Can Democrats Win More Rural Voters?

Wisconsin farm. Pixabay License.

Ben Wikler was probably the smartest Wisconsin Democratic Party chair in the last 40 years or so. The Democrats had many victories under him. And he was a zealot about campaigning in rural areas.

“We are organized in every county in the state,” he told Urban Milwaukee last fall, including the reddest rural areas. “There’s nothing more powerful than hearing directly from a candidate going door to door and asking for your vote. That’s going to drive Democratic turnout up and down the ballot.”

Wikler made a bold prediction, that the Democrats would win the Third Congressional District in western Wisconsin, despite its many rural voters. “This is one of the top pickup races for Democrats in the nation,” he declared. “There’s the possibility of running up big Democratic margins in relatively rural areas. I think it could make national headlines.”

It didn’t. Incumbent Republican Derrick Van Orden, whose chief virtue seems to be his obnoxiousness, whose two-year term was beset by the kind of controversial incidents and outrageous comments that would have killed his candidacy in the pre-Trumpian times of 20 years ago, won reelection. And Donald Trump ran up the score in Wisconsin’s rural areas, winning bigger margins than in 2020 or 2016. All of the efforts by Wikler and the state Democratic Party yielded little.

True, Democratic incumbent U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin won election, but barely squeaked by, with 49.4% of the vote, compared to Trump’s 49.7% of the presidential vote. And this is a candidate who has been celebrated for her ability to win rural voters, famed for regularly visiting rural towns and counties and delivering federal spending for projects in those areas. This is a formidable politician who won Wisconsin by more than 10 percentage points in 2018 and by about 6% in 2012.

Granted, she did better than Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, outperforming her in 65 of this state’s 72 counties. But that impressive-sounding performance netted Baldwin just 4,548 more votes in Wisconsin.

Yet experts continue to tell Democrats they need to make more efforts in rural areas. The latest wave of this came in reaction to an essay in the New York Times by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who has studied the people of eastern Kentucky, including a county where Trump won a whopping 81% of the vote. Her book is called Stolen Pride.

The county was a center for coal-mining, an industry that’s all but dead. These are people heavily dependent on government assistance, as are many red counties across the country, particularly in the south.

As Hothschild describes these voters it is hard to know precisely how Democrats are supposed to win them over. It is Democrats who support Medicaid and other safety net benefits, but the recipients are not happy about needing the assistance and bitter about being left behind. And so, even though Trump and Republicans want to cut those benefits, these voters support them.

Hothschild suggests Democrats shouldn’t talk down to these voters, but who exactly are these candidates stupid enough to do this? And how do you remind them you support the safety net — a key pocket book issue — without bringing up a sore subject?

Hothschild suggests Democrat need to listen to these voters. But that’s exactly what Baldwin did in the rural areas of Wisconsin. “I think showing up matters, listening matters,” Baldwin told a Fox News Digital reporter. “And so I go, and I really listen and get to know the challenges and aspirations of people.”

And for that she got 4,548 more votes than Kamala Harris.

Trump, of course, has promised to bring manufacturing back to America, but Baldwin has long before him pushed this issue, for “made in America” requirements for government contracts and other proposals. And while Trump’s push to bring back 1960s-style Rustbelt jobs is completely unrealistic, Baldwin and President Joe Biden pushed for renewable energy, the one area of manufacturing that does have potential for jobs, particularly in red states. But Trump and Republicans have succeeded in ridiculing this.

What Trump really offers these Kentuckians is a response to their feelings of stolen pride, of being left behind. And that in essence is pure nastiness, his brag that “I’ll take revenge on them… on the pet-eating immigrants, uppity women, spying international students, idle government workers, and the institutions behind them — the universities, the mainstream press, the judiciary, the ‘deep state,’” as Hothschild frames it.

What possible answer can a Democrat offer to this? And how can they do it diplomatically and memorably in the face of Republicans who can say the nastiest things, even threaten to jail their opponents? And finally: why expend all that effort in places that don’t have that many votes?

Meanwhile America’s suburbs have been becoming less red. In the last 20 years Ozaukee County has gone from 33% to 44% Democratic and Waukesha County has gone from 33% to 39% Republican. And these are big population counties where you connect to more voters more easily. Then there are the cities, key Democratic areas where Republicans have made some inroads with minority voters. In both cases these Democrats can make their pitch a little more easily, without having to untangle the complicated pathology described by Hothschild. On a cost vs benefits basis, there is probably no area of the nation where Democrats are likely to gain less than rural America.