Biden's win hides a dire warning for Democrats in rural U.S.
By: THOMAS BEAUMONT (AP NEWS)
Rural America is not becoming more conservative. That's an urban myth palmed off by Democrats to assuage concerns that the Democratic Party is drifting toward an illiberal and undemocratic philosophy of governing.
Rural America is where Democrats build landfills and wind farms. Democrats are far, far more concerned about people who have broken the law to reside in the United States than about rural communities. Democrats are much more interested in maintaining Chinese trade than retaining rural jobs. Democrats will take extraordinary measures to save Wall Street while they disparage, demean, and dismiss rural main street.
Rural America has become forgotten America for Democrats. And Democrats are actively attempting to write rural America out of history. Democrats simply cannot be bothered by rural issues.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Democrats once dominated Koochiching County in the blue-collar Iron Range of northern Minnesota. But in this month's presidential election, President Donald Trump won it with 60% of the vote.
That's not because voters there are suddenly shifting to the right, said Tom Bakk, who represents the area in the state Senate. It's because, he said, Democrats have steadily moved too far to the left for many rural voters.
"We've got to see if we can get the Democratic Party to moderate and accept the fact that rural Minnesota is not getting more conservative," said Bakk, who announced last week that he would become an independent after serving 25 years as a Democrat. "It's that you guys are leaving them behind."
While Democrats powered through cities and suburbs to reclaim the White House, the party slid further behind in huge rural swaths of northern battlegrounds. The party lost House seats in the Midwest, and Democratic challengers in Iowa, Kansas, Montana and North Carolina Senate races, all once viewed as serious threats to Republican incumbents, fell, some of them hard.
Though Democrats' rural woes aren't new, they now heap pressure on Biden to begin reversing the trend. Failure to do so endangers goals such as curbing climate change and winning a Senate majority, especially with GOP Senate seats in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin up in 2022.
"The pressure for Democrats has to be on conveying an economic message for rural America," said Iowa Democrat John Norris, a former candidate for governor. "We have a great one to convey, but we haven't put enough emphasis on it."
It has become a defining dynamic in almost every state where Democrats dominate urban areas and, for at least two elections, have clear momentum in the suburbs.
While Trump sought to squeeze more out of his mostly white, working-class base, he made little ground in places he barely won or lost in 2016, and slid in suburbs across the industrial and agricultural north. Instead, he supercharged his focus on places he won big last times.
Trump lost Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, after winning all three in 2016. But he won at least 60% of the vote in 126 counties in the three — 14 more than in 2016, according to Associated Press and state elections data. All of those counties are lightly populated.
Perhaps more telling, Trump increased his winning percentages in 90% of the counties where he reached the 60% mark in those three states four years ago. That includes all 24 counties where he won at least 70% of the vote last time, even while Biden was vastly outspending Trump on advertising.
The rural runaway was even greater in Iowa and Ohio, where polls late in October gave Biden's campaign hopes of a close race or narrow win, only to see him lose them by the same margins Clinton did.
Trump's greater dominance in rural Ohio surprised even Republican strategists. In Ohio's 6th Congressional District, 18 counties that hug the Pennsylvania border and Ohio River, Trump improved from 64% of the vote to more than 66%.
"I'll be the first to say I was doubtful President Trump could exceed what he did in 2016," said Ryan Steubenrauch, a senior adviser to 6th District Republican Rep. Bill Johnson.
Though Biden fulfilled Democrats' long-sought goal of carrying Georgia and Arizona, albeit narrowly, it wasn't because he concentrated on reaching beyond their metro hubs, said Steve Jarding, a veteran Democratic strategist who has long argued for greater party engagement in rural America.
"Democrats have found a way to win in the country, at least they believe this to be the case, by not concentrating much in big parts of the middle of the country," he said. "That's a scary proposition."
Jarding worries that by winning Arizona, Georgia and the northern swing states without addressing the rural economy, Democrats might believe the states are now trending their way as the result of favorable population and demographic shifts.
"We didn't win Georgia because we had a great message to rural Georgians," said Jarding, who helped Mark Warner win the Virginia governorship in 2001 by advising him to campaign aggressively far from the booming Washington, D.C., suburbs. "If Democrats say, look, we got into Georgia and we won it without having to talk about rural issues, they are dead wrong. It will flip back."
In clinging to their majority, House Democrats lost rural seats, notably the one held for 30 years by Rep. Collin Peterson in western Minnesota. The setbacks prompted accusations from moderates that the party's prominent liberals, such as New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, had become representative of a party foreign to America's farming and small manufacturing towns.
"I would argue everyone talks about the big tent. It's not as big as it used to be," Minnesota's Bakk said.
Biden campaigned little in person, even less in rural areas. Trump, on the other hand, whipped up enthusiasm at rallies in places like Wausau, Wisconsin, in the state's rural north where he dominated, as well as Saginaw in Mid Michigan, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, surrounded by counties he carried by more than 70%, even 80%.
