculture secretary who has long been loathed by rural voters is not just a needless error on policy; it’s a political catastrophe.
Of course, that rhetoric proved hollow. Obama appointed Vilsack to head up USDA, and he promptly went to work doing nothing to improve the lives of family farmers, while turning a blind eye even to punitive and retaliatory actions by those aforementioned companies. USDA and the Justice Department held five field hearings across rural America after Obama’s election, hearing tale after tale of punitive agribusinesses fleecing family farmers. After promising to help, the administration then didn’t do anything with what they learned, spuriously claiming that the antitrust laws prevented them from action.
Vilsack ginned up a heartwarming and entirely fictional tale about the plight of Black farmers during those years, which seemingly convinced only people within the Obama administration. Black farmers, meanwhile, were subject to such aggressive foreclosure processes from Vilsack’s department that the NAACP openly opposed his return to Biden’s Cabinet. Democratic vote share in rural areas collapsed almost immediately; rural voters, in many senses, still haven’t forgiven the party for that decision.
Democratic sympathizers will point out that rural areas represent a particular challenge for them regardless. In many of these regions, the media diet consists of just Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News on television, and the arch-conservative iHeartMedia on radio. That observation is not exculpatory—if anything, it means that Democrats need to work harder to appeal to rural voters on policy and deliver them material gains that will win their loyalty at the ballot box.
That shouldn’t be an impossible task. The Trump years were also particularly hard on small farmers. Trump’s USDA hacked to bits the rules that shielded small farmers from retaliation by Big Ag. Sonny Perdue, his USDA chief, dissolved the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration program put in place to protect small farms, folding it into a PR program called the Agricultural Marketing Service. That set the table for an increasingly aggressive takeover by agribusiness, even by American standards: Farmers who used to earn 37 cents of every retail dollar are now pulling just 15.
That’s to say nothing of the adverse impacts of the trade war. Trump tried to paper over this by handing out billions of dollars in compensation to farmers, but most of the subsidies went to the top 10 percent of producers. That program could be significantly altered to support family farmers. There exist significant, material concerns that can be addressed with policy on day one of the Biden administration, even without congressional approval.
Returning Vilsack, whom rural voters already know and hate, to the role he held for both terms under Obama is by contrast incomprehensible. Many of the retreads Biden has re-installed have at least offered an acknowledgment that they made policy errors in their time in the Obama or Clinton administrations, or pledged to take things in a more progressive direction (yeah, we’ll see). Vilsack hasn’t even been required to perform an act of penance.
Campaign trail Joe Biden committed repeatedly to serving as a bridge between the older, outgoing Democratic Party and a newer, younger crop of leaders. With Vilsack, President-elect Biden is showing that his Democratic Party remains unable to think strategically about building an enduring majority. He’s seeding the ground for a defeat that will thwart that transition.
The primary purpose of an administration is not to reward one’s friends for loyalty. That small thinking hurts the entirety of the Democratic Party. Biden is keeping his friends close, and allowing his enemies to move ever closer to returning to power.
