In the aftermath of the 2016 election, I spent a lot of time thinking about how Trump won by running up huge margins in rural areas–what it meant, what the Democrats could or should do about it, what it said about the people in those communities. Much of the Democratic base was so incensed that anyone could vote for Trump after all the credible accusations of sexual assault and his overtly racist campaign that they were convinced for both moral and political reasons that the party should write off the sticks entirely and pursue a suburban strategy to compensate.
On a visceral level, that’s how I felt, too. I was wounded by the election results and I was angry and in an unforgiving mood. But I also felt deep down that it would be wrong to take an approach of separation and disengagement. On the moral level, I don’t think a party that seeks to represent the less fortunate and more vulnerable can ever write off any community, let alone communities struggling with poverty, job loss, and a drug epidemic. On a political level, I doubted that we’d get an even trade even if the suburban strategy worked because it would give the Republicans a built-in advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives and especially in state legislatures. And on the level of pure alarm, I felt that populist rural rage that is channeled exclusively through right-wing channels leads to fascism and human rights abuses. I did not think it moral, savvy or wise to concede rural areas to Trumpism.
Only days after the election, on November 10, 2016, these ideas of mine started to spawn and I wrote a piece called Avoiding the Southification of the North. Later on, I wrote a cover story for the Washington Monthly on How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values. In our upcoming issue of the magazine, we have a great piece that touches on the same themes: The Democrats of Trump Country, written by Daniel Block.
The idea behind Block’s article is something I had recommended in much of my writing on this topic, both as a sensible strategy and as a moral argument. The media are always writing about the people who live in Trump Country as a kind endlessly fascinating anthropological study. But even in the reddest counties in the country, there are still a lot of people who voted for Hillary Clinton. What about them? What do they think has gone wrong for the Democrats? What do they think the national party and its spokespeople are doing that makes their jobs more difficult, or easier? Mr. Block set out for rural Virginia to find out.
One thing that surprised him was something that would not have surprised me, because I wrote about it in that post-election Southification blog-post. He didn’t realize how important intimidation and social coercion are in the Republicans’ success in these areas. In some communities, being a Democrat is so socially and morally suspect that it can damage your career or business, cost you friends and opportunities, or even the condemnation of your preacher and congregation. To be honest, the same can be said for Republicans living in places like Philadelphia or Manhattan. What worried me when I saw the 2016 election results was that I saw evidence of this phenomenon, which has been a way of life in the South since the Civil War, spreading to the northern Midwest. I saw it as outright dangerous to allow this to happen, and as moral cowardice to consent to it by choice.
When a community slips beyond a certain point there is no longer a political conversation going on, but just a war of them against someone else from somewhere else. A county where Obama carried 40 percent of the vote was still having a debate, but the same county giving Clinton 20 percent was a different kind of thing altogether. And if anyone was going to roll back the tide, it would have to be the people in those communities who remained active Democrats despite all the pressures to leave or go underground.
What Block discovered in rural Virginia is encouraging and you should read the whole piece. The area he focuses on is a little different than the ones I was worried about because it’s more conservatively Christian and more loyal to Trump than the areas of Pennsylvania and the upper Midwest that moved sharply to the right in the Obama years. Nonetheless, the Democrats, though as badly outnumbered as ever, are getting organized and coming out of the darkness with increasing frequency.
Just as Trump won statewide elections by running up the score in places he was always destined to win, the Democrats can win statewide elections by holding his numbers down in those places. That’s what Obama did twice, and the Democrats need to find a way to do it again. To find out how they’re going about it, don’t ask Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi. To find out, check out our cover story.
Look: I live in one of the most liberal areas of the already liberal SF Bay Area. Trump got about 30%-35% percent here. (Conversely I used to have to make frequent trips to OK for my job where the percentages are reversed, but the people I worked with were just as hardcore lefty as my CA neighbors).
Unfortunately some of my long-term (lefty) girlfriend’s even more long-term best friends, who are essentially “family” to her, are among the Trump 30%. I bite my tongue every time I see them and were it my call would tell them to f** themselves and never speak to them again, but I don’t – I listen and say nothing offensive trying to find a polite joke to cut the tension of all the sick sh* they say about climate change, Kavanaugh, MeToo and Latinos (the only areas where NoCal has gotten to them are that they’re not black racists – only Latin and Native American racists) and … well, actually that’s it, because they still think gay jokes are funny. Their sole concession is that they don’t hate black people – on everything else, they’re essentially evil incarnate.