Democrats also spent little time and money combatting Trump's attacks.
Unanswered, Trump's claims that Biden and other Democrats are proponents of socialism and eliminating police departments, as unfounded as they were, resonated in small towns, according to VoteCast, an Associated Press survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.
"We have to address this in a really more aggressive way," said veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, especially Trump's claims that Democrats are anti-police. "There were some serious kind of headwinds there."
Democrats need to not just defend against attacks but recruit more candidates among rural Americans and argue that progressive policy is to their advantage.
"We obviously have a brand problem in rural America," said former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat defeated in 2018. "But if you want to be an alternative, you can't go there empty-handed."
Heitkamp credits Biden for including specifically rural provisions in his policy plans, such as a transportation component in his health care proposal, considering many people in sparsely populated areas must travel some distance to see a doctor.
For now, Democrats' future in rural America rests largely on how Biden is viewed there, Heitkamp said.
"A good way to start out would be to make sure in his inaugural speech and state of the union, he talks about rural America," she said.
Urban Democrats will brag about vacation travels to distant undeveloped countries before they would ever consider traveling to outstate Minnesota. Democrats are not interested in rural America and, obviously, do not care about rural America.
I don't really don't have any sympathy for a bunch of ignorant weed benders and clod hoppers that supported a moron that likely did more damage to rural american lifestyles/livelihoods than any other US president in history. sucks being stupid.
Yea! I can spray more dangerous poisons and pesticides on my crops and contaminate my own water supply...
Hey, I might be on to something. Drinking contaminated water can cause imbalance...
No you can't
Yes I can
No you can't
Yes I can!!!!
First of all, there are loads of "urban" types who go traveling cross country, so I don't know what you are talking about. Second, how many people from Minnesota travel to the big cities? Third, this is more to do with cultural interests than anything else.
with greater access to the internet and the explosion of work from home opportunities due to covid, the forgotten flyover conservatives are being diluted by those that prefer living outside of urban centers.
You know, I actually agree with the premise of the article. But you take that premise to an absurd extreme.
I love rural america, but being around some backwardness sucks the life out of me.
I love to visit but I couldn't stand living in the middle of nowhere.
No way in hell I am going to have to drive for an hour and a half just to go to a grocery store.
I live in rural America, and aside from 4 years of dental school, always have. Even that was at WVU, so I lived in a university town in a mostly-rural state. I can't see myself being happy in a city. Maybe in a suburb, but that would be a stretch for me.
But there are some things I have trouble with - insularity, prejudice. I think they're more common in rural areas, just due to lack of exposure to other cultures. Some conservative politicians have skillfully played to those traits at times.
Yes, the Democratic Party needs to address rural America. Speak to healthcare - my local hospital has been expanding facilities over the last few years, adding a really nice new diagnostic center and physician office building, but I would still have to go to another county if I were to have a baby or a heart problem. We have the money for facilities, but we can't seem to support personnel for commonly-needed specialties, like Ob/Gyn and cardiology.
Transportation - we have no public transportation here. Ok, rural folks are used to not having buses and subways. But our highways aren't able to accommodate the amount of traffic that results from the lack of public transit and through traffic from more urban areas. Our county has an interstate running through it that's a nightmare. There's been talk, and only talk, about addressing it for years. Meanwhile, people are dying on that road (2 on the day before Thanksgiving), and our local emergency services are stretched thin responding to multiple crashes just about every week, and sometimes multiple crashes per day.
It's about 15 minutes to the grocery store for me, but only one pizza place delivers to my house, and the county doesn't maintain my road. But I have a hell of a view, and the quiet is pretty nice.
And one this morning. He was one of our county supervisors.
So, the main 'thing' for rural folk is relaxation of environmental rules, a continuation of a wealth transfer into the upper economic tiers, the ending of CHOICE, and the expanding of private for profit entities in their health care, to name a few items the current conservatives and their allies the GOP promotes?
Maybe the 'rural folk' need to understand that Hannity and Limbaugh are not necessarily espousing in their own best interests.
I voted this up Nerm, but a question remains as to why the 'rural folk' continue to be a bulwark of the GOP. Or, is something else in play here which is being overlooked?
Gotta love the, no government run healthcare but keep your hands off of my government run healthcare crowd...
you really can't fix stupid.
Ah yes. So you too remember the elderly lady in the broad brimmed straw hat with the tea bags swinging to and fro during a 2010 Tea Party Rally screaming to the news reporters, "I want the government out of my Medicare."
That was a hoot----and Hannity was there.
No! No you cannot! Try fixing the navigation system on a Cadillac with a hammer and duct tape. Simplistic dumbass bullshit sayings add nothing to a discussion besides off topic.
Interestingly enough I have dozens of relatives and even more friends that live in Northern MN. From the Iron Range to the Red River Valley to the Gunflint Trail and all are democrats and members of the DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor) party.