Wisconsin’s Dunn County is in the central part of the state, over 96 percent white, and represented by Democrat Ron Kind in Congress. Not far from Eau Claire, the rural area voted for Barack Obama twice, but in 2016 Donald Trump won it with 52 percent to 41 percent, a 2,000-vote advantage over Hillary Clinton. In 2020, running against Joe Biden, Trump carried Dunn County 56-42, giving him a 3,300-vote edge.
It was a disappointing result for Bill Hogseth, the chair of the county’s Democratic Party, who was motivated to get into politics in response to Trump’s 2016 upset. In a piece for Politico Magazine, Hogseth explains why he was unsuccessful in improving the Democrats’ numbers despite leading an energetic organizing effort by local party members. It boils down to rural voters’ perception, Hogseth argues, that the national Democratic Party doesn’t take their struggles seriously enough to warrant their support.
It didn’t have to be this way. When the Democrats picked up 40 seats and regained control of the House in the 2018 midterms, the main story was how suburban districts changed hands. Still, there were signs of encouragement in that 174 of 199 districts retained by the Republican Party moved to the left. An examination by the Brookings Institute found that counties with Republican attributes–as measured by race, age, and education–showed the most significant midterm percentage shift to the Democrats, even though few of those counties’ seats flipped. In Wisconsin’s 3rd congressional district, Ron Kind was reelected by a comfortable 61,000-vote in 2018. In 2020, with Trump back on the ballot, Kind’s margin narrowed to 10,000, showing the fragility of those midterm gains.
In other words, back in 2018, the GOP saw the most slippage in rural areas. While this rural surge helped the Democrats gain control of six state legislative chambers, it had almost no immediate effect in Congress and little staying power for 2020.
In 2020. Biden made more progress with white men on a national level than any other group. That’s what Brookings found in the Edison Research exit polls anyway, with college-educated white men moving 11 points in Biden’s direction and non-college-educated white men shifting by a smaller but still substantial margin of six points.
In Dunn County, however, Hogseth saw “more flags in support of the president flying from more flagpoles and pickup trucks.” His explanation and his proposed solutions closely track what I wrote in my 2017 magazine piece: How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values. Rural voters are keenly aware of how monopolies are squeezing the life out of their local economies, and disappointed in the Democrats’ response. To win more rural support, the left has to take antitrust enforcement much more seriously.
Here is how Hogseth describes the problem.
Rural voters appreciated Obama’s repeated campaign promises to challenge the rise of agribusiness monopolies. But as president, he allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system. His Department of Agriculture balked when it came time to enforce anti-monopoly rules such as those in the Packers and Stockyard Act, and failed to enforce Country of Origin Labeling, which would have allowed independent farmers and ranchers to better compete within the consolidated meat industry. The Obama Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission presided over a series of corporate mergers in the food and agriculture sectors, including the Kraft-Heinz and JBS-Cargill mergers. Taken together, these moves signaled that his administration did not have the backs of family farmers.
It’s not just agricultural consolidation that concerns rural voters. As Hogseth notes, “the small-town economy increasingly is dominated by large corporations” that provide low-wage retail jobs. The solution is to do something about this–and communicate it, so voters know that the Democrats, not the Republicans, are fighting the big interests.
For Democrats to start telling a story that resonates, they need to show a willingness to fight for rural people, and not just by proposing a “rural plan” or showing up on a farm for a photo op…A big step forward for Democrats would be to champion antitrust enforcement and challenge the anticompetitive practices of the gigantic agribusiness firms that squeeze our communities. In his rural plan, Biden pledged to “strengthen antitrust enforcement,” but the term doesn’t appear until the 35th bullet point. For rural voters, antitrust enforcement is a top priority
Whenever I write about these issues, I’m told by some liberals that these voters are unreachable or even “deplorable.” I’m lectured that they don’t care about something as dull as antitrust policy. Yet, my experience is just the opposite. In 2017, when I interviewed Tom Perriello during his unsuccessful primary campaign for Virginia governor, he emphasized that anti-monopoly policy resonates in rural areas:
What will often happen to me on a given day is that I will start the day out in a red county, where people are talking to me about consolidation and automation, and then end the day inside the Beltway talking to people who say, “Tom, you sound like a think tank, that kind of thing will never go down with those people out there.”
As he put it, “I actually think in many ways the challenge is people inside the Beltway having too low of an opinion about the sophistication and knowledge of people outside the Beltway.”
Yet, Hogseth insists, “for rural voters, antitrust enforcement is a top priority.” Leaders in the national Democratic Party should accept this local testimony as more reliable than their remote impressions.
