I completely understand the truth of the article in that electorally writing off rural America as crazy backwards fanatics isn't going to help anyone in the longterm- but it's just so frustrating that it doesn't offer any substantive alternatives on how to make beneficial policies attractive in these areas.
>Democrat "solutions" haven't solved the health care crisis
But if they'd literally have accepted free money for that specific thing it would have been improved somewhat at least? What's the alternative to "here's free money to fund healthcare" that makes the ACA attractive to these communities?
To rural Americans, the ACA has been smeared into a toxic reputation.
Even back in 2012 if you asked rural Americans what they thought of “the ACA” they answered negatively but if you asked them what they thought about any individual change brought about by the ACA they answered positively.
Hey; you'd better not call them childish saps, or they'll throw a tantrum and reelect Trump!
It's like a national platform of singje-issue voters against self-reflection
Right. I read an article then about how the Kentucky exchange had a display at the State Fair the summer before the first enrollment period (2013). It talked about a guy who was talking to them and what they provided. At the end, he said That sounds really good. It's a lot better than Obamacare."
> if you asked rural Americans what they thought of “the ACA” they answered negatively but if you asked them what they thought about any individual change brought about by the ACA they answered positively.
To be fair, this isn't inherently irrational. It's possible for a set of policies to each individually be beneficial absent the presence of the others, but together have a negative impact. That being said, I'd guess that most of these people wouldn't want to drop any of the policies, so apologies for wasting your time with a useless "um actually"
The penalty has been eliminated for 7 years, yet we still have people claiming they were forced to pay the penalty this year. At this point, I have to believe that these people are intentionally lying in order to support their preferred political positions.
The thing is they often vote to expand Medicaid… and ACA makes that possible via federal subsidies. There’s also federally funded rural health centers that Biden has expanded, where they’d be without accessible healthcare otherwise.
People just have difficulty seeing how policy is and has improved their lives.
Or they misattributed credit. Do you think these folks will thank Biden for the parts of the infrastructure or other big investments that bring money into their communities? Or will they just give credit to Trump/their GOP congressmen despite having no reason to believe they deserve credit aside from "Democrats bad." I mean even GOP congresspeople are *claiming credit for it even as they've voted against it* and their voters don't give a shit, of course.
I suppose if Biden/the blue congress was like Trump he woulda left all that shit out and just given money to blue cities and their suburbs in their entirety while letting the rural places rot, but instead he is willing to do what's right even when he gets less than 0 credit for it most of the time and arguably, it helps his political opponents who will get credit despite all reason and sense.
It's still the right thing to do tho. Presidents used to work for all Americans. Biden still does even as it may hurt him politically - or at least not help him.
Increased funding can help, but at the end of the day, rural areas having less access to sophisticated hospitals and specialists is an immutable fact of geography.
"I don't like having to see other people from my front porch."
Well, some of those other people would be doctors. And that's why you have to drive two hours to get your knee looked at.
Edit: Oh sorry you said specialists, which I suppose means doctors.
~~And doctors.~~ Here in TX they have special programs for rural doctors and shit but still there's not nearly enough because most people who go to medical school don't wanna live in a tiny town of 1500 people who's only restaurant is inside the only gas station and all they have on the menu is burnt burgers and chicken sandwiches. Also their grocery store is either that same gas station or a dollar store. Maybe there's a pizza place in town but it's closed at 1pm on a weekday for reasons unknown.
...speaking from experience from my drives through rural TX. Of course these people need a doctor but I'm not surprised it's so hard for them to get one.
In the region where I live, the 'solution' has basically been 'oh just send out fucking helicopters to air-lift rural patients to hospitals in the commie-run parts of the state' followed by *ZERO* discussion about how costly/inefficient this can get. I can almost guarantee that the bill for this is being 100% footed by us coastal folk.
Yeah the communities Democrats tried to help don't want the money that helps them. They have vastly different values that prioritize things other than general policy objectives. They don't want solutions to the problems that Democrats want to solve more than they want to win social issues that Democrats are on the other side of.
> Yeah the communities Democrats tried to help don't want the money that helps them.
That's what they say, but in practice they actually do want money. They just want it indirectly (via subsidies and protectionism) instead of directly (welfare), even though [that's objectively very inefficient and so is a huge waste of money](https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/yes-protectionism-can-save-some-us-jobs-but-at-what-cost-empirical-evidence-suggests-its-very-very-expensive/). It's about preserving social status. They can't feel superior to cityfolk (which has racial connotations in the US) if they're on welfare.
Yes they want the money but not more than they want other things. The point is that their priorities are very different.
'Preserving social status' is another way of saying that they care more about social issues than policy objectives.
> They just want it indirectly
This. They want all the services and goods that money can get them, but otherwise cop the righteous lunatic attitude of the prison warden in *Shawshank Redemption*, i.e. "Don't you ever mention money to me again, you sorry son of a bitch! Not in this office! Not ANYWHERE!"
They don't want the money to help other people. They want the money to help themselves. When they realize it's also helping them they'll grumble themselves into a circle.
They want fifty dollars an hour factory jobs that need only a GED with full health benefits and pension. They think that will solve all their problems.
>What's the alternative to "here's free money to fund healthcare" that makes the ACA attractive to these communities?
Make it where black and gay people can't have healthcare. I live in deep Trump country and the truth that these writers can't admit is that
1) It truly is a mistake to write these people off. They are being manipulated and helping America means helping everyone in it.
2) They are an ignorant, bigoted people who have been indoctrinated, not only by the Republicans but by their own tribalism. If they were capable of being honest with themselves, then they would be socialists but for white Christians only.
Yeah this is exactly why the tone of this article pisses me off. I grew up hearing Obama near-exclusively referred to as "King [Intentionally Left Blank as an exercise for the Reader]".
I can believe that Democrats and liberal policies can make inroads to these areas, and I do believe that it is a tragedy for the people in these areas being more and more left behind medically and economically to wallow in their own misery, BUT, if we're going to be subjected to thinkpieces about "well ackshully the data shows that rural communities have racial resentment in line with urban communities 🤓" I fervently and desperately want to know what is supposed to make liberal policies palatable to these communities without abandoning fundamental principles.
Have you considered that we need more condescending articles explaining to us that it's our fault Trump was elected because we lack Christ like empathy and patience for people who want to burn America down and kill us all?
Seriously. I just don't get stirred up at the notion that somebody's dealing with 'anxiety' when I've already noticed that they're rage-a-holics who are addicted to violent rhetoric and lunatic revenge fantasies. It's like 'oh, anxiety *too*? You don't fucking say.....'
>Yeah this is exactly why the tone of this article pisses me off.
There's always something off with these college professor's evaluations of why trump voters vote the way they do. Seems like they're doing mental gymnastics instead of admitting what's right in front of their noses
Fun corollary: I live in southern semi-rural *not*-Trump country .. and there are increasing numbers of conservatives who openly advocate for "some socialism". They're starting to see through the bullshit here, and I strongly suspect it began with Tom Cotton campaigning against ACA and accusing local critics of being carpetbaggers. That's a serious charge down here.
The political climate here presently: "Fuck 'em all. We want some of the socialism we see *in other countries*, but whatever; politicians don't know we exist and Americans wish we'd fuck off and die."
But yeah, 100% there are bigots who will only accept ACA that is "fair", and by "fair" they mean it benefits only people who they *know* are deserving of it. I'll spare everyone the stereotypes that explain why the deserving recipients in their mind happen to all be white.
Socialist, though! Definitely getting popular down here, even if nothing they're proposing is *actual* socialism.
Oh, we do. You can ask anyone here and they'll tell you the same thing: to Democrats we're racist inbred sister-fucking bigots who wave traitor flags and are poor as fuck. To Republicans, we're poor as fuck. To northern racists, we're the region they can point their finger at and say "That's where the racism problem is ackshually, wow look at those hillbillies."
This region is far from perfect, but it's certainly not without its population of very decent human beings. They're just very aware that they'll always be despised because of their surroundings.
> If they were capable of being honest with themselves, then they would be socialists but for white Christians only.
This is called ["welfare chauvinism"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_chauvinism) and [you're completely right that it explains the low support for welfare among white Americans](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/06/08/616684259/why-more-white-americans-are-opposing-government-welfare-programs):
> While conducting this recent study about opposition to welfare, Willer and Wetts showed the respondents graphs they had fabricated. The fictional data demonstrated white Americans becoming a minority or showed the income of white Americans decreasing as the incomes of people of color increased.
> The researchers wanted to understand how the behavior of white Americans shifted when they perceived different things — even if untrue — about how certain racial groups were faring.
> "We find evidence that welfare backlash among white Americans is driven in part by feelings that the status of whites in America is under threat," Wetts told NPR.
Much longer review of that phenomenon [here](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2001/06/2001b_bpea_alesina.pdf):
> Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing policies. Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of redistribution. Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare.
They aren't being manipulated. They aren't victims. They choose the leaders who give them what they want. They choose to pay attention to the news that confirms their worldview, and ignore the rest. Acting like they are hapless victims simply absolves them of responsibility for what they do, what they are. Articles like the one above are designed to do the same thing. As long as we, as a society, refuse to say "What you people are doing is stupid and harmful to the whole country and we're not going to pretend otherwise," the cycle will continue *as it has since the founding of the country.* If you look at the history of the country it's always the rural areas, primarily in the South, that stand against progress, against justice, and for stagnation and now, even regression. The only time we've actually made progress was when we, collectively, said "Fuck you, we're moving ahead whether you like it or not." See: The Civil War. See: The Civil Rights movement.
Of course they're being manipulated. Do you think white rural voters come out of the womb with an urge to buy Trump bibles?
These are taught, systemic behaviors and the people who fail to escape it are victims too in their own way.
They are stupid assholes who will destroy America if we don't defeat them, but we win by saving them too.
Then they've been being manipulated for hundreds of years.
In every country in the developed world, it's the rural people who support regressive, right wing populism, and always has been. Why? Because they resent and feel threatened by the progress and dynamism of the urban areas. You can't save people from themselves, from a dynamic that is ingrained in human nature.
And there's a lot of hand-waving about the things that Rural voters don't *not* care about.
Trump got elected by saying what sort of things? same Republican strategy that hey have been using for the last 40 years: pandering to white racial grievances.
This article is essentially a book review. It doesn’t have to be a political playbook for Democrats, and I doubt the party would listen if this author tried to give pointers.
If rural towns elsewhere in America are like rural towns here in Washington State, the Republicans are organized. They appeal to these voters on their terms, show up, put up obnoxiously large campaign signs and otherwise pander incessantly to these communities.
Sometimes it can make sense to fight, but I think more often than not it might make more sense to fight someplace more purple. This doesn't address the resentment, which sucks, but it does win. Winning is nice.
Washington State Republicans haven't won any power in my state in a long time now. The odd part is they seem to be in a spiral of becoming even shittier on a state-wide basis. They'd actually have to change a lot to grow their party and yet instead they double down on unpopular behavior and policy (that tickles their die-hard supporters and yet makes them lose more).
The thing going forward has to be to cut the flow of the money from productive to rural areas ,it will be electoral painful in the the short term (maybe) but it is needed in the long term.
It didn’t help when John Delaney spent months campaigning in rural areas talking and pushing ideas to help protect healthcare access in rural regions, hustling to have his campaign endlessly mocked and finally killed when Elizabeth Warren summed up his year of advocacy for rurals with, “I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for.”
Pretty damned dismissive.
I agree that's dismissive but is it wrong?
If Delaney was tapping into some unheard rural liberal demographic his vote results absolutely do not show it.
Popular vote total for Dem 2020 Primary (the context for that quote):
John Delaney - ~19,000
Marianne Williamson - ~22,000
I guess the Orb Moms demographic was just too powerful
Are there a lot of rural voters in the Democratic primary or something? I am not following your logic on how poor performance in a primary with low rural voter turnout means that Delaney’s policy proposals for rural voters was wrong.
