How Democrats Can Win Back Rural America

Tom Zoellner searches for solutions to the Democratic Party’s “rural problem.”

By Tom ZoellnerSeptember 27, 2024

• Politics

ON AN AVERAGE weekday evening in rural Cochise County, Arizona, a 60-year-old woman named Anne Carl has been walking up to doors at the end of long ranch roads, steeling herself for a potentially bad interaction, and knocking.

She is a Democrat running for county recorder, once a relatively dull courthouse job that involved safely retaining public records and managing voter rolls. The races for this elective office used to be snoozers, barely worth an inside page mention in the local Herald/Review. But now, in the southeast corner of this new presidential swing state, the county recorder’s office has become unusually important.

Carl is trying to unseat Republican David Stevens, who has helped make Cochise County a national focus of election conspiracy theories, giving himself expanded powers to oversee elections and pursuing an unusual—and potentially illegal—plan to institute an expensive hand count of ballots in the 2024 election, despite no credible evidence of fraud or tampering.

Even with the possible stakes, Carl is getting almost no help from the Arizona Democratic Party and does most of the door-knocking herself. And in this she exemplifies both the plight of the rural Democrat and the potential way forward for the party, which has essentially surrendered vast sections of the country. There are 3,244 counties in the United States, and according to Cody Lonning of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, only about 10 percent of them have active Democratic Party committees. The national party has virtually abandoned liberal-leaning or persuadable voters in those areas and left candidates like Carl to fend for themselves.

“I have to believe there’s hope,” she said. “I go to everybody’s house, not just Democrats. I do think there’s a universal language with folks. Everyone’s in the middle somewhere.”

There was once a time, within recent memory, when centrist Democrats held their own in rural America, able to win and keep US Senate seats in places like Arkansas, Indiana, West Virginia, South Dakota, and Louisiana. But that began to change in 2008 after Barack Obama won the Democratic primary and then the presidency with a strategy that bypassed the system of old county party committees and relied on a mobile brigade of young college graduates armed with block-by-block data stored on mobile devices. The elections would be managed not by locals with a long investment in the area but by twentysomethings from elsewhere making a pit stop on their way to law school. Out-of-the-way spots like Cochise County stopped receiving money or attention.

The Democratic Party’s retreat from farm and ranch country is often framed as a story of ideology. Boondocks voters were thought to be too obsessed with guns and abortion, and therefore it made no sense to keep throwing campaign money into a black hole in the middle of the country. Why not spend those resources on the suburbs of Detroit, Columbus, and Denver, where there are a lot of donors and centrist voters? “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia,” said Senator Charles Schumer, then chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2016. “And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

But the real reason that Donald Trump was able to raise his share of the rural vote from 59 percent in 2016 to 65 percent in 2020 was actually about tactics. Rural voters stopped caring about the Democrats because the Democrats stopped caring about them. “They were not listening,” write Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward in Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It (2022). “They were not cultivating relationships of trust. They were not telling a story that spoke to the sharp pain of the struggling rural poor.” When Democrats did talk about poverty from a distance, it was usually through the judgmental terms of racism or immigration, which doesn’t translate into electoral gains.

The knock-on effects of not even bothering to show up hurt Democrats beyond a single election cycle. Voters in small towns and farm country live in a social environment that puts a premium on getting along with one’s neighbors. Your cousin’s wife does the hair of your grade school teacher, who sits on the deacon board with the guy who gave your uncle a job at the grain elevator. Arguments are not quickly forgotten. Politics gets tricky in an information milieu where the local newspaper has withered or disappeared, and most news comes through the TV or the internet with partisan heat attached.

“It’s not necessarily that rural people think they will lose their job if they proudly proclaim they are a Democrat, it’s more about a rural culture of not wanting to rock the boat and wanting to get along,” writes Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, in Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America (2020). “Generations go by with no investments from the Democratic Party to win elections, and you get where we are at this moment.”

The Democratic abandonment of rural America is particularly striking considering the quality of its policies on education, healthcare, technology, public lands, and agriculture that would seem an easy sell in small towns. But the party is stuck in its own colonial narrative of an interior teeming with aging citizens, disappearing jobs, culture war grievances, and cycles of addiction. Getting it unstuck will require both a shift in tactics and a rediscovery of what Democrats once understood instinctively.

