The Dems Don’t Get Rural America

The Democrats have a good idea, but I’m not sure their execution of it is on the mark.

The party is awash in cash so it has decided to spend $140 million on a campaign to better connect with rural America. That’s a good idea. But their strategy is questionable.

Democrats have been getting pummeled outside of major metro areas and college towns for years. In 1982, Democrat Tony Earl won the Wisconsin governor’s office with 40 of 72 counties. Forty years later Tony Evers won it with only 16 counties. And you will find that same pattern in all of the key states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia.

Democrats now rely on huge margins in a handful of places to win statewide races. The trouble is that it’s very hard to win legislative or Congressional majorities that way. Even under fair maps in an equally divided state, Republicans have a lock on four of Wisconsin’s Congressional seats while Democrats can only count on two with two more up for grabs, but leaning to the GOP. Fair maps for the Legislature still project a 52-47 GOP advantage in the Assembly and a 17-16 Republican edge in the State Senate.

So the party has identified the right problem, but I see two issues with their new initiative. For one thing it’s short term and shallow. It’s built around finding voters for Joe Biden this November. There’s nothing wrong with that — God knows, I want Biden to win — but as far as I can tell this is not about a long-term effort to listen to, understand and try to win over rural voters for the long haul. This is not about building a real Democratic infrastructure in rural America; it’s about winning the next presidential election. It’s drive-by politics.

And that leads to my second concern. This is clearly a strategy developed by coastal consultants, not something that actually springs from rural America. The AP story on this quotes Bradley Beychok who founded the Washington-based organization American Bridge that is producing ads for the effort: “People are afraid of Trump. And in some cases you have to remind them why.”

Catch a whiff of condescension there? The only people I know who are afraid of Trump are urban liberals. Nobody in rural America fears Trump. Some may not like him. Some may be looking for a reason not to vote for him. But they don’t fear him. And if they do have concerns about Trump they don’t need Bradley Beychok to remind them why.

And Beychok went on to say that, “Democrats should have learned by now that since Trump was elected in 2016, women have saved democracy election after election.” Nice way to start off by alienating 50% of your potential voter base, but this is the kind of identity-focussed language that comes out of DC these days. There has been a growing gender gap in American politics (57% of women voted for Biden in 2020), but the answer isn’t to widen it. If the Democrats are going to do better in rural America they can’t do it with women alone. They can’t afford to drive away two more men for every woman they bring over to their side. And, by the way, the latest polling indicates that the gender gap in this latest Biden-Trump matchup has all but disappeared.

Along these lines the first set of ads, which will start appearing soon in the Wausau and Rhinelander TV markets, targets women on the abortion issue. That’s fine but if you’re a voter for whom abortion rights are your top issue, aren’t you already voting for Democrats?

In the short-run maybe this will work. Maybe by squeezing out absolutely every woman pro-choice voter in northern Wisconsin Biden will narrow his margins of defeat there and win the state and another term. But this is not going to win back any sizable portion of this part of the country for the party in the long-run. It’s more evidence that my party, dominated by urban liberals, just doesn’t get the rest of America.

We’ve got the Quote & Quiz already teed up for you for tomorrow, so study up on your current events. Have a good weekend. Looks to be lovely.