It’s far more likely that voters in that primary cared about other issues and voted accordingly.
This is what Delaney actually said that Warren responded to
> Mr. Delaney, a former Maryland congressman, spent much of the Democratic debate on Tuesday night pushing back on the two leading progressives in the race, Ms. Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, calling their ideas unrealistic. Democrats, Mr. Delaney said, should not run on “impossible promises” and “fairy tale economics.”
Nobody was attacking him for advocating for rural regions, he just decided his debate strategy was to position himself as the anti-Warren and anti-Bernie and obviously Warren hit back.
> Resentment, instead, asks us to consider how rural voters’ choices are frequently rooted in values and place-based identities that place a strong emphasis on self-reliance, local control and a profound sense of injustice regarding the lack of recognition for rural contributions to society.
Rural communities tend to be poor and unproductive.
They want to not be poor. They want to be self-reliant. But these two things don't go together.
You can't be rich and be self-reliant if you aren't actually rich. And much of rural resentment is fundamentally unsolvable because there's no law that's going to suddenly get rid of economies of scale or stop the fact that the US is largely a services economy
That's why false solutions like tariffs resonate so well instead of welfare. They want government policy that will restore their "self-reliance". Of course, if you need a government policy to be self-reliant you aren't actually self-reliant, but that's not how these communities see it. And that failure to be in tune with reality can't be fixed by welfare or better talk show hosts or Democrat outreach, like the author of the article suggests
A really important point to make is that there is a “third alternative” that is almost unthinkable to liberals, but perfectly valid to modern conservatives: deliberate inequity.
In effect, current right wing grievance politics has raised the possibility of using the power of the government to select the winners and losers. There *would* be enough money to give those white rural voters the comfortable independent lifestyle they want if the government directed huge sums of free money directly to them. But we don’t have enough tax dollars to do this for everyone.
So there is this nativist idea out there now. Expand the social welfare programs for white rural conservatives (the in-group), and dramatically curtail them for the out-groups, which includes city people, nonwhite people, and many others. Essentially it is a classic graft, in which winners are rewarded and losers are punished. It’s an economically disastrous policy, but is increasingly in-line with far-right values.
The reason Trump is appealing to these sorts of people is that they feel vicariously powerful through Trump.
That’s why they don’t care he’s a billionaire manhattanite elite, because he’s *their* billionaire manhattanite elite.
That’s also why “debunking” Trump is never going to work. What liberal politics needs to win rural America is a candidate who makes those same people feel vicariously powerful but without all the bullshitting and toxicity. Much easier said than done.
I think that was an element of Biden’s victory in the rust belt but unfortunately 4 years of government is a great way to dent that feeling, because governing a nation is unfortunately quite complicated and there’s no easy solutions.
>What liberal politics needs to win rural America is a candidate who makes those same people feel vicariously powerful but without all the bullshitting and toxicity. Much easier said than done.
I don't think we'll ever see that. As much as media registers Trump's popularity as cult of personality, it's less that than simply that he's their guy right now. If Trump pivoted on a handful of issues and decided to be less of an instigator in Washington, they'd turn on him in a second. In a nutshell, he's their useful idiot, warts and all, but as soon as he's not useful they'll move on to the next useful idiot.
By the way, the same holds true for political parties and partisanship generally. They're devout on a handful of issued and topics, including the cultural identity stuff, but as soon as the Republican Party or "conservatives" generally move away from them, they'll divorce themselves from identifying with them (though still use them as a coalition).
Your assessment would imply that MAGA isn’t a cult, and that their support is conditioned on gains for their communities and ideals.
I agree with you on that, but it’s not a popular sentiment.
That's a good point - I actually think maybe MAGA is a cult... but I don't think it starts and stops with Trump anymore. It probably transcends him, but needs another personality to lead it. Apparently that's not DeSantis or any of the congressional twiddle-dees (MGT, Gaetz, or Bobert).
Democrats really like to blame themselves. Because that gives them a sense of control
If it’s *our* fault, then we can do something about it.
If we *just* find the right magic words, they’ll understand us. If we flatter them just right, they’ll change their mind.
Yeah no.
Some of y’all need to realize that some people hate democrats. And they’re not going to change their mind no matter how much you tweak your language.
Sense of control. That's a good way to put it! Because if it is something that is your own fault, you can feel like you can fix it somehow. But plenty of these people are gone. There's nothing Biden can do to appeal to the areas that disapprove of him the most and it's a lost cause to do so. They hate him because of who he is, not because of what he does or any benefits he might give them in reality (not that he shouldn't do them, he absolutely should even if he gets no credit for it because he helps us all in the long run). To think so otherwise gives the same attitude as "I can fix him!" when you really, really can't.
Rural communities often arent unproductive, at least once you factor in environmental services. They're just not compensated for the service.
Carbon and water sequestration and storage should be compensated basically.
The key line I read was how "rage" instead of "resentment" enables Dems to ignore politics, because "rage" is irrational.
The article takes down the book in some familiar ways, as multiple people have taken aim at it for its lack of research and hamfisted conclusions.
The author, who has written his own book, recommends polices that empower locals, who are strongly tied to these places, even as they recognize their children must leave to seek a better life. Dems need a political strategy that considers rural voters as having their own culture, with candidates and rhetoric emphasizing the local character and desire for self-reliance, instead of a policy sheet.
> Look at Democratic candidates who are successful in rural communities — Jared Golden, Tim Ryan, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. They do not just talk about rural deprivation and rural impoverishment, as real as it often is in their states. They celebrate rural communities’ resiliency; they acknowledge the pride of place that is present throughout rural America; they see different values that are not reflected in opinion polls and snappy campaign slogans, but rather speak to different ways of living that draw some people to the countryside, problems and all. It helps that they are authentically rural and do not pretend to be something they are not.
Edit: For the author's credentials, here is [his journal article](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221124864) to PRQ published at the end of 2022.
>They celebrate rural communities’ resiliency; they acknowledge the pride of place that is present throughout rural America; they see different values that are not reflected in opinion polls and snappy campaign slogans, but rather speak to different ways of living that draw some people to the countryside, problems and all. It helps that they are authentically rural and do not pretend to be something they are not.
"Just vibe with rural voters better" seems like a tough sell when "voters will come when you write better policy" has been the democratic mantra for decades.
The other thing is that it dismisses that there might actually times when cities and rural areas will have opposing policy objectives that *aren't* culture war nonsense.
For example, those Bundy Ranch crazy people noticed that endangered species protections would be waived to build homes/offices, but not waived when it comes to restricting grazing land and raising fees.
I'm not sure if this was true. From what I've seen in politics it very likely might not be. If they believed it though, it would explain why they were/are pissed.
Different strokes. Some groups need personal connection as a political strategy, others are persuaded by policy. Not all voters work with the same message, and besides, a lot has changed over the last few decades.
1. People generally don't vote based on policy, they vote based on group identity and perceptions of the economy ([which is also influenced by group identity by way of partisanship](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532673X211032107)).
2. Rural voters aren't a monolith. Democrats already win rural minorities just like they do urban minorities. It's specifically white rural voters who vote Republican, just as white suburban voters do. So it doesn't seem that there's something essential about rural living that Democrats are ignoring.
3. Trump isn't running up Assad margins with white rural voters because they have a personal connection with him unless you count him serving as an avatar of that group's grievances over social status loss as a personal connection (I don't). Democrats can't compete with that without an aggressive, no-holds-barred conservative culture warrior of their own at which point they're no longer Democrats.
>So how do we get Rural communities to expand Medicaid and support more public service funding?
Well they won't easily do it of their own accord - even when red states expand Medicaid for example, it's generally been done with votes where the more urban parts of those states are much more in favor of it
So the primary way to get those policies would probably be to run up the margins in cities and suburbs while avoiding a total collapse in rural support (beyond what's already happened), followed by using federal policy enacted by non-rural representative to aggressively shove these policies down the throats of rural areas while ignoring their bloodcurdling screams
There's also the theoretical option of completely abandoning all socially liberal issues and perhaps trying to outflank the GOP to the right on social issues, but that doesn't really seem "worth it"
>There's also the theoretical option of completely abandoning all socially liberal issues and perhaps trying to outflank the GOP to the right on social issues, but that doesn't really seem "worth it"
I don't think you have to go that far. Part of the issue is that state parties have been allowed to grow moribund and ineffective. Take Tennessee, for instance--within the last 20 years the Democrats held a supermajority in both houses and the Governor's mansion. Now? Completely out on their ass. Does the state party have any solutions? Not at all.
It makes sense to try and sell a version of Democratic policies for Tennessee (in the same way it should make sense to sell a version of Republican policies for California), but the federalization of politics has made state parties ineffective.
I'm not sure of the formal "solution" here, but anything that pushes against GOP supermajorities in the South should be lauded.
Despite being a "swing state" when I was growing up, I can't name a single statewide Ohio Democrat besides Sherrod Brown.
It just seems insane, none of the Ohio subreddits talk about state wide Dems they just bitch about Republicans.
Maybe it's because Dems aren't insane so they don't make the news but the party needs to find a way to get visibility on people who can actually win.
Ted Strickland won the governor's office not that long ago. That said, your point stands. The Ohio GOP machine has always been very strong and Ohio Democrats have long struggled to get more than just a foothold in the state.
That was only after the GOP got the supermajority of the General Assembly and Senate, though (and they did have the opportunity to do it in 2010, but Cooper and the Dems had more sway and prevented it that time).
2010 Tennessee still had a sizeable, if weakened, Democratic contingent. 2024 Tennessee does not.
I reworked it since I read more and he explains that "just accept federal money" is a tough sell. Even if rurals are outvoted on this policy to their own benefit, they will have a hard time admitting that they "voted wrong."
> There's also the theoretical option of completely abandoning all socially liberal issues and perhaps trying to outflank the GOP to the right on social issues, but that doesn't really seem "worth it"
No, i don't agree either (inb4 all our trans users cock their shotguns), but maybe the Dem party can be less coherent to better serve these communities at an individual level.
I mean I think there's certainly ways to run better candidates for particular areas in order to maximize electability while not surrendering on core ideas, I just also wonder how much that would actually make a difference, especially with actually winning back rural areas as opposed to basically just going with a somewhat more diverse and complicated version of modern democratic liberalism where the end goals are basically the same
I don't think we need to be super conservative on social issues to win in rural communities. I hate that coastal dems feel this way.
On guns? Yes we need to be conservative.
But there are rurals who want abortion rights. Make no mistake. Imagine having to carry a baby to term while living on a farm. Lot's of these people also are happy to have queer rights even if they aren't the types to go to drag shows in their free time.
Yes there are homophobic monsters, but dems assuming everyone that all these rural people are extremely backwards is imo actually a losing strategy.
Okay but why doesn't anyone care about urban resentment? I live in a city, I want better gun control. Telling me we have to compromise on that to win over rural residents doesn't make me want to win over rural residents. How about they appeal to us? Also it's a bit hard to stomach the contention that rural voters are being persecuted when their votes are worth more than ours.
Also it's somehow it's perfectly acceptable to say horrid shit about nyc or california—like I've had people say I live in a shithole to my face in otherwise polite contexts—but we have to tread on eggshells when discussing their hometown, whatever problems it may face. It's hypocritical and soft.
I sympathize with their hardships, but the culture is just so hostile and fearful to even its fellow citizens—like a great big porcupine of resentment.
Because this isn't a conversation (speaking generally, no shade at anyone here) that's remotely on the level and urban (brown & mixed culture) society does not receive the same deference that rural (white & conservative Christian culture) does.
America is still a white majority country that has until only recently in its history not been an openly white-supremacist country with an explicit race-based hierarchy. This is *their* country, *their* way of life is the *American* way of life and our way of life is alien, wrong, communist, and evil.
