NOTE TO READERS: The substance of this post is indirectly derived from the contents of a new book, Rural versus Urban, by political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown, as discussed on the “Ezra Klein Show” with Mettler herself. That show’s transcribed text in the NYT is the only thing that I have yet read that adequately explains a multiply-indicted New York City con-man and real-estate mogul becoming the champion and cult leader of struggling rural America.
Fact 1. Until the mid-nineties, there was no great difference between rural and urban voters in party affiliations. Then the gap began growing—in Republicans’ favor. It’s now exploding.
Fact 2. The rural political county chairs that the authors spoke to said, “the issues that were most important to people are the economy, health care, education, etc. They did not mention “gun rights and abortion and immigration as top issues.”
Fact 3. On a “feeling” scale from one to 100, white rural Americans rate Black Americans at 70, Hispanic Americans at 67, gay men at 57, illegal immigrants at 39, and Democrats at 14 points.
Fact 4. Together, the 26 least-populated states have less than 11% of the total US population but command a majority of votes in the United States Senate. The Electoral College and House are less extremely tilted toward rural power, but you get the idea. Relatively speaking, rural folk rule.
Fact 5. “[T]he basic pattern from 1994 to the present [was] that rural places have elected Republicans, but in the middle of that time, things went in a different way. That was when Howard Dean became the head of the Democratic National Committee, 2005 through 2008.”
“His strategy was to work hard in all 50 states and particularly to organize in rural counties. Some of the county party chairs whom I interviewed still remember how well organized they were at that time. And then Barack Obama comes along and uses similar kinds of organizing strategies, and it really makes a difference.”
* * *
Put these facts together, and you arrive at a simple conclusion. Democrats have lost the rural parts of the country not for any failure of policy, but for failure to show up.
As Mettler put it, “this is where Democratic Party organizing is so needed and crucial. I remember a county chair in southern Ohio saying: Look, there’s no one here shouting from the rooftops back against Fox News: ‘They’re lying to you.’” The Dems have effectively ceded our nation’s rural areas to Republican propaganda, forgetting that our Constitution always has given rural folk inordinate political power.
One other crucial finding of Mettler’s and Brown’s research is hard to encapsulate in a single quotation. For a variety of reasons, rural folk have come to distrust and even fear big cities’ voters, their elite and their moguls. This antipathy has grown as rural factories have closed (often having been shipped to China), rural towns have dried up, decimated by factory closings and opioid addiction, and city incomes have surged or maintained while farms and rural areas have struggled.
As a result, there is a general feeling in rural America that the big, blue cities don’t give a damn about farms, small towns and country folk. They don’t seem to listen and don’t seem to care.
This, in my mind, explains the seeming contradiction that rural folk, by and large, endorse the same policies that city folk do but vote quite differently and idolize Donald Trump. Have you ever tried to reason with your spouse at a time when he or she believes you don’t listen and don’t care? That’s what city pols are up against when they make their grand pronouncements on city media but don’t get their feet dirty and go door to door, let alone organize, in the country.
About fourteen months ago, I wrote a post arguing that campaign contributions to candidates and party organizations are mostly worthless. Why? Virtually all candidates and (to my knowledge) the Democratic Party and its various offshoots spend most of their money talking to themselves or city Dems. For the price of multiple times what it would cost to sustain a field volunteer for a week, they compose, produce and air (repeatedly) print ads and video clips that argue policy positions and try to make the Republican side look bad.
I characterize this activity in the same words that Einstein used to describe insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Ever since Howard Dean gave the infamous scream that drove him from the presidential race and, apparently, from credibility in Democratic campaign circles, we’ve systematically replaced his fifty-state, neglect-no-precinct organizing strategy with an horrendously expensive media war that has been a uniform, consistent and catastrophic failure for Democrats. Will we ever learn?
During the last election cycle, I spent all but a few of my campaign dollars on GOTV organizations, as described (and named) in this post fourteen months ago. All together, I spent enough to buy a new small car.
Since the catastrophe last November, I’ve been taking a contribution holiday. But now, with a year before the midterms approaching, I’m ready to begin contributing again. And I’m going to support the same GOTV and local organizing bodies that I did last time, plus any others that I may discover that do the same sort of work.
In all this, Stacey Abrams is my model. She’s a brilliant on-the-ground organizer who, for some strange reason, was unable to get herself elected governor of Georgia. But she gave us two solid Democratic Senators in Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock. In my mind, she’s the modern incarnation of Howard Dean and the successor to his briefly successful organizing legacy.
But Abrams is not alone. There are many others who understand that politics in our nation today depends more on trench warfare than drones and informatics operating in the ether or cyberspace.
Our nation’s future depends on people-to-people organizing, just as it did in the beginning. Trying insanely to win the information war in the cesspool of today’s ether and Internet could lead to a real, bloody civil war. What we need is person-to-person diligent and friendly contact.
So Abrams and others like her will get my campaign dollars, as many of them as I can spare. Let would-be writers and producers of expensive clips and sound bites seek their fortunes in Hollywood, what’s left of it.
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