In both the 2018 midterms and the 2020 elections, we’ve seen evidence that non-college educated whites are not wedded to the Republicans and there are plenty of votes to be had in rural areas. The Democrats have practical and moral reasons to fight for them.
Rural voters turn to right-wing populism, which is dangerous, when they don’t see the left fighting for them. From Dunn County, Hogseth says Democratic neglect leaves “an opening for other stories to be told to fill the vacuum—stories that villainize and divide us along racial, geographic and partisan lines.”
The left should always fight for people who are struggling, no matter their race, religion or location. This will make life easier for Dunn County Democrats like Hogseth and Rep. Kind, and it will help the party win back more legislatures, and statewide races.
Here’s what you never deal with:
This is an international phenomenon. The only party in the world to stop it or even slow it down to take power were the Danish left who went hard right on immigration. Doing this lost them support to further left parties, but they won ~10% from the racist parties. They basically lost 8% of their supporters but won back 10% elsewhere. It was BARELY enough, but they won a government in coalition with other left parties. However, as a result of the coalition, they ended up dropping a lot of their newly found hard right immigration positions once in government.
Can that be replicated here? I don’t see how. And it wouldn’t benefit us because we form the coalition before and then go to the election rather than forming it after the election.
I’m not saying give up. If you govern well and in their interests maybe your brand improved and they start to be open to your party again. Barack Obama was absolutely terrible on monopoly, but we also live in Robert Bork’s world. Kinda hard with the current court system to enforce what laws we have on the books since they only care about prices being lower.
These are cross-pressured voters and all of their neighbors are marinating in right wing propaganda as local news dies. Good governance can reduce some of these margins to where there’s some ability to win the Senate. But rural places are dying for a reason.
How does Martin’s suggestion implicate immigration? I see anti-trust enforcement as something that stands on its own.
He does not. I am telling him that this is an international phenomenon replicated in almost every OCED country, something that I am sure he knows given he has followed Putin’s dirty influence in Europe. That no one has shown ability to arrest the slip of center left parties in rural, agrarian classes to the far right. And that the only center left party to do this has been the Danish socialists, and what they did in order to accomplish it.
In other words, I’m fine with trying it and governing like this because anti-trust is good policy on its own. But I am skeptical it will work. I don’t have any better ideas.
Let’s take this passage from the Politico piece:
You can argue for rural broadband on its own as good policy because these people shouldn’t be left behind or feel forced to immigrate to have access to it. And it’s a requirement to even try and build a modern economy. But there is no evidence this policy would benefit the left and a lot of evidence it would be detrimental and bad electorally.
This just feels like wishcasting. We need some wishes to come true.
I agree that the left wouldn’t benefit from that just as the left didn’t benefit much from Obamacare in this country. People default to an assumption that it’s costing them and helping some group of undeserving others unless the impact is visceral. Even then, if they feel it’s benefiting some other group more, they may resent it. We can wish people weren’t so tribal but most are.
Antitrust enforcement, to me, is in a different camp. It’s something rural folks can embrace. They see the impact of corporate monopoly. They see too how Democrats have fallen down on the job. Up through the late 70s, antitrust enforcement was a big deal to our party. It’s one of the reasons a lot of working families in rural place were lifelong Democrats. I believe it could be revived to positive effect. Plus it’s the right thing to do.
Rural broadband is not a benefit. There is nothing to resent and no one is getting a benefit that you won’t also be receiving. The studies are more about how messages become “nationalized” and that as voters have access to more information due to internet access they learn more about the parties and become distrustful since there is no alignment with their values. With respect to the US, they don’t differentiate local from national and ticket splitting drops as a result (just like any parliamentary government, although to our detriment since we don’t have a parliament). The correlation with Senate candidates and Presidential this year was 0.94.
However, you can backdoor some anti-trust policy here since everyone hates Comcast, Verizon, ATT, and the rest of the telecom behemoths. Make it municipal and government owned. It’s cheaper and faster.
I’m with you on anti-trust. I’m just extremely skeptical of arguments made on a nationally specific basis when it is visible on an international scale.
I find myself wondering why Elizabeth Warren chose to cannibalize Sanders votes rather than hit hard on this issue. She began talking about it some but without adequate ardor. Then she pretty much dropped it entirely. Huge missed opportunity. I think your analysis is brilliant. Of course, what the heck do I know. Thought Trumpism was going to get smacked down. Clearly, I do not understand my fellow countrymen (inclusive of women).
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I guess there’s not much harm in trying it. Or just do what Trump did. Send out checks with your name on it. Tax the corporations do pay for it. Alaska does it right?
Well, sitting here in WV, pretty rural state, I have seen guns and abortion as the dominant issues for quite a long time now. They always sell, and they always work. Obama did a lot for WV, but received no thanks and few votes for it.