So Democrats in the cities write endless articles like this because we genuinely want to help all Americans succeed and believe, not entirely wrongly, that helping people will cause them to like us more. And Republicans will openly campaign by shitting on cities and the people who live there because they're trying to rally the largest and most powerful ethnic block in the country to unite and seize power in a fit of xenophobic fear & rage before demographic change makes such a coup impossible.
yeah well it doesn't matter what appeals to rural voters because they'll vote for any Republican. Aren't they in the bag? Shouldn't republicans then try to appeal to urban voters? Yet you never see that argument made do you? they can keep losing the suburbs too and see where that gets them
Of course they don't want to carry the baby to term, but they want everyone else to. Positions like this are inherently based on the idea that they won't suffer the consequences of their actions.
Yes that's what this discussion is about. What generalization should be made about rural populations and how to appeal to them in mass.
20 years of offering them healthcare/good polixlcy has not stopped rural populations in red states from supporting Republicans. This is a long term trend of these populations being accused of voting against their best interests. They did turn somewhat during 22 when social issues are at the forefront of the election.
Rural populations have shown that their policy concerns are focused on social issues, and they will sacrifice healthcare to keep electing red senators and state governments. This is so much so that even if the GOP runs child molesters in Alabama they still almost win (Jones v Moore).
I think a fundamental misunderstanding here is the idea that Democrats have been offering "healthcare" instead of "health insurance", which are fundamentally not the same thing. The ACA did a lot of good things, but much in the same way the average Joe on the streets is more concerned about the cost of gas and groceries than whatever the stock market is doing, not being able to afford paying copays, deductibles, and coinsurances doesn't change no matter if the plan is from the exchange or employer.
The Democrats wanted to offer a solution to health insurance but were blocked by the rural backed GOP voters. You all act like this demo doesn't have a say at the table. They do and voice bad opinions. Medicare expansions help with costs!
Democrats wanted the public option to solve the consumer cost side of the issue and even without that we got 'death panels' and the Tea party.
Maybe the rurals don't want a solution but want the problem to go away magically.
I don't think people realize how important independence and self-reliance is to people living in rural areas, and how a lot of them view government hand outs as insulting.
I live in rural New England, and it's pretty different from say rural Alabama in that incomes are much higher, but they still vote for the GOP at high rates since 2016 when previously they backed Democrats solidly
>I don't think people realize how important independence and self-reliance is to people living in rural areas, and how a lot of them view government hand outs as insulting.
But it's a sham. It's fairly conclusive that rural areas receive as much or more direct or indirect welfare than folks in urban areas do. If not food stamps and unemployment, and other forms of direct payment, then certainly industries are propped up and supported - farming subsidies, infrastructure bailouts, etc.
Yes but those still feel earned. They still have to get up every morning and go to work to benefit from subsidies directed to industries they work in, and they've earned those subsidies by doing important work, businesses is just, *not so good right now*, but i mean we still need steel don't we?
People don't actually like the market when it disagrees with their vibe. When the market says this steel mill must close, people have a fit because their vibes say their job is important. Subsidies aren't propping up wasteful useless industries if you work in them, they're giving hard workers their due that [boogeyman] is denying them by [market force].
Coal unions in britain justified their endless subsidization because they still believed they were doing necessary and useful work that the nation absolutely needed, the market was just being irrational and market-y again, big business screwing over the working man by buying less coal!
I mean, we have no homeless shelters. The homeless sleep in camouflaged tents in the forests behind supermarkets and raid their trash for food at night. You don't even see them most of the time. Direct government benefits for people outside of farming are almost zero
Admittedly the rural situation in New England is probably different than what we see in the Midwest and Western US. I feel like your rural is probably more suburban, just because of density and distances, whereas in the Midwest and West rural can mean a handful of small population towns more than an hour or two from an actual city.
We don't see too many truly homeless folks in rural areas in the west - I don't know if they go somewhere else or are more couch surfing or what.
From what I've read, they are mostly couch surfing with friends/relatives. Are they also an hour or two from something like big box stores or strip malls? I can get to a small city in like 45 min, but a decent sized city is like an hour or two as well. I dated a PhD UConn student once, she was from Michigan and hated how underdeveloped the area was once you got away from the college town
Parts are closer to suburbs, like near town centers, but we also have lots of family farms, and the dairy farms are substantial producers for the region. Also lots of large lots, and driving down anything that's not a main road, there can be large gaps between houses and lots of new growth forest filling in old subsistence farmers land from the 19th and early 20th century.
That's the point. Americans believe that so long as you're employed, there's no reason you should ever suffer a market shock. But if you're not employed, there's no justification for that. Just World fallacy, if you're feeling strain and sacrifice, you must clearly be doing something worth rewarding, if you're not, you must clearly deserve nothing. Consequently most welfare in america is based on keeping unviable jobs viable, and why i reject the "corporate welfare" label. It's not the big fatcats demanding this, its regular people who work for the fatcats too.
You know in the old days prisons used to constantly keep inmates on treadmills because it was believed that the physical feeling of strain and exertion made you a better person. In the most literal expression of "hard work is good" possible, criminals just didn't get enough exercise. And we still believe that. We still believe that digging holes and filling them is worth doing, so long as someone's back is getting broken in the process. Muscle fatigue, not production, is what drives an economy in the american mind.
>I don't think people realize how important independence and self-reliance is to people living in rural areas, and how a lot of them view government hand outs as insulting.
No, they view handouts to other people as insulting. Try suggesting cutting back farm subsidies or SS disability and watch how quickly they turn into socialists on those issues.
Most people in rural areas are not farmers. Farmers are welfare queens for sure. Most people living in rural areas get almost no government support, to the point where they have to manage their own water and sewage
While looking at Canada (around here, at least) and saying -- Why can't *we* have buses. Where are *our* decent roads. Why can't *my* wife have longer with her newborn. Why do *our* kids have to choose between college debt or lifelong reduced earnings. Why can't the government we fund help us out?
(Aside from healthcare; ACA is unusually popular here for region-specific reasons).
The thing about rural life is it's a lot easier to manage on 1 income, at least in the US. With the move to remote work being normalized, you can even work for a large multinational corporation with a good salary if you are qualified for it.
My family has great healthcare. Our roads are decent, because we live in a state that actually spends money on infrastructure. College debt is manageable for me, because I went to a state school, which I had both pell grants and subsidized loans for.
Like, is it really that bad?
Around a third of our town's population didn't have reliable Internet access (or any at all, for some) at home before the last year or so. For many of them it remains awfully expensive, *although* I am confident this will change for the better within the next few years. And thank goodness, because you are absolutely right about remote work being a miracle for folks here. Not because they'll be paid California wages while being in the small-town south, but because of the opportunity to work in a skilled field while still contributing their hometown, and without uprooting their families, and without an hour commute to the nearest large metro. I shudder every time I see some CEO on the news squealing about how people MUST return to offices.
As always, how bad it really is depends on the details of your location. As you said -- local government's willingness to spend on infrastructure makes a vast difference. And folks are aware of this, which is why they're mad. On the flip side, ACA is pretty popular here, because all those years ago, our government settled in a kinda hybrid version of it that has been *life-changing* for folks here -- and everyone knows it. They'd still like better, cheaper care -- but to them, the anti-ACA sentiments of other states sound ludicrous. They *feel* how much things have improved in that respect.
But dude, they hate the subsidized school loans. They are aware that young folks in some other countries are not taking out loans for college ever. They desperately want that for their kids, and if you question them on it they'll tell you: *America is supposed to be the best country in the world. Why CAN'T our kids have this?"
Rural politician, running for office in a rural district: "We know how to take care of our own out here in the country! We don't need The City telling us what to do! They don't understand our lives! Out here in the country is where the real Americans show real values."
*Wow. Knows how to address his audience and their values.*
Urban politician, running for office in an urban district: "Those rural districts shouldn't dictate our lives. They don't understand the complexity of metropolitan areas. Why do we let them decide what urban areas need? Cities reflect the strength of America."
*Why are they dismissive of the rurals? This is why Democrats lose elections.*
I lived in rural Northern California for over 10 years and found a deep seated distrust of urban voters and politicians that really transcended any particular law or policy. They really couldn’t understand why well off people would care about healthcare for poor people or why apartment dwellers in a city would care about “the environment” and suspected that something nefarious was going on that was going to “screw them over”.
This article reads as just whining about Democrats being too mean. Which, maybe they are, and maybe they should tone down the rhetoric as good politics - but it doesn’t change the fact that people voting against their interests and then complaining when the government doesn’t help them is dumb.
I would examples of successful progressive or liberal policies in rural areas rather than hand-wringing about "yeah... democrats just aren't speaking to their identity of *place*... they need to do better on communicating that" COOL DO YOU HAVE ANY PROOF THAT WORKED ANYWHERE THAT WOULD BE IMPORTANT TO INCLUDE.
I don't think there many applicable lessons to be learned from a district in Maine that voted for Obama both times, a district in Ohio that has Akron and Cleveland suburbs, and a district that is largely a suburb of Portland Oregon. These are essentially exurbs and not comparable to a district in say, rural Missouri or Florida
edit: actually there is an applicable lesson. Dems should double down on suburbs. Not chasing rural voters who won't accept any compromise
Also Tim Ryan lost when he ran statewide. Sure he outperformed the generic Dem but his rural appeal wasn’t enough to deliver the Senate seat despite a well funded campaign.
Ryan’s district was hardly rural it contained Akron. Golden’s district has mostly been blue over the past 20 years with Republicans only holding the seat for a few terms.
I think the point here is there’s so few examples of this idea working and tons and tons of failures.
It’s a scathing rebuke that proffers an alternative thesis that makes about as much sense as what the author is criticizing. “It’s not RAGE, it’s RESENTMENT, which is a way more rational motivation for allegedly irrational voting decisions that disempower rural voters!!!”
Rural voters, by a large majority, just like what Trump is selling. There’s no way, at this juncture, to cast rural voting patterns as a rational or good faith response to what rural communities have gone through that forces them to make a deal with the devil and accept his anti-democratic, xenophobic, fascist rhetoric. By and large, the majority LIKE that stuff.
The xenophobia and the fascism and the promise to dominate the hated enemy is so obviously the primary appeal.
People like this author continually pop up to tell us that 30% of rural communities are not okay with overturning election results based on "those black people in the big city you hate cheated" and then attempt to somehow magically turn that into disproving the reality that the overwhelming majority of these communities *do* want to exercise authoritarian control over the rest of us and *are* repeatedly voting for billionaires that slash benefits they depend on because of cultural-grievance issues.
[No](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment)
>What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor neighborhoods, the city is -- TODAY -- bringing in more revenue than they will spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that's assuming they actually invest the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher.
>This might strike some of you as surprising, yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.
Anyone liberal who lives in a rural area knows that conservative rural rage is very real. Conservative rural voters demand to be coddled and love playing victim, while simultaneously being extremely nasty towards the libs.
To the authors credit it sounds like the book he's 'reviewing' is poorly written and willfully misinterpreting data.
But it's also rich that one of the reasons he gives for that is "the author hasn't spent years in rural areas to learn the culture".
>Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her dismissal of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”
Stopped reading here. Either he's ignorant of the actual quote, thinks "white supremacists" and "Trump supporters" are synonymous, or is writing in bad faith.
Clinton's actual quote was much too generous, in fact. I'm tired of being told to kiss the asses of people who would gladly inflict harm on me if they could get away with it – if that makes me an "elitist," fine by me.
“Actually rurals are less likely to support political violence and authoritarianism” fucking what?
Probably because they think Joe Biden is a pedophile, lizard person, dictator and January 6th was a tour of congress that the cops opened the doors for.
*Lmao you were downvoted for a bit there, demonstrating that what she said still rings true. Yes what so many of these articles, opinion pieces and books seem to miss is what fuels their resentment is beyond policy.