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The psychological waters didn’t always flow in this direction, at least when it came to rural attitudes toward government.

Farmers upset with the anticompetitive practices of railroads created the big populist surge of the 1870s called the National Grange, which demanded a bigger federal footprint in setting shipping prices, regulating grain elevators, and making free mail deliveries to country destinations. A similar enthusiasm for intervention swept through rural America in the 1930s, with a groundswell of support for subsidies under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, as well as the Rural Electrification Act, which modernized the countryside.

But the farm credit meltdown of the 1980s was the last time Democrats made a conspicuous show of caring about rural Americans, in this case by opposing Ronald Reagan’s cuts to agricultural programs. “A total of 200,000 farmers and ranchers have gone out of business under Reaganomics, and more than a million more are on the brink of broke this very day, while Ronny Reagan stands around humming ‘Thank God I’m a Country Boy,’” thundered Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower at the 1984 Democratic National Convention.

Such populist fire died down as the cultural politics of abortion, gays, and guns took center stage, leading liberal thinkers to conclude that they had lost the countryside for a generation, perhaps permanently. In 2004, the journalist Thomas Frank published his enormously influential book What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, positing that Republicans had successfully exploited the us-versus-them power of symbolic cultural issues to the point that rural Americans were now persuaded to “vote against their own economic interests,” a phrase repeated like a mantra by the book’s many admirers. The thesis was both seductive and brilliant and helped explain the Democrats’ mounting failures by blaming the voters instead of the consultants.

“Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, farther to the right,” Frank wrote. “Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics.”

Frank’s book is more sophisticated than this heated passage may suggest, but the core of it was easily reducible and made sense to coastal Democrats who had 1970s memories of Richard Nixon successfully breaking the New Deal–era Democratic alliance in the South by campaigning in coded racist language as an enemy of the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement.

The idea took hold: rural America is a lost cause. And that narrative helps explain the abandonment of places like Cochise County. “A lot of people have a preconceived notion of what rural Arizona is, and they just assume they all must be conservative,” said Tom Prezelski of Rural Arizona Action, an advocacy group that works on local issues.

But there are multiple problems with Frank’s thesis, not least of which is the enduring popularity of many Democratic policies when they are put in the form of a referendum instead of a candidate. In 2014, for example, 60 percent of Nebraskans voted to raise the state minimum wage. In Kansas itself in 2022, voters overwhelming rejected a ballot measure to include anti-abortion language in the state constitution. Majorities in Oklahoma, Utah, Idaho, and Missouri have voted to expand Medicaid, often in the face of concerted resistance from Republican elected officials. And despite the cable TV news shibboleth that climate change is a hoax, the citizens who are most in touch with the rhythms of the natural world are farmers, and their levels of doubt are correspondingly low.

In his 2015 book Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change, Seamus McGraw makes the case that the most compelling narratives of climate change and possible moves to subvert it are coming from rural America. “We need to listen to them,” he writes, “even if it’s sometimes hard to hear them over the shrieks of protest from partisans on both sides of the climate debate who demand strict adherence to their almost religious orthodoxy.”

By neglecting the heartland, the Democratic Party has bred a cycle of doom, compounding successive defeats into a wasteland of defeatism. Such has been the fate of Cochise County, where many local races go uncontested by Democrats, and where some who used to be with the party have stopped voting altogether because they feel there’s nobody on the ballot who cares about them. As former DNC chair Tom Perez once put it: “You can’t door-knock in rural America.”

Candidates like Anne Carl are working hard to overturn that view. Her campaign signs are colored purple—halfway between red and blue—and she has resolved to knock on more than 10,000 doors in this spectacular expanse of basin and range country in the Chihuahuan Desert.

“I feel like I’m on a mission just to show my face to people who are on the other side,” she said. “I’ll spend the time listening. And it’s a little scary because some have a different methodology for voting than I do. They’ll tell me, ‘You came to my door, so I’m going to vote for you.’ Or ‘You listened, so I’ll vote for you.’”

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Democratic weakness in rural America may be explained by another blind spot. Many of the party’s members have become allergic to talking about faith, family, and flag—core principles that bear intense meaning for the electorate, yet ones that seem to embarrass Democrats or make them feel awkward, even when their policies can be easily explained through the filter of these values.

