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President Obama travels through the Iowa countryside during a three-day economic bus tour, August 2011.
Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America
By Jane Kleeb
Ecco
Our system of government intensifies the urban-rural divide in a way that favors rural voters at the expense of urban interests, argues Jonathan Rodden in his recent book Why Cities Lose. This imbalance explains why Republicans win the White House while losing the popular vote, and why progressive voters are underrepresented in Congress and state legislatures. Another way to view the analysis of Rodden, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, is that whoever can help Democrats capture rural votes stands to make a name for themselves.
Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb wants to be that person. Her polemic Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America comes out just before the Iowa primaries, where appealing to rural voters will be a popular talking point.
The problems Democrats face in rural areas are numerous and familiar: They get outspent, they’ve been unable to develop a deep bench of candidates or host competitive primaries, they fight among themselves. And as news sources and activists have nationalized politics, many small-town residents now see Democrats as out-of-touch on cultural issues. Given that Republicans over the past decade increased their voter share in rural counties by about 10 percentage points, it’s unrealistic to expect Democrats to win the rural vote outright in 2020. But Democrats could win more elections if they were able to reduce the magnitude of their rural losses, which is what Kleeb and other party officials hope to accomplish. “As Democrats look toward the 2020 presidential election, this demographic chasm is alarming party strategists who fear that it could cement the G.O.P’s grip on the Senate and make it difficult to defeat President Trump,” wrote Jonathan Martin in The New York Times,
Kleeb recognizes that if Democrats are going to gain any votes in these areas, it’s counterproductive to dismiss rural voters as backward folks who vote against their own interests. She suggests that Democrats spend more time in rural areas talking to voters about health care costs, corporations taking private property through eminent domain, industrial agriculture, and even climate change.
Regarding the last one, Democrats have to be careful with their messaging on climate when targeting rural voters. Basic terms like “global warming” can quickly alienate people in conservative-leaning areas. Thanks to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s infamous resolution, mentioning the Green New Deal in agriculture-dependent areas will likely spark sarcastic comments about farting cows. Kleeb’s success as an operative opposing the Keystone XL Pipeline showed that people in rural areas can be mobilized to protect their environment. However, that movement occurred outside of party politics. Democrats carry a lot of baggage in rural areas, so making climate a key campaign plank is a risky move.
Health care is another area where messaging requires finesse. In Nebraska and in other red states, Obamacare was met with derision. Yet through a ballot measure, Nebraska expanded Medicaid, as have many other Republican-leaning states. With the right messaging, there’s an opportunity to win some rural voters with health care.
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In a voter poll by the American Heart Association and Morning Consult, three in five respondents said they would likely vote for candidates who prioritize rural health during their 2020 campaigns. Rural America has a severe shortage of doctors and its hospitals keep closing, creating a terrible recipe for an aging population. Accessing mental-health services is challenging for people living far from cities. For example, a large swath of Montana is served by a single psychiatrist. The struggles that rural people have in obtaining health services is troubling considering that suicide rates are rising in rural areas. A lot of rural folks say they prefer small government, but they’re wise enough to realize that for-profit health care enterprises aren’t serving them well. Democrats should talk with them about this.
Many of Kleeb’s suggestions are rooted in anti-corporate politics. Some of these topics, like large landowners being taken advantage of through eminent domain, are too niche to build a campaign around. Still, calling out how corporate giants damage small towns is a strategy worth pursuing. Even Fox News believes so.
Several Democrats who recently had success in rural and suburban areas did so by railing against monied interests. Montana Governor Steve Bullock opposed campaign finance deregulations that have made it easier for corporations to hide which lawmakers they fund. J.D. Scholten, an Iowan who almost unseated Representative Steve King, harped on agribusiness greed. Kansas Congresswoman Sharice Davids emphasized that Republican-led tax cuts disproportionately favored wealthy people and corporations.
Kleeb briefly touches upon how school consolidations hurt rural areas. I’ve witnessed small towns lose their schools, and subsequently their sense of hope, as population loss, blight, meth, and business closures set in. Once a town’s school goes, you can feel the decay accelerate. It bites your face like a mid-winter Great Plains wind gust. This issue is personal to rural voters. If Democrats can develop a plan to help these schools survive, they will find sympathetic ears.
Another issue that’s hitting rural America hard is Trump’s protectionist economic policies. The trade war has cost U.S. farmers dearly. Democrats should keep reminding rural voters about the harms this imposed.