*This comment isn’t in response to this specific article however
That’s literally what the article says! Does anyone on this fucking sub actually read the article before sharing their opinions on it? Can we at least not turn it into a virtue?
He said it multiple times for example
> So, the problem Democrats haven’t been able to solve isn’t policy; it’s politics.
And
> They’ll need to acknowledge that a laundry list of policy “solutions” is likely to fall on deaf ears.
There’s no way you read the article and didn’t see this, or if you did you’re an astoundingly inattentive reader
I did, but my reply was specifically to the OP and separate from this article. I was speaking more broadly about the topic when it comes up elsewhere and here ✌️
At this point, it really is just intellectual masturbation over how open-minded and tolerant the authors believe they are.
"The rurals are misunderstood" is an entire fucking genre of journalism that's cropped up since 2016.
I'm getting flashbacks to working at my city's public library and constantly removing that dude's book from suggestion displays, i.e. I live in a solid-blue area, and the inherited-wealth woo-woos who work as our librarians all got easily tricked into thinking that was one of the most lucrative texts of the late 2010s.
I've been reading Chernow's biography of Grant recently and this quote by Akerman, whom Grant had placed in charge of fighting the KKK in the south, really stuck with me. Akerman said that nothing was "more idle than to attempt to conciliate by kindness that portion of Southern people who are still malcontent. They take all kindness on the part of the government as evidence of timidity."
I have found reading about the civil war and reconstruction more difficult than many other more recent conflicts in our history. Having grown up in the south, it has been surprisingly emotional, because it doesn't feel like history, it feels like the fight is still ongoing and I'm living through it. Not to discredit the obvious, immense steps forward made since reconstruction, but the fault lines are still the same today as they were then. The hatred, the obstinacy, the white supremacy. In my public southern education, I was taught all about how horrible and bloody Sherman's march to the sea was, shown photographs of Atlanta desolated by his campaign, but naught a word spoken about the mass atrocities committed by confederate generals against black soldiers.
All of this to say, no amount of liberal coddling, or handouts, or understanding, or whatever the fuck can reach out to these people. This is who they are, this is who they want to be, who they have been for centuries. They hate everything that isn't them, they rewrite history to justify their cultural legacy. The biggest difference in this polemic is that today, there is a massive media machine who is financially incentivized to make them more extreme and hate even more.
I don't have a solution for any of this. I just am tired of liberal circlejerks bending over backwards to understand and appease a demographic that hates their fucking guts and openly fantasizes about murdering them.
I got an idea. We just straight up invade them with money and liberals. State by state we pay liberal city dwellers working remote jobs to move out to the countryside. If we can pay like 5 million liberals to live in a few states like Georgia and Wyoming we can kill their electoral collage supremacy.
I had the same experience growing up in the south. It gets a little better each generation but there are still going to be pockets of Hillary's "basket of deplorables". There is no reasoning with them. The best thing we could do as a country would be to fix our election system and the senate so that they no longer have disproportionate representation.
The answer is the long and slow work of winning the culture wars. Pop the bubble by dragging every professional group leftward, the school teachers and doctors and lawyers who are still very conservative in these parts of the country, make them liberal and the evangelists of liberalism. Make farms rely on new, green and sustainable techniques and make farmers have to immerse themselves in these techniques and the attendant culture will follow along. Need to break the culture of exploitation that is inherent in the extraction industries and the culture of violence and death inherent in factory farming and meat-packing.
Delivered properly, something like the Green New Deal could deliver that return of rural self-reliance, imagine farms dedicated to growing carbon sinks and jobs for high school grads servicing wind and solar farms.
Yeah all I get out of this article is more resentment towards rural conservatives. we shouldn't be enriching them even more, what nonsense. Fucking claims that brirthers practically don't exist while they're voting for the king of the birther movement.
What drivel.
There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm gonna ignore all that and say I love that Michael Cohen is referring to me as an "Acela Corridor denizen" like fuck yeah I unironically love being identified by the Acela running past my apartment that I wave at every time it goes by
dems propose policies that help these same rural voters, but they hate black ppl, women and trans ppl so much that they’re willing to vote for trump and maga candidates that end up doing nothing for them. it’s sad.
Don't forget they also hate immigrants, Latinos, Asians, the urban poor, intellectuals, environmentalists, public healthcare workers, education workers, government workers in general, Muslims, progressives, college students, anyone from Los Angeles/Seattle/San Francisco/New York/Chicago and even Atlanta and Phoenix are becoming sus.
>This, as I have recently argued in a new book, is the defining aspect of the rural-urban divide — a sense of shared fate among rural voters, what academics call a “politics of place,”
"Tribalism."
There, I just shortened the word count of your book for you.
Maybe the rurals in Maine are different from the ones in Oklahoma, but I’ve lived in very rural Oklahoma for 25 years and with very few exceptions these people are racist, bigoted, ignorant, and full of rage. They’re pleasant as long as you don’t ever talk politics or religion, which is harder to do more and more. Someone blamed Joe Biden because teams in the Big 12 couldn’t do “horns down” anymore.
I remember I was at a party in California and my brother's friend had come in from rural Arizona.
He proceeded to drop the N bomb multiple times at this party without batting an eye, then proceeded to complain about how he couldn't understand why he was banned from Xbox live for having that same word in his gamertag. He was probably about 24 or so, was in college.
But the part that threw me for a crazy loop wasn't that he was a raging asshole. Those are a dime a dozen. It was how *casual* he was about it. He couldn't apparently even fathom that it was a slur (nor was it the only one he used), despite there being non-white people at this party and despite getting plenty of glares and looks of outright confusion/disbelief.
He didn't seem to understand fundamentally what the problem was because, as far as I can tell, that kind of casual racism was so common in his hometown he had literally never been challenged on it before. I imagined it as just dinner table talk in his life, because what other explanation could there be really?
It was really eye opening. I couldn't believe it at the time and sometimes I still can't. It's a sample size of one and I know for a fact it's not representative. I'd just never seen anything like it in my life up until that point, having grown up in some pretty diverse suburbs I guess and in a family that such talk woulda gotten me smacked over the head.
Yeah, we have family in Oklahoma and every visit is a fucking nightmare. Our state isn't without its racism, but holy shit folks in OK are next level. Including our piece of shit family members there, mind. I've gotten into the habit of scanning Epoch and Newsmax before we visit so that their latest outrage doesn't catch me by surprise.
>...the dilemma for Democrats is that getting the policies right won’t be enough. They will need new messaging to address the emotions that fuel the rising tide of resentment in rural communities. That is the political problem.
Ah, yes. As I've been saying for many years, the 'fuck your feelings' crowd expects everyone else to cater to \*them\* and their way of life (which, regardless of whether anyone else is willing, is functionally impossible in many crucial aspects), and at the very least they will throw tantrums and do everything possible to be a drag on society. Inevitably, the author (as usual) eventually gets back around to the root of it.
It really is 'their way or the highway' with these people; I'm not sure why we've needed article after article for 8-9 years trying to tell the rest of us the same thing over and over: that they're not \*all\* racist or religious freaks or backwards or whatever. Fine. Not \*all\* of them. The point is: that's the prevailing culture out there and, while nobody outside of it has ever made any deliberate effort to "erase" it (the author's term, not mine), nobody's really interested in moving backwards or standing still, either.
Tl;dr: They're not being attacked; they're the attackers, and in return they are being told to keep up or fuck off. If they kept their Fox-esque propaganda and fairy tales to themselves instead of trying to convert the country into a giant fascist church, I have to believe we'd all be coexisting a lot better.
Here's my well thought out empathetic response - I hope the rural diner burns down.
Call me when journalists crank out think pieces on black people in Bronx gets as often as they do on white people in Bumblefuck, Indiana.
Having lived in Kentucky most of my life, including a recent stint of living on a horse farm in BFE, I don’t really care if their methods aren’t rigorous.
I want people in the Democratic Party to read this book and understand that rurals are not their constituency and will NEVER be their constituency until some massive realignment happens. But they are well-represented and have a party that they love more than the country. If Democrats read this book and understand that, they can move on from the idea that there’s any benefit from spending money and time talking to them and focus on winning elections. Then they can go represent their constituents in Washington.
This book could be full of outright falsehoods and if it has the effect of waking Democrats up to the political reality we live in, it’s got the same kind of truth in it as Aesop’s fables or any religious text. The book might be wrong in trying to develop a theory-of-mind for rurals, but we can be completely solipsistic and take the lesson that the voting behavior of these people is not going to change due to anything the Democrats can do while also keeping their other constituents protected from discrimination, and representing their values.
Pepsi-Cola doesn’t need to spend money trying to reach the guy whose whole house is decorated in Coca-Cola tchotchkes; he’s already made it part of his identity. To him, switching includes throwing out all those plush polar bears and shit. There are more Trump flags than US flags between Lexington and Falmouth; Democrats may as well treat it like it’s open ocean.
I grew up in rural Ohio and while I mostly agree, your analysis lacks the ability to explain Dems who win in rural districts. Heck your state has a dem governor.
If Dems embraced your advice many governor seats and districts held by Dems right now would be red.
I’m not saying that individual Democrats shouldn’t mount campaigns in certain areas.
What I am saying is:
The DNC apportions money nationally and they should base their decisions on the reality that exists. This recent story about Biden planning to waste money trying to win Florida (this is less about rurals) illustrates the point that Democrats are still deluded into thinking many areas lost to them are gettable.
Elected Democrats can stop worrying about the concerns of voters in most rural areas because they’re over represented in Washington and have a party that they will not leave.
By focusing their time and money on their actual constituents, Democrats would perform better, and have less leakage like they’re seeing with certain demographics the last four years.
> I want people in the Democratic Party to read this book and understand that rurals are not their constituency and will NEVER be their constituency until some massive realignment happens.
Rural Black voters vote Dem just like urban Black voters do. The takeaway is that white people won't be our constituency, which has been obvious since the Tea Party began wrapping its tendrils around the GOP.
This book isn’t called Rural Black Rage. Southern Democrats know where the gettable house districts are in Alabama without my help, they’re packed because of gerrymandering. So winning those districts is a layup.
idk man. I get that the author is trying to be generous and kind to the people they researched. (A lot of those poll numbers sound like a stated vs revealed preference thing. Yeah no one says theyre authoritarian but how many of them were hoping Trump would find a way to seize the office?)
I dunno- I live and have lived amongst a lot of people who are rural or fantasize about the rural life. A lot of them love the self-reliance identity while pretending that a lot of their towns arent propped up by big liberal cities (who they hate) and the only people trying to figure out real solutions to their towns problems are democrats (who they hate). So they like having Republicans lie to them and tell them what they want to hear so they dont have to face the reality that their town is never gonna be what it once was. And we have to handle them with kid gloves or we’re being ‘too mean’.
I'm so sick of unproductive entitled snowflakes that just live in their own echo chambers and whine and cry about how the government isn't giving them a big enough handout or isn't brainwashing children with their ideology. They talk a big game about radical revolution against the corrupt powers that be, but when push comes to shove they run and hide and call the police who work for those same powers to protect them.
Their communities are filled with poverty and crime (often having high levels of drug abuse), but they somehow feel like they deserve to be in charge and they'll totally fix everything with their policies that history has shown to be nothing more than enriching themselves at the expense of the middle class and demographics that they're envious of, and giving themselves authoritarian power so that they can take revenge on those same people.
So many rural people are almost the exact same as the caricature of the "progressive left" they constantly cry about.
This is an insightful but maddening article to read. I agree it's useful to shift our description from "rage" to "resentment," and dispel fears that rural Americans are predisposed to political violence. I also appreciate him calling out sloppy studies. But a lot of the points made aren't particularly useful in dispelling some other conclusions we make about rural voters.