Some of this has to do with the secularization of younger voters, and the sense that talking about religious values even generically may be off-putting or insensitive to some listeners. According to a 2015 Pew poll, a firm belief in God among Democrats and those who lean toward the party was down from 67 percent in 2007 to 55 percent just seven years later.

Even Democrats with genuine religious convictions often decide that a public show of faith or a search for common ground with evangelicals is not worth the time or risk. An abject example—even a heartbreaking one—is Hillary Clinton, a devout Methodist and a participant in a women’s Bible study who made almost no outreach to conservative church leaders in the 2016 race, leaving those voters with no alternative but Trump.

Entrenched belief among Beltway Democrats held that abortion and misogyny had permanently firewalled them off, and that they were lost causes, but the truth was that Trump’s long string of moral failings, his Nietzschean worldview, and his biblical cluelessness had left a substantial portion of them looking for an off-ramp. But Clinton made scant mention of her faith on the campaign trail, made no attempt to speak before any major Christian groups, brushed off interview requests from religious publications, avoided Catholic events, and hired no outreach director to evangelicals. “Not to have anyone reaching out to a quarter of the electorate is political malpractice,” Michael Wear, Obama’s faith outreach director in 2012, told Ruth Graham of Slate.

Trump has little evidence of a personal faith, but he showed up where Clinton would not and promised Christian voters raw power and protection. They rewarded him with 81 percent of the white evangelical vote, with many convincing themselves to the point of delusion that he was secretly one of them. This alliance of convenience has only deepened over the last eight years, with no sign that Democrats are willing to attack it at its root or offer an alternative to voters who need to feel a nod toward spiritual values from a candidate—or at least a sense that candidates are listening. Ironically enough, President Joe Biden, a frequent and unflashy communicant at whatever Catholic church happens to be nearby, is probably the most personally devout president to hold the office since the Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter left in 1981.

Through this squeamishness toward matters of faith, Democrats miss the fact that rural churches are often the strongest glue holding the community together and also serve as default social service agencies. Ignoring them not only projects an unappealing aura of atheism to rural voters but also makes Democrats seem hostile to the value of having children during young adulthood, a foundational life choice for many of those voters. As Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman write in a recent New York Times op-ed, “the success narratives of modern liberal life leave little room for having a family.” A sense of doom about climate change and a retreat from the 1990s rhetoric that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” translates into an unintended anti-family message among those voters who consider the family a core part of their identity.

Again, ironies abound. The policies embraced by most Democrats—subsidized childcare, universal preschool, quality healthcare for pregnant mothers—are far more hospitable to family stability than the ubiquitous punt to the free market offered by most Republicans. Yet the perception of Democratic indifference to natural reproduction leads many rural citizens to perceive such programs cynically, as giveaways to the urban poor in exchange for their votes—a political deal instead of an attempt to make small-town life a little more affordable.

Another problem: Even as Trumpist Republicans like to paint a picture of a nation in decline, awash in crime, amorality, and undesirable immigrants, Democrats are correspondingly uncomfortable with the idea of “America” as a hopeful concept, a light to the rest of the world. Some of this is driven by the academic melancholy that has shaped the mindsets of junior staffers. These neo-Calvinist attitudes of national shame stand in sharp contrast not just to the views of most rural Americans but also to those of the people of color and immigrants that progressive Democrats would like to think they represent.

A 2020 survey from the nonprofit More in Common shows that 70 percent of Black Americans and 76 percent of Hispanic Americans report pride in their country, as opposed to only about one-third of progressives. More generally, 59 percent of Republicans in a recent Gallup poll said they were extremely proud to be American, compared to just 36 percent of Democrats, which may help explain the alarming departure of many voters of color to the ranks of MAGA.

“Democrats have a bit of a problem with patriotism,” wrote Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute in citing these discordant numbers. “It’s kind of hard to strike up the band on patriotism,” he argued, “when you’ve been endorsing the view that America was born in slavery, marinated in racism and remains a white supremacist society, shot through with multiple, intersecting levels of injustice that make everybody either oppressed or oppressor on a daily basis.”