The continual lack of broadband also makes it more difficult for small towns to sustain themselves. Without reliable internet access, people are limited in the types of jobs they can work and children are deprived of educational opportunities. Like the health care market, it’s clear that so-called free markets aren’t serving rural people well in broadband, leaving entire areas of the county behind. Democratic candidates should ask themselves if there is anything they can do about this.
Compared to economic positions, cultural issues are a tougher sell for Democrats in small towns. Throughout her book, Kleeb accuses Republicans of weaponizing wedge issues to turn out the vote and divide people. This has been an effective tactic for the GOP. Whenever an emotional cultural issue surfaces during a campaign, Democrats are tempted to avoid the issue altogether, which comes across as weak.
On issues like immigration, Democrats would have better luck appealing to those in small towns if they addressed the issue honestly and directly by tying their message back to the struggles of the working class, the approach Scholten used when he narrowly lost a district that Republicans have controlled for over 20 years. I don’t deny the existence of xenophobia among rural white people, but much of that anxiety stems from economic uncertainty. Old-timers who used to earn a living wage at the local packing plant become resentful after their wages drop and benefits disappear. They get mad at the migrant laborers who fill the poorly paid and dangerous jobs at their former employers. Democrats should aim to redirect that ire at the corporations who, through consolidation and union busting, drove wages down so far that the only people who will take their jobs anymore are people from other countries eager for a new life.
Abortion is a more difficult wedge issue for Democrats to navigate in rural areas, where identifying as pro-life is in vogue. At one point Kleeb states: “The laws Republicans are passing will not reduce abortions. The laws Republicans are passing will kill women. And quite frankly, they should be forced to sign the death certificates of all the women their reckless laws will kill.” In the paragraph following this statement, she accuses Republicans of being divisive over abortion.
If Kleeb’s main goals are to sell books to politicos, get people talking at conferences, secure press coverage and rise within the Democratic ranks by becoming a media personality or official for a national organization, this particular style of communication could benefit her. But if her primary intention is to bring more small-town residents into the Democratic Party, as her book’s subtitle suggests, then this language would alienate the rural people I’ve met while living in a farming village for two decades.
Rodden notes that Democrats became the party of cities in part because of their stance on social issues like abortion and sexuality. He writes that Democrats who won in red states “crafted their own idiosyncratic local brands” to distance themselves from their national party. That’s become much harder to pull off due to the rise of social network bubbles, partisan media sources and out-of-state money funding elections.
Nonetheless, the voting records of moderate Democrats such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Utah’s Ben McAdams illustrate that Democrats can win in rural and conservative states by selectively deviating from their party. According to Voteview, which tallies congressional votes, both Manchin and McAdams vote with their party the vast majority of the time, but not as often as the median Democrat. Neither of these two are particularly well-liked by national progressives. But they are more liberal than the likely alternative: a Republican. Purity tests and wedge issues will continue to hinder Democrats in sparsely populated regions, but if Democrats can keep debates focused on issues that affect local economies, they have stronger material to work with.
While Democrats have economic issues at their disposal to lure rural voters with, recent elections have shown the Democratic Party to be out of touch with these constituents. Kleeb writes that the DNC needs reforming so that there is more geographic diversity in its leadership positions. She suggests that at least one officer role is given to someone living in a rural community and that the committee positions are divided into geographic regions (South, West, Midwest, East).
It’s quite possible that Democrats would be better served in rural areas if they picked leaders with more experience actually living there. However, the suggestion could be seen as self-serving. Should the Democrats adopt the reforms Kleeb suggests, then one of the most qualified people for these leadership positions would be Kleeb herself.
In his review of Jonathan Rodden’s book about the urban-rural political divide, Prospect co-founder Paul Starr wrote that “population density now predicts partisanship.” That phenomenon extends beyond Nebraska’s borders and is out of Kleeb’s or any single individual’s control. But as someone from a small town in a red state, I find it encouraging that political officials are at least paying some attention to this problem. Before Trump got elected and sent the Democratic Party searching for its soul, the issue mostly got ignored. For every blue-collar voter lost in the Midwest, Democrats would pick up two in the suburbs, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer insisted in 2016. That didn’t pan out.
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Today, an increasing number of Democrats have come to realize that it’s worth paying attention to the places where they keep losing and political strategists are spending more energy trying to build a winning strategy for rural voters. Kleeb’s short book offers some worthwhile ideas, but it doesn’t offer all the answers, and at times it gets repetitive giving the feeling that it is designed to reiterate a set of talking points to political strategists. Regardless, her book is a decent discussion starter. Rural voters won’t be easy to win, but Democrats do themselves a disfavor if they abandon them.