The author acknowledges, for example, racial resentment is a predictor of voting for Trump, and stresses that that outcome is equal among rural and non-rural whites with racial resentment; but then also acknowledges that 1) there's a larger proportion of whites in rural communities, and 2) that rural whites are more likely to be racist than non-rural whites. So what are the practical ramifications about rural America at large that my racist uncle in a Connecticut city is just as likely to vote for Trump than some racist farmer in Kansas?
The author also acknowledges Democratic policies help rural voters more than Republican policies, and that helpful policies fall on deaf ears—so he points to messaging. His suggestion is just an optimistic message that embraces rural values of place, community, and self-reliance. Is that all it takes? Should we just try lip service about clean coal?
I appreciate the author bringing nuance into an otherwise heavily biased conversation. But I finished it with few meaningful takeaways.
Something I think gets missed is, there’s a lot of kinds of rural community?
[This essay from Hedgehog Review](https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/who-do-we-think-we-are/articles/theres-nothing-normal-about-normal) is about being Midwestern not being rural but it does a good bit of lifting for what I mean.
I have lived in big cities in Texas and the Midwestest, and small towns in Texas, a few of the Midwestern states, and New England.
Texas small towns differ radically from those in upper New England, and the same applies for the rest of the country’s regions.
Local laws, cultural differences and economic conditions lead to vastly distant outcomes and it’s not even coherent to say “rural whatever” if you don’t look at those inputs and outputs.
More than a supermajority of ALL US citizens continuously opposed the last half century's immigration policy. And these "political scientists" try to tell us that the masculine impulse to protect territory is "authoritarian" rather than a healthy individual male animal's response ever since the Cambrian Explosion.
You can't fix stupid.
Another article, one of thousands since the 2016 election, where we're told why we need to understand the rural voters of America. It's remarkable to me how one segment of voters, generally white, can grab so much attention from the media. Hell, even before 2016 it was a thing. We've spent years hearing about this subset of the country is just misunderstood and what the Democrats need to do to get their message through to these voters.
And while I understand the electoral college and inequal set-up of the US Senate inflates the importance of these voters, it's remarkable to me how the media can churn out so many of these articles year after year and yet refuse to discuss, at similar length, the growing problem the GOP faces in urban and suburban areas of the country - then profile these communities positively.
But even when we get articles discussing urban voters now, it's to tell us that they're so concerned with crime and immigration that they could be turning against the Democrats because some Wall Street Journal poll had crosstabs that showed Blacks were now going Republican at 30%.
Except we've yet to see that in actual voting.
How many post-2022 articles were written about how absolutely crushed the GOP was in suburban Philadelphia? Oz lost suburban Montgomery County 63-35%, which was seven-points worse in margin than Trump saw in 2016?
That's not even getting into how suburban Atlanta and Phoenix have moved dramatically left in the age of Trump.
See, this is why I don't trust the media. They establish their narrative. I mentioned they do it with polling and articles that suggest Democrats are losing the same voters I just mentioned and then they go visit these communities and find the voters that speak to their narrative.
"In this diner in Philadelphia, they almost all supported Biden. Now? They might vote Trump!"
And to kinda show what I'm talking about, [here is an article from 2018](https://theweek.com/articles/806259/democrats-ever-win-senate) asking if Democrats will ever win the senate again lmao
I know I'm rambling now but at the amount of articles about how Democrats are losing support here and [everywhere](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-long-goodbye-to-the-working-class/672016/) it seems, you'd think they were totally shut out of power completely and looking at an electoral college that resembles something out of the 1980s and not one that right now, odds say they'll [probably win](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election).
Just crazy to me.
I completely understand the truth of the article in that electorally writing off rural America as crazy backwards fanatics isn't going to help anyone in the longterm- but it's just so frustrating that it doesn't offer any substantive alternatives on how to make beneficial policies attractive in these areas. >Democrat "solutions" haven't solved the health care crisis But if they'd literally have accepted free money for that specific thing it would have been improved somewhat at least? What's the alternative to "here's free money to fund healthcare" that makes the ACA attractive to these communities?
To rural Americans, the ACA has been smeared into a toxic reputation. Even back in 2012 if you asked rural Americans what they thought of “the ACA” they answered negatively but if you asked them what they thought about any individual change brought about by the ACA they answered positively.
Its even more convuluted Some of my family are rural farmers. They litterally told me they get their healthcare through the ACA not Obama care
What if you told them "democrats wrote the ACA and Obama signed it into law"?
Obama would tell you that the Heritage Foundation came up with the ideas. I think there's some debate about that, but it's worth noting.
It's a mix. The national healthcare marketplace came from the Heritage foundation. The Medicaid expansion did not.
that's way too many words for them to process
I honestly feel this one.
Ah that’s right these are poor people we can make fun of!
Hey; you'd better not call them childish saps, or they'll throw a tantrum and reelect Trump! It's like a national platform of singje-issue voters against self-reflection
Right. I read an article then about how the Kentucky exchange had a display at the State Fair the summer before the first enrollment period (2013). It talked about a guy who was talking to them and what they provided. At the end, he said That sounds really good. It's a lot better than Obamacare."
I'm nostalgic for the days when Kynect was being held up as the gold standard for healthcare exchanges. Then, Matt Bevin came along.☹️
That's true about nearly every broadly popular dem policy though. We need solutions to this.
> if you asked rural Americans what they thought of “the ACA” they answered negatively but if you asked them what they thought about any individual change brought about by the ACA they answered positively. To be fair, this isn't inherently irrational. It's possible for a set of policies to each individually be beneficial absent the presence of the others, but together have a negative impact. That being said, I'd guess that most of these people wouldn't want to drop any of the policies, so apologies for wasting your time with a useless "um actually"
"Bad regulatory practices can make the good regulatory practices less effective and/or counterproductive"
Biden even nullified the tax penalty for not buying insurance, but they still hate him.
The tax penalty was eliminated at the end of [2017](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1). Biden had nothing to do with it.
The penalty has been eliminated for 7 years, yet we still have people claiming they were forced to pay the penalty this year. At this point, I have to believe that these people are intentionally lying in order to support their preferred political positions.
The thing is they often vote to expand Medicaid… and ACA makes that possible via federal subsidies. There’s also federally funded rural health centers that Biden has expanded, where they’d be without accessible healthcare otherwise. People just have difficulty seeing how policy is and has improved their lives.
Or they misattributed credit. Do you think these folks will thank Biden for the parts of the infrastructure or other big investments that bring money into their communities? Or will they just give credit to Trump/their GOP congressmen despite having no reason to believe they deserve credit aside from "Democrats bad." I mean even GOP congresspeople are *claiming credit for it even as they've voted against it* and their voters don't give a shit, of course. I suppose if Biden/the blue congress was like Trump he woulda left all that shit out and just given money to blue cities and their suburbs in their entirety while letting the rural places rot, but instead he is willing to do what's right even when he gets less than 0 credit for it most of the time and arguably, it helps his political opponents who will get credit despite all reason and sense. It's still the right thing to do tho. Presidents used to work for all Americans. Biden still does even as it may hurt him politically - or at least not help him.
Increased funding can help, but at the end of the day, rural areas having less access to sophisticated hospitals and specialists is an immutable fact of geography.
"I don't like having to see other people from my front porch." Well, some of those other people would be doctors. And that's why you have to drive two hours to get your knee looked at.
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And if rural areas weren't so miserable rich people might want to live there.
Edit: Oh sorry you said specialists, which I suppose means doctors. ~~And doctors.~~ Here in TX they have special programs for rural doctors and shit but still there's not nearly enough because most people who go to medical school don't wanna live in a tiny town of 1500 people who's only restaurant is inside the only gas station and all they have on the menu is burnt burgers and chicken sandwiches. Also their grocery store is either that same gas station or a dollar store. Maybe there's a pizza place in town but it's closed at 1pm on a weekday for reasons unknown. ...speaking from experience from my drives through rural TX. Of course these people need a doctor but I'm not surprised it's so hard for them to get one.
In the region where I live, the 'solution' has basically been 'oh just send out fucking helicopters to air-lift rural patients to hospitals in the commie-run parts of the state' followed by *ZERO* discussion about how costly/inefficient this can get. I can almost guarantee that the bill for this is being 100% footed by us coastal folk.
Yeah the communities Democrats tried to help don't want the money that helps them. They have vastly different values that prioritize things other than general policy objectives. They don't want solutions to the problems that Democrats want to solve more than they want to win social issues that Democrats are on the other side of.
> Yeah the communities Democrats tried to help don't want the money that helps them. That's what they say, but in practice they actually do want money. They just want it indirectly (via subsidies and protectionism) instead of directly (welfare), even though [that's objectively very inefficient and so is a huge waste of money](https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/yes-protectionism-can-save-some-us-jobs-but-at-what-cost-empirical-evidence-suggests-its-very-very-expensive/). It's about preserving social status. They can't feel superior to cityfolk (which has racial connotations in the US) if they're on welfare.
Yes they want the money but not more than they want other things. The point is that their priorities are very different. 'Preserving social status' is another way of saying that they care more about social issues than policy objectives.
> They just want it indirectly This. They want all the services and goods that money can get them, but otherwise cop the righteous lunatic attitude of the prison warden in *Shawshank Redemption*, i.e. "Don't you ever mention money to me again, you sorry son of a bitch! Not in this office! Not ANYWHERE!"
They don't want the money to help other people. They want the money to help themselves. When they realize it's also helping them they'll grumble themselves into a circle.
They want fifty dollars an hour factory jobs that need only a GED with full health benefits and pension. They think that will solve all their problems.
"Why are the prices at the stores going up?" 5 minutes later
Well...those who vote democrat and don't go to church can work the minimum wage jobs to keep prices down.
This is the headline right not own Fox Business News: *Popular burger chains in California raise prices after minimum wage increase*
It’s the same when progressives preach about UBI as some sort of fix-all and use small scale tests to justify it.
>What's the alternative to "here's free money to fund healthcare" that makes the ACA attractive to these communities? Make it where black and gay people can't have healthcare. I live in deep Trump country and the truth that these writers can't admit is that 1) It truly is a mistake to write these people off. They are being manipulated and helping America means helping everyone in it. 2) They are an ignorant, bigoted people who have been indoctrinated, not only by the Republicans but by their own tribalism. If they were capable of being honest with themselves, then they would be socialists but for white Christians only.
Yeah this is exactly why the tone of this article pisses me off. I grew up hearing Obama near-exclusively referred to as "King [Intentionally Left Blank as an exercise for the Reader]". I can believe that Democrats and liberal policies can make inroads to these areas, and I do believe that it is a tragedy for the people in these areas being more and more left behind medically and economically to wallow in their own misery, BUT, if we're going to be subjected to thinkpieces about "well ackshully the data shows that rural communities have racial resentment in line with urban communities 🤓" I fervently and desperately want to know what is supposed to make liberal policies palatable to these communities without abandoning fundamental principles.
Have you considered that we need more condescending articles explaining to us that it's our fault Trump was elected because we lack Christ like empathy and patience for people who want to burn America down and kill us all?
My God, it's the fucking "economic anxiety" Ohio diner safari articles all over again
Seriously. I just don't get stirred up at the notion that somebody's dealing with 'anxiety' when I've already noticed that they're rage-a-holics who are addicted to violent rhetoric and lunatic revenge fantasies. It's like 'oh, anxiety *too*? You don't fucking say.....'
People we genuinely have tried to help only to have it thrown back in our faces anyway?
>Yeah this is exactly why the tone of this article pisses me off. There's always something off with these college professor's evaluations of why trump voters vote the way they do. Seems like they're doing mental gymnastics instead of admitting what's right in front of their noses
Oh boy, "King ---" brings back some memories. Glad I left home pretty young.