Few people want to vote for more of that—unrelenting HR modules or racially themed struggle sessions without a clear sense of optimism, joy, or hope waiting on the other end. As tawdry as it may appear for Trump to call his own country “a Third World hellhole” governed by “pervert criminals and thugs,” and for his sycophants to engage in the same kind of toxic nostalgia, Republicans can still claim to be passionate lovers of country while Democrats are conveniently cast as the anti-American party. And rural Democrats feel especially vulnerable to being painted that way.

“They feel intimidated and frightened and don’t show up much,” said Anthony Flaccavento, a community development specialist in the Appalachian western side of Virginia, in a telephone interview. “When they do show up, it’s in protest mode for kids in cages or police shootings, furthering the sense among rural Americans that we’re completely different than them.”

To be sure, outrageous injustices like family separations at the border and racism in policing are richly deserving of protest. But the neglect of homegrown Democratic Party structures and the party’s disappearance from ordinary community life means that the in-your-face stuff tends to be the only mode in which rural America perceives national Democrats: aggression and derision without a valentine to the benevolent side of the country. Conservative media is only too happy to serve up the worst examples and make them stand in for the whole.

Older members of the party like Obama, Biden, and the Clintons were no strangers to the art of performative loyalism, routinely praising their country and wearing flag pins. But this example is not universally shared throughout the party. As the essayist Meghan Daum said to me, to be seen as patriotic in liberal circles is like “carrying a plastic purse”—deeply unfashionable.

The inability to speak the same language of would-be allies is a self-inflicted wound.

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How to turn it around? Kamala Harris’s choice of former small-town football coach and all-around Midwestern über-dad Tim Walz as her running mate is an excellent piece of green Jell-O symbolism. As I have argued elsewhere, the party can build on this momentum by “reinvesting in local party offices in red states to keep the Democratic flame burning, emboldening local MAGA skeptics, recruiting candidates, and providing a visible alternative to the extremes of the other party.”

Such bets may seem like long shots at present. But political realignments are certain to happen, and the groundwork can be prepared now. When Howard Dean was the chair of the DNC from 2005 to 2009, he championed a “50-State Strategy” to contest races even in deep-red places by giving regular $25,000 grants to state parties. Though it may have sounded like a cannonade of moonshots, it was both low-cost and high-impact. Those grants could be reinstated for the cost of a week’s worth of redundant TV ads in an average US Senate campaign.

For that matter, the party should rethink its spending habits on wall-to-wall media and direct mail, which quickly reaches saturation point with persuadable voters. A far better investment may be found in the one-to-one contact with neighbors that a vibrant local office can provide. Some of the insane sums of money raised to knock off reviled GOP villains—such as Amy McGrath’s failed $90 million bid to get rid of Mitch McConnell in Kentucky—should be spent on building permanent beachheads in those communities, prioritizing local hires over the seasonal airlifts of a handful of self-selected liberal arts college kids.

The party should also reassess its entire relationship to fundraising. Money may matter less in politics than is commonly assumed. Solid candidates with good organizations don’t always need expensive media buys to get ahead. For the price of a single TV ad in a big-city market—they run dozens each day during election season—the party could bulk up its rural offices and yield big results.

The party should also conquer its allergy to atmospheric impurities. In the lucid and prophetic 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Stanford philosopher Richard Rorty took elite liberals—particularly those in universities—to task for failing to get their hands dirty with the real work of politics that accomplishes genuine reform rather than blaming individuals for their perceived heresies. Such is also the ailment of the Democratic Party when it writes off large sections of its own nation, refuses to learn the local languages, and transforms it all into an imaginary foreign land to be suspected and feared.

“America is not a morally pure country,” Rorty writes. “No country ever has been or ever will be. Nor will any country ever have a morally pure, homogenous Left. In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts.”

A change in language would go a long way toward making those coalitions stick. In the 2019 study “Resolving the Progressive Paradox: Conservative Value Framing of Progressive Economic Policies Increases Candidate Support,” a pair of researchers from Stanford University found that conservative and moderate voters were far more likely to express support for a policy initiative like job creation if it came draped with rhetorical concepts like patriotism, family, and tradition. “We may underestimate just how much framing matters, often more than the objective features of the thing being framed,” said study co-lead Robb Willer. Or, as Senator Jon Tester of Montana, one of the few elected Democrats in Congress who is an actual farmer, put it, the party “overcomplicated things with wonky, abstract, or even impossible messages,” leaving voters uncertain what they were getting.

Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen made a similar point in his underappreciated 2007 book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, in which he argued that the human brain “is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures, and policies to make a reasoned decision.” Instead, voters decide whether they “like” a candidate based on a variety of subliminal cues. Feeling lectured to from a distance never passes this test. But showing up in person, showing concern, showing solidarity, and having a lot of surrogates do the same for you across a district? That’s how elections are won. An analysis of 50 Congressional races between 2016 and 2020 showed a consistent theme, said Lonning of Rural Urban Bridge. “The overperformers were first and foremost listeners,” he told me.

If they show up and listen like Anne Carl, national Democrats might find that MAGA’s roots are shallower than they appear. A 2023 poll from the Center for Rural Strategies showed “three messaging points—lowering prices; bringing good-paying jobs to local communities; and a populist message focused on corporate greed—received such broad support that they rivaled voters’ agreement on core values like family and freedom.”

The last point—corporate greed—is where substantial gold lies in harvesting Democratic votes from rural America. The fine art of politics lies in identifying the correct villain. Democrats would do well to pick the best enemies and hammer them mercilessly. Instead of talking about systemic racism, for which there is no obvious solution, or making people feel ashamed for their previous Trump votes, Democrats should attack corporate mergers, the offshoring of jobs, and farm policies that benefit only Big Food and seed companies like Monsanto. They should reject Wall Street money from these sources and position themselves—again—as the party of the people standing up to corporate interests.

In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, Franklin D. Roosevelt villainized the “organized money” that stood against Social Security with one of the great pugnacious lines in political history: “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” I heard an echo of this line in 2016 when a laid-off West Virginia coal miner told me the reason most people in his narcotics-ravaged town voted for Trump: “The more the media told us how terrible he would be, the better we liked him.” Simply put, American voters love a fighter who won’t back down, a tribune for the common people.

Another lesson from the 1930s—a decade troublingly similar to our own—might be found in Texas Congressman Wright Patman, who in 1935 grew alarmed at the spread of grocery chains like A&P across small towns, driving out locally owned businesses through predatory volume pricing. The Robinson-Patman Act helped preserve rural free enterprise by prohibiting sweetheart deals between food manufacturers and big chains. But in the 1980s, the act wasn’t enforced, and Walmart made its concurrent destructive march through Main Street, USA, ushering in an anticompetitive era that brought us Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Bringing back such consumer-friendly legislation on free enterprise grounds ought to be a selling point for Democrats challenging the idea that deregulation and wealth-hoarding is the road to working-class prosperity.

There are hopeful signs on the horizon. Rural Urban Bridge has an initiative called Community Works that organizes civic betterment projects, such as diaper drives, road cleanups, and arts classes, in small towns. Such events get neighbors talking about a shared desire for more responsive public institutions, perhaps leading them to run for office themselves. Local party organizations grow when the center is not focused on a single personality or campaign. “We’re seeing people pleasantly surprised that Democrats are showing up,” said Flaccavento.

An imprint of Howard Dean’s 50-State Strategy can also be seen in the group Contest Every Race, which holds candidate recruitment drives, training sessions, and grant opportunities for those willing to challenge entrenched Republicans in traditionally red districts. And the Center for Rural Strategies publishes a smart blend of rural political analysis and culture at the The Daily Yonder. The road is long, but there are plenty out there who want to travel it.

One of them is Missa Foy, the chair of the Navajo County Democratic Party in Arizona. She doesn’t have a physical office—that went away years ago. But she runs a robust program to get eight trained organizers out to the three Native reservations in the county: the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and White Mountain Apache, which comprise two-thirds of the county’s land base. Foy was all too accustomed to hearing “Are you here just for our vote, and then you’re going to leave?” The Northeast Arizona Native Democrats now show up year-round for conversations at community events and homes. “We talk about the power of voters to shape policy,” said Foy.

That ethos—simply talking to voters, no matter where they are—is what keeps Anne Carl going as she fights election disinformation on the other side of the state, one door at a time. “I’ll even knock on the doors where there’s a flag flying that says ‘Fuck Joe Biden,’” she said. “I want to talk to those people.”

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Featured image: William P. Chappel. House Raising, 1870s. The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954. The Met Museum (54.90.512). CC0, www.metmuseum.org. Accessed September 16, 2024. Image has been cropped.