My point is: I’m stuck with these bastards, but as a political movement, stop trying to make nice with these sick f**s. You will *never ever get them to see reason. I know. I suffer, sober, through long parties where they get increasingly drunk and unfiltered and they are f*** awful – deep down to the bone.
But there are way more of us than there are of them and if we get 90% turnout, they are D.O.N.E. – and good f**** riddance.
Well, the combination of not being able to edit and using asterisks to not be vulgar turned that post into a disaster of formatting. I’m used to Twitter, where this means a polite form of caps lock, not “bold what’s insides the asterisks.
. . . function largely redundant and unnecessary. ‘Course you gotta actually use it for that to be the case.
Not that it wouldn’t still be nice to have Edit option. I preview (and edit in the process) pretty assiduously, but stuff still occasionally slips by. I presume if booman ever decides on and gets around to that site redesign he has mentioned considering, that Edit will be an included upgrade.
Didn’t read, eh.
Brave people, on the front line of defending democracy and the republic. Very like their 1860 Unionist forbears in TN, MS, AL and (ironically) the western portion of VA, which of course became WVa in 1863 (I think) upon permanent occupation by the Union army. Fortunately all that needed to be done in 1860 was the physical conquest of a treasonous rebellion, with the elected Southern Quislings in DC having voluntarily debarked to Richmond VA.
Unfortunately, events in 2018 are now moving too quickly for journalists (and certainly the hapless corporate media) to meaningfully cover them, with Der Trumper now running the first explicitly fascist campaign by a major party in American history.
We have daily spittle-flecked preznidential speeches screamed at a fever pitch, warning of (suspiciously timed) “caravans” of “dangerous” brown people (including “Middle Easterners”) posing a “national emergency”, which is being aided by hated Mexico and its Mexicans. These hate-filled fact-free screeds are rebroadcast coast to coast (without attempt at debunking) by the complicit corporate media. Properly incited Trumpist Brownshirts are now posting mail bombs to “globalist” (i.e. Jewish) financier Soros (care to take bets on the level of national coverage that will get?) The (open and obvious) right wing mob projects its virulent hate onto the left, while the glorious Trumper proudly proclaims himself a “nationalist”, blithely urging other Trumpists to do the same—with the ignorant American public mystified as to why this might herald a bit of a concern. I’ve mocked this shit as National Trumpalism, but of course in Failed America, reality has now quickly overtaken satire.
We now face the equivalent of the German election of 1932, except Weimar Germany had a greater chance of fending off their Hitlerites than 21st Century America, mainly because the National Trumpalists already have total control of federal courts, and an ever-expanding election rigging, vote suppression system up and running. Will we go down without fighting (rhetorical) fire with fire? Chuck and Nancy, all hands on deck…
Frankly the only way to make real inroads into Trump country would be to abolish Fox News and reintroduce the Fairness Principle. As long as they have their alternative media, they will believe painful lies.
As long as Trump emboldens them to say and do outrageous things, then they will say and do them.
What is really needed is to have an alternative media in their communities that counteracts the lies. Most of them won’t pay attention except to attack it, but some people will inevitably listen. And if Dems want to get back to 40% in rural white America, then that would be the way.
However, Global Warming is going to provide a real challenge, because as things collapse the anti-immigrant bias in America is going through the roof. Maintaining a universalist perspective in the midst of global warfare and food shortages is going to be wildly difficult.
The human race will have to come together in ways it never has, in order to survive. So far the signs are that instead of developing solidarity, everybody retreats into their own tribal and ethnic identities and points their fingers at foreign “others” as the problem. “Food is scarce! The world economy is in collapse! We cannot afford to sustain these useless mouths!” The Trumpites are already there – demagogueing a caravan of helpless refugees, mostly composed of women and children.
“These are not nice people, OK?”
This Malthusian ethos was wildly popular in the 19th century. The mid-20th century prosperity and relative peace subdued a lot of eliminationist rhetoric, but now it’s back for good.
About the only chance really is to change the rules so that archaic political systems like each state having 2 senators and the electoral college don’t exist any more. That would take Constitutional amendments and it’s not sure what exactly to do about the problems.
Didn’t read, eh.
Oh, I read that article. Sounds like cherry picking a few individual good feeling stories. I have trouble believing that there are very many of these Trump-Country Democrats who didn’t vote in 2016 but suddenly will now. We’ll see in the elections, but I think that people who don’t vote generally don’t change and start voting in any significant numbers.