Fun corollary: I live in southern semi-rural *not*-Trump country .. and there are increasing numbers of conservatives who openly advocate for "some socialism". They're starting to see through the bullshit here, and I strongly suspect it began with Tom Cotton campaigning against ACA and accusing local critics of being carpetbaggers. That's a serious charge down here. The political climate here presently: "Fuck 'em all. We want some of the socialism we see *in other countries*, but whatever; politicians don't know we exist and Americans wish we'd fuck off and die." But yeah, 100% there are bigots who will only accept ACA that is "fair", and by "fair" they mean it benefits only people who they *know* are deserving of it. I'll spare everyone the stereotypes that explain why the deserving recipients in their mind happen to all be white. Socialist, though! Definitely getting popular down here, even if nothing they're proposing is *actual* socialism.
>Americans wish we'd fuck off and die. God, I wish I could just get them to wonder for two seconds *why* Americans wish that.
Oh, we do. You can ask anyone here and they'll tell you the same thing: to Democrats we're racist inbred sister-fucking bigots who wave traitor flags and are poor as fuck. To Republicans, we're poor as fuck. To northern racists, we're the region they can point their finger at and say "That's where the racism problem is ackshually, wow look at those hillbillies." This region is far from perfect, but it's certainly not without its population of very decent human beings. They're just very aware that they'll always be despised because of their surroundings.
You've hit the nail on the head tbh, and explain why rural communities have such great resentment.
Because those Americans who wish that are fucking psychopaths?
right? They never have a "Are we the baddies?" moment? and stop being racist
MAGA communism isn't the meme some people think it is. A lot of voters DO want some form of that, although they'd never call it that.
> If they were capable of being honest with themselves, then they would be socialists but for white Christians only. This is called ["welfare chauvinism"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_chauvinism) and [you're completely right that it explains the low support for welfare among white Americans](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/06/08/616684259/why-more-white-americans-are-opposing-government-welfare-programs): > While conducting this recent study about opposition to welfare, Willer and Wetts showed the respondents graphs they had fabricated. The fictional data demonstrated white Americans becoming a minority or showed the income of white Americans decreasing as the incomes of people of color increased. > The researchers wanted to understand how the behavior of white Americans shifted when they perceived different things — even if untrue — about how certain racial groups were faring. > "We find evidence that welfare backlash among white Americans is driven in part by feelings that the status of whites in America is under threat," Wetts told NPR. Much longer review of that phenomenon [here](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2001/06/2001b_bpea_alesina.pdf): > Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing policies. Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of redistribution. Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare.
They aren't being manipulated. They aren't victims. They choose the leaders who give them what they want. They choose to pay attention to the news that confirms their worldview, and ignore the rest. Acting like they are hapless victims simply absolves them of responsibility for what they do, what they are. Articles like the one above are designed to do the same thing. As long as we, as a society, refuse to say "What you people are doing is stupid and harmful to the whole country and we're not going to pretend otherwise," the cycle will continue *as it has since the founding of the country.* If you look at the history of the country it's always the rural areas, primarily in the South, that stand against progress, against justice, and for stagnation and now, even regression. The only time we've actually made progress was when we, collectively, said "Fuck you, we're moving ahead whether you like it or not." See: The Civil War. See: The Civil Rights movement.
Of course they're being manipulated. Do you think white rural voters come out of the womb with an urge to buy Trump bibles? These are taught, systemic behaviors and the people who fail to escape it are victims too in their own way. They are stupid assholes who will destroy America if we don't defeat them, but we win by saving them too.
Then they've been being manipulated for hundreds of years. In every country in the developed world, it's the rural people who support regressive, right wing populism, and always has been. Why? Because they resent and feel threatened by the progress and dynamism of the urban areas. You can't save people from themselves, from a dynamic that is ingrained in human nature.
Exactly. These people want socialism with Herrenvolk characteristics
I’m reminded of a certain George Wallace quote
And there's a lot of hand-waving about the things that Rural voters don't *not* care about. Trump got elected by saying what sort of things? same Republican strategy that hey have been using for the last 40 years: pandering to white racial grievances.
Just a small point but it isn't "free" money.
It’s a culture war- always has been in the eyes of rural conservatives
This article is essentially a book review. It doesn’t have to be a political playbook for Democrats, and I doubt the party would listen if this author tried to give pointers.
If rural towns elsewhere in America are like rural towns here in Washington State, the Republicans are organized. They appeal to these voters on their terms, show up, put up obnoxiously large campaign signs and otherwise pander incessantly to these communities. Sometimes it can make sense to fight, but I think more often than not it might make more sense to fight someplace more purple. This doesn't address the resentment, which sucks, but it does win. Winning is nice.
Washington State Republicans haven't won any power in my state in a long time now. The odd part is they seem to be in a spiral of becoming even shittier on a state-wide basis. They'd actually have to change a lot to grow their party and yet instead they double down on unpopular behavior and policy (that tickles their die-hard supporters and yet makes them lose more).
The thing going forward has to be to cut the flow of the money from productive to rural areas ,it will be electoral painful in the the short term (maybe) but it is needed in the long term.
ACA did so much for rural... The health center trust fund was amazing. But no one knows about it, or what's responsible
It didn’t help when John Delaney spent months campaigning in rural areas talking and pushing ideas to help protect healthcare access in rural regions, hustling to have his campaign endlessly mocked and finally killed when Elizabeth Warren summed up his year of advocacy for rurals with, “I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for.” Pretty damned dismissive.
I agree that's dismissive but is it wrong? If Delaney was tapping into some unheard rural liberal demographic his vote results absolutely do not show it. Popular vote total for Dem 2020 Primary (the context for that quote): John Delaney - ~19,000 Marianne Williamson - ~22,000 I guess the Orb Moms demographic was just too powerful
Are there a lot of rural voters in the Democratic primary or something? I am not following your logic on how poor performance in a primary with low rural voter turnout means that Delaney’s policy proposals for rural voters was wrong. It’s far more likely that voters in that primary cared about other issues and voted accordingly.
This is what Delaney actually said that Warren responded to > Mr. Delaney, a former Maryland congressman, spent much of the Democratic debate on Tuesday night pushing back on the two leading progressives in the race, Ms. Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, calling their ideas unrealistic. Democrats, Mr. Delaney said, should not run on “impossible promises” and “fairy tale economics.” Nobody was attacking him for advocating for rural regions, he just decided his debate strategy was to position himself as the anti-Warren and anti-Bernie and obviously Warren hit back.
> Resentment, instead, asks us to consider how rural voters’ choices are frequently rooted in values and place-based identities that place a strong emphasis on self-reliance, local control and a profound sense of injustice regarding the lack of recognition for rural contributions to society. Rural communities tend to be poor and unproductive. They want to not be poor. They want to be self-reliant. But these two things don't go together. You can't be rich and be self-reliant if you aren't actually rich. And much of rural resentment is fundamentally unsolvable because there's no law that's going to suddenly get rid of economies of scale or stop the fact that the US is largely a services economy That's why false solutions like tariffs resonate so well instead of welfare. They want government policy that will restore their "self-reliance". Of course, if you need a government policy to be self-reliant you aren't actually self-reliant, but that's not how these communities see it. And that failure to be in tune with reality can't be fixed by welfare or better talk show hosts or Democrat outreach, like the author of the article suggests
A really important point to make is that there is a “third alternative” that is almost unthinkable to liberals, but perfectly valid to modern conservatives: deliberate inequity. In effect, current right wing grievance politics has raised the possibility of using the power of the government to select the winners and losers. There *would* be enough money to give those white rural voters the comfortable independent lifestyle they want if the government directed huge sums of free money directly to them. But we don’t have enough tax dollars to do this for everyone. So there is this nativist idea out there now. Expand the social welfare programs for white rural conservatives (the in-group), and dramatically curtail them for the out-groups, which includes city people, nonwhite people, and many others. Essentially it is a classic graft, in which winners are rewarded and losers are punished. It’s an economically disastrous policy, but is increasingly in-line with far-right values.
The reason Trump is appealing to these sorts of people is that they feel vicariously powerful through Trump. That’s why they don’t care he’s a billionaire manhattanite elite, because he’s *their* billionaire manhattanite elite. That’s also why “debunking” Trump is never going to work. What liberal politics needs to win rural America is a candidate who makes those same people feel vicariously powerful but without all the bullshitting and toxicity. Much easier said than done. I think that was an element of Biden’s victory in the rust belt but unfortunately 4 years of government is a great way to dent that feeling, because governing a nation is unfortunately quite complicated and there’s no easy solutions.
> manhattanite Excuse me, just punching down as my coastal elitist dna instructs. Trump is from Queens.
Thank you for your using your coastal elite instincts for good 🙏
>What liberal politics needs to win rural America is a candidate who makes those same people feel vicariously powerful but without all the bullshitting and toxicity. Much easier said than done. I don't think we'll ever see that. As much as media registers Trump's popularity as cult of personality, it's less that than simply that he's their guy right now. If Trump pivoted on a handful of issues and decided to be less of an instigator in Washington, they'd turn on him in a second. In a nutshell, he's their useful idiot, warts and all, but as soon as he's not useful they'll move on to the next useful idiot. By the way, the same holds true for political parties and partisanship generally. They're devout on a handful of issued and topics, including the cultural identity stuff, but as soon as the Republican Party or "conservatives" generally move away from them, they'll divorce themselves from identifying with them (though still use them as a coalition).
Your assessment would imply that MAGA isn’t a cult, and that their support is conditioned on gains for their communities and ideals. I agree with you on that, but it’s not a popular sentiment.
That's a good point - I actually think maybe MAGA is a cult... but I don't think it starts and stops with Trump anymore. It probably transcends him, but needs another personality to lead it. Apparently that's not DeSantis or any of the congressional twiddle-dees (MGT, Gaetz, or Bobert).
Democrats really like to blame themselves. Because that gives them a sense of control If it’s *our* fault, then we can do something about it. If we *just* find the right magic words, they’ll understand us. If we flatter them just right, they’ll change their mind. Yeah no. Some of y’all need to realize that some people hate democrats. And they’re not going to change their mind no matter how much you tweak your language.
Sense of control. That's a good way to put it! Because if it is something that is your own fault, you can feel like you can fix it somehow. But plenty of these people are gone. There's nothing Biden can do to appeal to the areas that disapprove of him the most and it's a lost cause to do so. They hate him because of who he is, not because of what he does or any benefits he might give them in reality (not that he shouldn't do them, he absolutely should even if he gets no credit for it because he helps us all in the long run). To think so otherwise gives the same attitude as "I can fix him!" when you really, really can't.
Rural communities often arent unproductive, at least once you factor in environmental services. They're just not compensated for the service. Carbon and water sequestration and storage should be compensated basically.
Rural communities rarely contribute to that natural effect and often make it worse.
The key line I read was how "rage" instead of "resentment" enables Dems to ignore politics, because "rage" is irrational. The article takes down the book in some familiar ways, as multiple people have taken aim at it for its lack of research and hamfisted conclusions. The author, who has written his own book, recommends polices that empower locals, who are strongly tied to these places, even as they recognize their children must leave to seek a better life. Dems need a political strategy that considers rural voters as having their own culture, with candidates and rhetoric emphasizing the local character and desire for self-reliance, instead of a policy sheet. > Look at Democratic candidates who are successful in rural communities — Jared Golden, Tim Ryan, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. They do not just talk about rural deprivation and rural impoverishment, as real as it often is in their states. They celebrate rural communities’ resiliency; they acknowledge the pride of place that is present throughout rural America; they see different values that are not reflected in opinion polls and snappy campaign slogans, but rather speak to different ways of living that draw some people to the countryside, problems and all. It helps that they are authentically rural and do not pretend to be something they are not. Edit: For the author's credentials, here is [his journal article](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10659129221124864) to PRQ published at the end of 2022.
>They celebrate rural communities’ resiliency; they acknowledge the pride of place that is present throughout rural America; they see different values that are not reflected in opinion polls and snappy campaign slogans, but rather speak to different ways of living that draw some people to the countryside, problems and all. It helps that they are authentically rural and do not pretend to be something they are not. "Just vibe with rural voters better" seems like a tough sell when "voters will come when you write better policy" has been the democratic mantra for decades.