I appreciate the continued hammering of the importance of anti-trust messaging to winning rural votes. It’s good policy and if it helps win back some rural votes, even better. but…the big hole in your reasoning seems to be, that these voters are voting for Republicans en masse. Are republicans doing anything about anti-trust? are they breaking up the big monopolies or taxing the hell out of the companies who ship jobs overseas? are they doing anything but provide welfare for farmers to prop up the losing trade war? of course not. they are the party of the wealthy and corporations. they despise unions, many of them don’t even support minimum wage laws let alone raising the minimum wage.
If these people are so cognizant of anti-trust issues why in the hell are they voting for Republicans? the only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that they are low information voters, comfortably ignorant, they seem to have no problem letting themselves be swayed by racist and xenophobic arguments. Unfortunately, I think many of these people are lost because they have decided time and again that they are ok with voting for a party that places no value on policy, truth, science or reality.
For whatever reason, (bigotry, guns, abortion, an illogical hatred of anything deemed “socialism” seem to be the main reasons) they have lost all trust and faith in the Democratic party and I don’t see it ever coming back. Our best hope is that with Trump’s failure many of them give up on voting at all and stay home and eventually there won’t be enough of them left to sway elections. I hope I’m wrong and I hope the Dems follow your advice. It’s worth a shot as long as we don’t sacrifice the other priorities and values we hold dear.
I’m replying to you Zopp, because your comment reflects the same assumptions I see in all the critics of Martin’s piece in this thread – i.e. “yeah but low info voters respond to the racism and (fill in the blank)”.
What everybody is missing is that 1) people don’t make any decisions based solely on rational analysis of self-interest (and particularly not low-info voters), and 2) they aren’t responding to what you think they are.
It’s simple, really. They are angry. Their life sucks. They don’t believe Dem promises to improve things, because Dems haven’t delivered for the past 40 years*. They need somebody – a villain – to blame. The GOP (and every nationalist movement in history) gives them that. What the strategy Martin proposes does is give them the REAL villain, and one they already hate, at that.
*In tangible enough ways that their life doesn’t suck anymore.
Another assumption is that the goal of this strategy would be to win over the majority of rural voters. The goal is to win over some of them, on the margins. Maybe 90% of them are going to continue to vote R because of culture issues. But if there are 10% of them who are amenable to being won over by actual policy, then that tips the balance in some key states.
I’m afraid this is just fantasy. An anti-choice rural voter will be won over by anti-trust enforcement? Red hot emotion vs. rational self-interest? When has that ever worked for rural voters? They’ll happily take our agri-business pushback to the bank and turn right around and starting screaming, ‘baby killers!’ and clutch their guns.
As for getting high speed internet into rural areas, this is a version of the unfortunately mistaken article of Democratic faith that education solves all problems. High speed internet in Asscrack, Arkansas just means conspiracy theories travel faster.
You’re speaking categorically. As Rae said above, a good strategy doesn’t win over everyone. In this case, we don’t even need a majority. Even a few percent can make a huge difference.
I agree with some of the other posters here. It’s a laudable goal to enforce these anti monopoly laws and it will help some to rebuild small businesses in rural areas. But this is completely divorced from whether this will actually help us substantially with rural voters. I might have thought this was doable before the election, but seeing how both OH and IA have remained steadfastly on the trump train, I have serious doubts. I listened to Ann Selzer on the 538 podcast. In it she talked about one of the focus groups she ran for a client. The group was all Trump voters who were hesitant to support him this time around. When asked what they liked about Trump, they all said things like the border wall, the tarrifs, standing up to China, and restricting immigration. This is all they care about – hurting other people who don’t look like them. That’s it. It’s not hard to understand. They are basically irredeemable. They need to be educated to understand the cities. Enough of ‘we need to understand them’.
One good nugget is that the same people also didn’t say they’d support any other republican or democrat. Probably because none of the others are sufficiently demagogic for their tastes. If you want to win them you will need to go hard right on immigration. Which obviously is impossible for us. So the only play is to double down on the suburban strategy and write them off. It will be fine for Ds until the Rs run another demagogue.
Right. We have had fights on this board with now banned user “dataguy” who was constantly obsessed with this issue. I constantly fought with him and told him he was full of shit, that we can attract them with other ways, but with a lot of egg on my face, he was right: they wanted to restrict immigration and that’s all they cared about. Of course, you can’t ignore religiosity. White evangelicals are really the driver here, and there’s lots of overlap with the racism and misogyny.
In fact it was this realization that made me so focused on why this was happening internationally. It’s the combination of financial crisis, urbanization, and mass migration. The Syrian War and collapse of the state in Libya set it off in Europe. Add “the internet” and the spread of information and “nationalized” news and it’s a recipe for fascist reaction.