To be a non-voter in your 30’s or later you have to resist so much of society’s pressures to vote. Everybody I know who does that keeps right on resisting the urge to vote. They have strong opinions about politics sometimes, but they have strongly formed opinions about non-voting. They have TONS of rationalizations about not-voting – layers and layers of rationalizations. It doesn’t do any good, it just encourages them. The parties are all the same, it doesn’t ever change anything. Etc. Etc.
Now suddenly because of Trump they’re going to start actually voting and not just complaining? Put me down as highly skeptical that will actually happen in any significant numbers.
Well, it’s just an anecdote, of course, but we’ve gotten close to our Shenandoah neighbors and our immediate neighbors are a Mennonite woman who lives alone and the other neighbor is a British immigrant who trains horses. In the course of many conversations we discovered that both had voted in 2016 and both had independently written in Jesus. They weren’t prepared for Hillary but they found Trump appalling. Whatever.
Submental drivel.
The turnout rates between presidential races and midterms are always much different, so we would expect far fewer Democrats to vote in this election than last time around. All indications from early voting are that the drop-off may be historically low for this midterm, and that means a lot of people from both parties voting who don’t typically vote in midterms.
In Trump Country, there was a lot of actual party switching two years ago, as lifelong Democrats abandoned the party. This changed the result in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and thus the outcome of the election. Those states are all running governors races where the Democrat is either cruising or looking to upset incumbent Scott Walker. The Democratic senators from those states are looking safe. That’s a snapback of Obama/Trump Democrats, and there are lots of them.
In rural Virginia, it was different. Hillary supporters were so few that they were pushed underground, fearful to even advocate on her behalf. Now they are coming out together and getting organized, making it an argument again, and that will improve the Democrats’ numbers even as they still get crushed. But it will help reelect Tim Kaine. More Democrats will vote, and more people will be persuaded to choose the Democrats.
It’s not that hard to understand. It’s the difference between winning and losing on the statewide level in important states.
Read about 50 percent. Reminds me of my neighborhood. Maybe someday but not anytime soon it will change. Our candidate also has less than a one percent chance of winning, But it is a beginning, I tell her to come back again in two years, if this does not work out. She has been great to show folks the Dems don’t have red eyes and horns.
I lived in Roanoke Va. it is democratic except in the area I lived. Another deep red neighborhood, filled with hunters and gun enthusiasts. Our kids played all the youth sports together, great to get to know them. The people, like here, are very nice, so long as you stay away from politics. Otherwise they think you are joking.
I’ve mentioned several times before in this blog that we have a small farm that we are rehabilitating in VA-06. Yes, it is heavily rural and Trumpian but Jennifer for who we are campaigning even though we are full-time residents of Silver Spring, MD is a good candidate. I read the article and it closely mirrors our experience, including that awful sign at the Shenandoah Co. fair. (The Democratic and Republican tables were right across from each other.)
On the basis of issues, there are some salient issues that should be sympathetic to Democrats. For example, the opioid crisis. Lewis has reached out to the trailer park people and others who are affected by poverty and the crisis to register them to vote. She works in this field and is an environmentalist. There’s a growing organic farming movement in this region but even regular farmers are opposed to the fracking pipeline. I’ve mentioned before that farmers like the idea of solar panels on their barn roofs since otherwise many don’t have power. So that’s popular and one of the main local solar providers had prominent Hillary Clinton signs at his store/factory in Woodstock. This district used to have a Democratic representative in the ’80s/early ’90s. Then it was gerrymandered into Republican. The area of the district is enormous, encompassing virtually the entire Shenandoah Valley. But that also includes 5 significant cities that should have Democratic voters. Also the district has a quite sizeable Hispanic immigrant population, mainly Mexican. Persuading them to vote would be tough and that’s a future party-building challenge. Maybe someday. But you can’t be someone with no-one.
Obviously, I meant you can’t beat someone with no-one. (Blog needs an edit button.)
That’s a great article. And it’s an interesting answer or response to your Southification pieces, which I think about fairly often. Thanks for the link.
I read the post (not the article yet, but it sounds worthy and I’ll certainly be getting to it soon), and for my two bits I consider writing off an entire region as a lost cause not only political malpractice, but just personally unfair to all the decent people living there.
But boy howdy will I write off individuals. It pains me to regard people whom I have known to be decent and sensible in the past as essentially lost beyond all hope of redemption now.
I’ve spent a fair amount of my time as an adult in America biting my tongue and doing whatever needed in order to avoid confrontations over politics, and I can only hope that there are enough such holdouts in Trump country to activate and swing some key districts. I look forward to reading about it in the WM piece.