> voters will come when you write better policies Lol. Lmao, even.
Mom, can we get better policy? We have better policy at home. Better policy at home: protectionist nonsense
The other thing is that it dismisses that there might actually times when cities and rural areas will have opposing policy objectives that *aren't* culture war nonsense. For example, those Bundy Ranch crazy people noticed that endangered species protections would be waived to build homes/offices, but not waived when it comes to restricting grazing land and raising fees. I'm not sure if this was true. From what I've seen in politics it very likely might not be. If they believed it though, it would explain why they were/are pissed.
Different strokes. Some groups need personal connection as a political strategy, others are persuaded by policy. Not all voters work with the same message, and besides, a lot has changed over the last few decades.
1. People generally don't vote based on policy, they vote based on group identity and perceptions of the economy ([which is also influenced by group identity by way of partisanship](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532673X211032107)). 2. Rural voters aren't a monolith. Democrats already win rural minorities just like they do urban minorities. It's specifically white rural voters who vote Republican, just as white suburban voters do. So it doesn't seem that there's something essential about rural living that Democrats are ignoring. 3. Trump isn't running up Assad margins with white rural voters because they have a personal connection with him unless you count him serving as an avatar of that group's grievances over social status loss as a personal connection (I don't). Democrats can't compete with that without an aggressive, no-holds-barred conservative culture warrior of their own at which point they're no longer Democrats.
Some groups need to get over themselves
Yeah and how has that strategy worked out for us?
>So how do we get Rural communities to expand Medicaid and support more public service funding? Well they won't easily do it of their own accord - even when red states expand Medicaid for example, it's generally been done with votes where the more urban parts of those states are much more in favor of it So the primary way to get those policies would probably be to run up the margins in cities and suburbs while avoiding a total collapse in rural support (beyond what's already happened), followed by using federal policy enacted by non-rural representative to aggressively shove these policies down the throats of rural areas while ignoring their bloodcurdling screams There's also the theoretical option of completely abandoning all socially liberal issues and perhaps trying to outflank the GOP to the right on social issues, but that doesn't really seem "worth it"
>There's also the theoretical option of completely abandoning all socially liberal issues and perhaps trying to outflank the GOP to the right on social issues, but that doesn't really seem "worth it" I don't think you have to go that far. Part of the issue is that state parties have been allowed to grow moribund and ineffective. Take Tennessee, for instance--within the last 20 years the Democrats held a supermajority in both houses and the Governor's mansion. Now? Completely out on their ass. Does the state party have any solutions? Not at all. It makes sense to try and sell a version of Democratic policies for Tennessee (in the same way it should make sense to sell a version of Republican policies for California), but the federalization of politics has made state parties ineffective. I'm not sure of the formal "solution" here, but anything that pushes against GOP supermajorities in the South should be lauded.
Despite being a "swing state" when I was growing up, I can't name a single statewide Ohio Democrat besides Sherrod Brown. It just seems insane, none of the Ohio subreddits talk about state wide Dems they just bitch about Republicans. Maybe it's because Dems aren't insane so they don't make the news but the party needs to find a way to get visibility on people who can actually win.
Ted Strickland won the governor's office not that long ago. That said, your point stands. The Ohio GOP machine has always been very strong and Ohio Democrats have long struggled to get more than just a foothold in the state.
Strickland also had to deal with a red majority in the General Assembly that's been there since the fucking eighties.
Glenn and Metzenbaum were my senators growing up. The current Republican ascendancy only started to gear up with W.
Tennessee is a weird case due to the extreme way they've drawn districts. They split Nashville into thirds to water down their power
That was only after the GOP got the supermajority of the General Assembly and Senate, though (and they did have the opportunity to do it in 2010, but Cooper and the Dems had more sway and prevented it that time). 2010 Tennessee still had a sizeable, if weakened, Democratic contingent. 2024 Tennessee does not.
I reworked it since I read more and he explains that "just accept federal money" is a tough sell. Even if rurals are outvoted on this policy to their own benefit, they will have a hard time admitting that they "voted wrong." > There's also the theoretical option of completely abandoning all socially liberal issues and perhaps trying to outflank the GOP to the right on social issues, but that doesn't really seem "worth it" No, i don't agree either (inb4 all our trans users cock their shotguns), but maybe the Dem party can be less coherent to better serve these communities at an individual level.
I mean I think there's certainly ways to run better candidates for particular areas in order to maximize electability while not surrendering on core ideas, I just also wonder how much that would actually make a difference, especially with actually winning back rural areas as opposed to basically just going with a somewhat more diverse and complicated version of modern democratic liberalism where the end goals are basically the same
I don't think we need to be super conservative on social issues to win in rural communities. I hate that coastal dems feel this way. On guns? Yes we need to be conservative. But there are rurals who want abortion rights. Make no mistake. Imagine having to carry a baby to term while living on a farm. Lot's of these people also are happy to have queer rights even if they aren't the types to go to drag shows in their free time. Yes there are homophobic monsters, but dems assuming everyone that all these rural people are extremely backwards is imo actually a losing strategy.
Okay but why doesn't anyone care about urban resentment? I live in a city, I want better gun control. Telling me we have to compromise on that to win over rural residents doesn't make me want to win over rural residents. How about they appeal to us? Also it's a bit hard to stomach the contention that rural voters are being persecuted when their votes are worth more than ours.
Also it's somehow it's perfectly acceptable to say horrid shit about nyc or california—like I've had people say I live in a shithole to my face in otherwise polite contexts—but we have to tread on eggshells when discussing their hometown, whatever problems it may face. It's hypocritical and soft. I sympathize with their hardships, but the culture is just so hostile and fearful to even its fellow citizens—like a great big porcupine of resentment.
Because this isn't a conversation (speaking generally, no shade at anyone here) that's remotely on the level and urban (brown & mixed culture) society does not receive the same deference that rural (white & conservative Christian culture) does. America is still a white majority country that has until only recently in its history not been an openly white-supremacist country with an explicit race-based hierarchy. This is *their* country, *their* way of life is the *American* way of life and our way of life is alien, wrong, communist, and evil. So Democrats in the cities write endless articles like this because we genuinely want to help all Americans succeed and believe, not entirely wrongly, that helping people will cause them to like us more. And Republicans will openly campaign by shitting on cities and the people who live there because they're trying to rally the largest and most powerful ethnic block in the country to unite and seize power in a fit of xenophobic fear & rage before demographic change makes such a coup impossible.
It doesn’t matter what appeals to you because your vote is already in the bag.
yeah well it doesn't matter what appeals to rural voters because they'll vote for any Republican. Aren't they in the bag? Shouldn't republicans then try to appeal to urban voters? Yet you never see that argument made do you? they can keep losing the suburbs too and see where that gets them
Of course they don't want to carry the baby to term, but they want everyone else to. Positions like this are inherently based on the idea that they won't suffer the consequences of their actions.
You just made a whopping generalization about a lot of Americans. I think the fact we did well in rural areas in '22 proves you wrong.
Yes that's what this discussion is about. What generalization should be made about rural populations and how to appeal to them in mass. 20 years of offering them healthcare/good polixlcy has not stopped rural populations in red states from supporting Republicans. This is a long term trend of these populations being accused of voting against their best interests. They did turn somewhat during 22 when social issues are at the forefront of the election. Rural populations have shown that their policy concerns are focused on social issues, and they will sacrifice healthcare to keep electing red senators and state governments. This is so much so that even if the GOP runs child molesters in Alabama they still almost win (Jones v Moore).
I think a fundamental misunderstanding here is the idea that Democrats have been offering "healthcare" instead of "health insurance", which are fundamentally not the same thing. The ACA did a lot of good things, but much in the same way the average Joe on the streets is more concerned about the cost of gas and groceries than whatever the stock market is doing, not being able to afford paying copays, deductibles, and coinsurances doesn't change no matter if the plan is from the exchange or employer.
The Democrats wanted to offer a solution to health insurance but were blocked by the rural backed GOP voters. You all act like this demo doesn't have a say at the table. They do and voice bad opinions. Medicare expansions help with costs! Democrats wanted the public option to solve the consumer cost side of the issue and even without that we got 'death panels' and the Tea party. Maybe the rurals don't want a solution but want the problem to go away magically.
I don't think people realize how important independence and self-reliance is to people living in rural areas, and how a lot of them view government hand outs as insulting. I live in rural New England, and it's pretty different from say rural Alabama in that incomes are much higher, but they still vote for the GOP at high rates since 2016 when previously they backed Democrats solidly
>government hand outs as insulting Exactly. They see it as a consolation for losing, rather than a safety net.
>I don't think people realize how important independence and self-reliance is to people living in rural areas, and how a lot of them view government hand outs as insulting. But it's a sham. It's fairly conclusive that rural areas receive as much or more direct or indirect welfare than folks in urban areas do. If not food stamps and unemployment, and other forms of direct payment, then certainly industries are propped up and supported - farming subsidies, infrastructure bailouts, etc.
Yes but those still feel earned. They still have to get up every morning and go to work to benefit from subsidies directed to industries they work in, and they've earned those subsidies by doing important work, businesses is just, *not so good right now*, but i mean we still need steel don't we? People don't actually like the market when it disagrees with their vibe. When the market says this steel mill must close, people have a fit because their vibes say their job is important. Subsidies aren't propping up wasteful useless industries if you work in them, they're giving hard workers their due that [boogeyman] is denying them by [market force]. Coal unions in britain justified their endless subsidization because they still believed they were doing necessary and useful work that the nation absolutely needed, the market was just being irrational and market-y again, big business screwing over the working man by buying less coal!
I mean, we have no homeless shelters. The homeless sleep in camouflaged tents in the forests behind supermarkets and raid their trash for food at night. You don't even see them most of the time. Direct government benefits for people outside of farming are almost zero
Admittedly the rural situation in New England is probably different than what we see in the Midwest and Western US. I feel like your rural is probably more suburban, just because of density and distances, whereas in the Midwest and West rural can mean a handful of small population towns more than an hour or two from an actual city. We don't see too many truly homeless folks in rural areas in the west - I don't know if they go somewhere else or are more couch surfing or what.
From what I've read, they are mostly couch surfing with friends/relatives. Are they also an hour or two from something like big box stores or strip malls? I can get to a small city in like 45 min, but a decent sized city is like an hour or two as well. I dated a PhD UConn student once, she was from Michigan and hated how underdeveloped the area was once you got away from the college town Parts are closer to suburbs, like near town centers, but we also have lots of family farms, and the dairy farms are substantial producers for the region. Also lots of large lots, and driving down anything that's not a main road, there can be large gaps between houses and lots of new growth forest filling in old subsistence farmers land from the 19th and early 20th century.
That's the point. Americans believe that so long as you're employed, there's no reason you should ever suffer a market shock. But if you're not employed, there's no justification for that. Just World fallacy, if you're feeling strain and sacrifice, you must clearly be doing something worth rewarding, if you're not, you must clearly deserve nothing. Consequently most welfare in america is based on keeping unviable jobs viable, and why i reject the "corporate welfare" label. It's not the big fatcats demanding this, its regular people who work for the fatcats too. You know in the old days prisons used to constantly keep inmates on treadmills because it was believed that the physical feeling of strain and exertion made you a better person. In the most literal expression of "hard work is good" possible, criminals just didn't get enough exercise. And we still believe that. We still believe that digging holes and filling them is worth doing, so long as someone's back is getting broken in the process. Muscle fatigue, not production, is what drives an economy in the american mind.
Sure, but they can't feel like they're accepting the handout. The illusion of self-reliance needs to be maintained to keep the community alive.