I remember dataguy well. He blamed “illegals” and h1b visas for his predicament. I clued in early around 07 that the Republican party didn’t care about illegal immigrants. They just wanted to stop immigration entirely to maintain white dominance. That was just a dog whistle. Ezra Klein did a box podcast with a Latino professor who had a good summary of the history on this.
It’s interesting to look back at George Bush’s approval rating for his second term. Everyone thought the collapse happened because of Katrina and the Iraq War, and then the financial crisis of 2008. But if you look back his support among Republicans was still pretty much in the mid 70’s to 80’s throughout 2006. It didn’t take a hit among them until after he tried passing immigration reform.
The following article captures something thats been at the back of my mind, suggesting a way forward in the long term. I’m going to quote part of it below, but I think its worth reading in full.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/race-american-history.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
The authors comment on how, broadly speaking, from roughly the 1930’s onward to the 1970’s, the country made strides toward racial equality and social justice, and then gradually turned away from the Johnson-era commitment to a more just and equitable society as we slid into Reaganism and a return to the emphasis on individual gain over community. The authors call this period the I-me-I century, and go on to make a recommendation:
“The lessons of America’s I-we-I century are thus twofold. First, we Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we’re in now by rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its inception. America has turned the tide from “I” to “we” once before and we can do it again. And, to a greater extent than heretofore recognized, we made more rapid progress toward racial parity during the communitarian epoch than during the period of increasing individualism that followed.
But “we” can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms. The “we” we were constructing in the first two-thirds of the last century was highly racialized, and thus contained the seeds of its own undoing. Any attempt we may make today to spark a new upswing must aim for a higher summit by being fully inclusive, fully egalitarian and genuinely accommodating of difference. Anything less will fall victim once again to its own internal inconsistencies.
As Theodore Roosevelt put it, “the fundamental rule in our national life — the rule which underlies all others — is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.”
To really start to repair the current splits between black, brown, and white, rural and urban, rich and poor, we need leadership in the democratic party and in the country as a whole that can bring us back to this ideal of a shared commitment to a more just and equitable country. This will be a long term project. But maybe we can then finally banish the ghost of Reaganism.
Hi — I made the following comment but it seems to have gotten hung up in cyberspace somewhere, so I’m reposting.
The following article captures something thats been at the back of my mind, suggesting a way forward in the long term. I’m going to quote part of it below, but I think its worth reading in full.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/race-american-history.html
The authors comment on how, broadly speaking, from roughly the 1930’s onward to the 1970’s, the country made strides toward racial equality and social justice, and then gradually turned away from the Johnson-era commitment to a more just and equitable society as we slid into Reaganism and a return to the emphasis on individual gain over community. The authors call this period the I-me-I century, and go on to make a recommendation:
“The lessons of America’s I-we-I century are thus twofold. First, we Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we’re in now by rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its inception. America has turned the tide from “I” to “we” once before and we can do it again. And, to a greater extent than heretofore recognized, we made more rapid progress toward racial parity during the communitarian epoch than during the period of increasing individualism that followed.
But “we” can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms. The “we” we were constructing in the first two-thirds of the last century was highly racialized, and thus contained the seeds of its own undoing. Any attempt we may make today to spark a new upswing must aim for a higher summit by being fully inclusive, fully egalitarian and genuinely accommodating of difference. Anything less will fall victim once again to its own internal inconsistencies.
As Theodore Roosevelt put it, “the fundamental rule in our national life — the rule which underlies all others — is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.”
To really start to repair the current splits between black, brown, and white, rural and urban, rich and poor, we need leadership in the democratic party and in the country as a whole that can bring us back to this ideal of a shared commitment to a more just and equitable country. This will be a long term project. But maybe we can then finally banish the ghost of Reaganism.
Alright, so how do we work around the edges to pick up some rural voters?
Tell them that we’re going to massively invest in rural infrastructure without changing the makeup/lifestyle of rural areas?
Because just saying we’re going to invest money and give y’all modern stuff seems like a coded message that us libtards are going to move to your town, “gentrify” it, and then make you move because you won’t like our inclusive politics and the increased cost of living.
So, crafting a message that resonates without it being hand-waved away doesn’t seem all that simple or straightforward.
1. Stay clear of the culture wars
It turns people off and makes real progressive change harder.
2. Hand out checks. Rural places aren’t getting better in a hurry. Might as well keep the people happy with the greenback.
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I heard the Warnock/Leffler debate. The number of times that robot said “social leftist” – Republicans don’t do nuances. Guns, God, Abortion – not necessarily in that order.
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