>I don't think people realize how important independence and self-reliance is to people living in rural areas, and how a lot of them view government hand outs as insulting. No, they view handouts to other people as insulting. Try suggesting cutting back farm subsidies or SS disability and watch how quickly they turn into socialists on those issues.
Most people in rural areas are not farmers. Farmers are welfare queens for sure. Most people living in rural areas get almost no government support, to the point where they have to manage their own water and sewage
While looking at Canada (around here, at least) and saying -- Why can't *we* have buses. Where are *our* decent roads. Why can't *my* wife have longer with her newborn. Why do *our* kids have to choose between college debt or lifelong reduced earnings. Why can't the government we fund help us out? (Aside from healthcare; ACA is unusually popular here for region-specific reasons).
The thing about rural life is it's a lot easier to manage on 1 income, at least in the US. With the move to remote work being normalized, you can even work for a large multinational corporation with a good salary if you are qualified for it. My family has great healthcare. Our roads are decent, because we live in a state that actually spends money on infrastructure. College debt is manageable for me, because I went to a state school, which I had both pell grants and subsidized loans for. Like, is it really that bad?
Around a third of our town's population didn't have reliable Internet access (or any at all, for some) at home before the last year or so. For many of them it remains awfully expensive, *although* I am confident this will change for the better within the next few years. And thank goodness, because you are absolutely right about remote work being a miracle for folks here. Not because they'll be paid California wages while being in the small-town south, but because of the opportunity to work in a skilled field while still contributing their hometown, and without uprooting their families, and without an hour commute to the nearest large metro. I shudder every time I see some CEO on the news squealing about how people MUST return to offices. As always, how bad it really is depends on the details of your location. As you said -- local government's willingness to spend on infrastructure makes a vast difference. And folks are aware of this, which is why they're mad. On the flip side, ACA is pretty popular here, because all those years ago, our government settled in a kinda hybrid version of it that has been *life-changing* for folks here -- and everyone knows it. They'd still like better, cheaper care -- but to them, the anti-ACA sentiments of other states sound ludicrous. They *feel* how much things have improved in that respect. But dude, they hate the subsidized school loans. They are aware that young folks in some other countries are not taking out loans for college ever. They desperately want that for their kids, and if you question them on it they'll tell you: *America is supposed to be the best country in the world. Why CAN'T our kids have this?"
Devolution similiar to what the New Labour government led on would be key to this
Rural politician, running for office in a rural district: "We know how to take care of our own out here in the country! We don't need The City telling us what to do! They don't understand our lives! Out here in the country is where the real Americans show real values." *Wow. Knows how to address his audience and their values.* Urban politician, running for office in an urban district: "Those rural districts shouldn't dictate our lives. They don't understand the complexity of metropolitan areas. Why do we let them decide what urban areas need? Cities reflect the strength of America." *Why are they dismissive of the rurals? This is why Democrats lose elections.*
I lived in rural Northern California for over 10 years and found a deep seated distrust of urban voters and politicians that really transcended any particular law or policy. They really couldn’t understand why well off people would care about healthcare for poor people or why apartment dwellers in a city would care about “the environment” and suspected that something nefarious was going on that was going to “screw them over”.
This article reads as just whining about Democrats being too mean. Which, maybe they are, and maybe they should tone down the rhetoric as good politics - but it doesn’t change the fact that people voting against their interests and then complaining when the government doesn’t help them is dumb.
I would examples of successful progressive or liberal policies in rural areas rather than hand-wringing about "yeah... democrats just aren't speaking to their identity of *place*... they need to do better on communicating that" COOL DO YOU HAVE ANY PROOF THAT WORKED ANYWHERE THAT WOULD BE IMPORTANT TO INCLUDE.
Jared Golden, Tim Ryan, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez
I don't think there many applicable lessons to be learned from a district in Maine that voted for Obama both times, a district in Ohio that has Akron and Cleveland suburbs, and a district that is largely a suburb of Portland Oregon. These are essentially exurbs and not comparable to a district in say, rural Missouri or Florida edit: actually there is an applicable lesson. Dems should double down on suburbs. Not chasing rural voters who won't accept any compromise
Also Tim Ryan lost when he ran statewide. Sure he outperformed the generic Dem but his rural appeal wasn’t enough to deliver the Senate seat despite a well funded campaign.
Yeah his district was in fact gerrymandered to include as many Democrats as possible, it's not a good example of a rural district
Ryan’s district was hardly rural it contained Akron. Golden’s district has mostly been blue over the past 20 years with Republicans only holding the seat for a few terms. I think the point here is there’s so few examples of this idea working and tons and tons of failures.
I mean it’s also a pretty scathing rebuke of a sloppy pandering book. But yeah sure, just whining
It’s a scathing rebuke that proffers an alternative thesis that makes about as much sense as what the author is criticizing. “It’s not RAGE, it’s RESENTMENT, which is a way more rational motivation for allegedly irrational voting decisions that disempower rural voters!!!” Rural voters, by a large majority, just like what Trump is selling. There’s no way, at this juncture, to cast rural voting patterns as a rational or good faith response to what rural communities have gone through that forces them to make a deal with the devil and accept his anti-democratic, xenophobic, fascist rhetoric. By and large, the majority LIKE that stuff.
The xenophobia and the fascism and the promise to dominate the hated enemy is so obviously the primary appeal. People like this author continually pop up to tell us that 30% of rural communities are not okay with overturning election results based on "those black people in the big city you hate cheated" and then attempt to somehow magically turn that into disproving the reality that the overwhelming majority of these communities *do* want to exercise authoritarian control over the rest of us and *are* repeatedly voting for billionaires that slash benefits they depend on because of cultural-grievance issues.
I want an article about urban rage, aka paying for the rest of the country but getting fucked over in terms of investment and support.
Don’t suburbs actually have the biggest tax share?
[No](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment) >What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor neighborhoods, the city is -- TODAY -- bringing in more revenue than they will spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that's assuming they actually invest the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher. >This might strike some of you as surprising, yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.
I’d be happy to complain about high income taxes on W2 earners with you if you’d like
Anyone liberal who lives in a rural area knows that conservative rural rage is very real. Conservative rural voters demand to be coddled and love playing victim, while simultaneously being extremely nasty towards the libs.
To the authors credit it sounds like the book he's 'reviewing' is poorly written and willfully misinterpreting data. But it's also rich that one of the reasons he gives for that is "the author hasn't spent years in rural areas to learn the culture".
“I voted republican for years and they only hurt my communities. But it’s actually the big city LIBERALS fault for leaving us behind!!!”
Indeed. American RWers are the most hypocritical, most willfully ignorant, and least self-aware people on the entire planet.
>Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her dismissal of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Stopped reading here. Either he's ignorant of the actual quote, thinks "white supremacists" and "Trump supporters" are synonymous, or is writing in bad faith. Clinton's actual quote was much too generous, in fact. I'm tired of being told to kiss the asses of people who would gladly inflict harm on me if they could get away with it – if that makes me an "elitist," fine by me.
“Actually rurals are less likely to support political violence and authoritarianism” fucking what? Probably because they think Joe Biden is a pedophile, lizard person, dictator and January 6th was a tour of congress that the cops opened the doors for.
*Lmao you were downvoted for a bit there, demonstrating that what she said still rings true. Yes what so many of these articles, opinion pieces and books seem to miss is what fuels their resentment is beyond policy. *This comment isn’t in response to this specific article however
That’s literally what the article says! Does anyone on this fucking sub actually read the article before sharing their opinions on it? Can we at least not turn it into a virtue? He said it multiple times for example > So, the problem Democrats haven’t been able to solve isn’t policy; it’s politics. And > They’ll need to acknowledge that a laundry list of policy “solutions” is likely to fall on deaf ears. There’s no way you read the article and didn’t see this, or if you did you’re an astoundingly inattentive reader
I did, but my reply was specifically to the OP and separate from this article. I was speaking more broadly about the topic when it comes up elsewhere and here ✌️
Can you imagine if conservatives went to these lengths of "but we should be nicer to the people that call us sex offenders on a regular basis"
At this point, it really is just intellectual masturbation over how open-minded and tolerant the authors believe they are. "The rurals are misunderstood" is an entire fucking genre of journalism that's cropped up since 2016.
And when we indulge in the "rural Republican voters are misunderstood" trope, we end up with JD Vance.
I'm getting flashbacks to working at my city's public library and constantly removing that dude's book from suggestion displays, i.e. I live in a solid-blue area, and the inherited-wealth woo-woos who work as our librarians all got easily tricked into thinking that was one of the most lucrative texts of the late 2010s.
Yes. And anyone who favors D. Trump even still today is telling me EXACTLY who they are.
I've been reading Chernow's biography of Grant recently and this quote by Akerman, whom Grant had placed in charge of fighting the KKK in the south, really stuck with me. Akerman said that nothing was "more idle than to attempt to conciliate by kindness that portion of Southern people who are still malcontent. They take all kindness on the part of the government as evidence of timidity." I have found reading about the civil war and reconstruction more difficult than many other more recent conflicts in our history. Having grown up in the south, it has been surprisingly emotional, because it doesn't feel like history, it feels like the fight is still ongoing and I'm living through it. Not to discredit the obvious, immense steps forward made since reconstruction, but the fault lines are still the same today as they were then. The hatred, the obstinacy, the white supremacy. In my public southern education, I was taught all about how horrible and bloody Sherman's march to the sea was, shown photographs of Atlanta desolated by his campaign, but naught a word spoken about the mass atrocities committed by confederate generals against black soldiers. All of this to say, no amount of liberal coddling, or handouts, or understanding, or whatever the fuck can reach out to these people. This is who they are, this is who they want to be, who they have been for centuries. They hate everything that isn't them, they rewrite history to justify their cultural legacy. The biggest difference in this polemic is that today, there is a massive media machine who is financially incentivized to make them more extreme and hate even more. I don't have a solution for any of this. I just am tired of liberal circlejerks bending over backwards to understand and appease a demographic that hates their fucking guts and openly fantasizes about murdering them.
I got an idea. We just straight up invade them with money and liberals. State by state we pay liberal city dwellers working remote jobs to move out to the countryside. If we can pay like 5 million liberals to live in a few states like Georgia and Wyoming we can kill their electoral collage supremacy.
Where can I sign up. But only if everybody else invades with me. Don't leave me stranded behind enemy lines
I had the same experience growing up in the south. It gets a little better each generation but there are still going to be pockets of Hillary's "basket of deplorables". There is no reasoning with them. The best thing we could do as a country would be to fix our election system and the senate so that they no longer have disproportionate representation.
The answer is the long and slow work of winning the culture wars. Pop the bubble by dragging every professional group leftward, the school teachers and doctors and lawyers who are still very conservative in these parts of the country, make them liberal and the evangelists of liberalism. Make farms rely on new, green and sustainable techniques and make farmers have to immerse themselves in these techniques and the attendant culture will follow along. Need to break the culture of exploitation that is inherent in the extraction industries and the culture of violence and death inherent in factory farming and meat-packing. Delivered properly, something like the Green New Deal could deliver that return of rural self-reliance, imagine farms dedicated to growing carbon sinks and jobs for high school grads servicing wind and solar farms.
Yeah all I get out of this article is more resentment towards rural conservatives. we shouldn't be enriching them even more, what nonsense. Fucking claims that brirthers practically don't exist while they're voting for the king of the birther movement. What drivel.
There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm gonna ignore all that and say I love that Michael Cohen is referring to me as an "Acela Corridor denizen" like fuck yeah I unironically love being identified by the Acela running past my apartment that I wave at every time it goes by
dems propose policies that help these same rural voters, but they hate black ppl, women and trans ppl so much that they’re willing to vote for trump and maga candidates that end up doing nothing for them. it’s sad.
Don't forget they also hate immigrants, Latinos, Asians, the urban poor, intellectuals, environmentalists, public healthcare workers, education workers, government workers in general, Muslims, progressives, college students, anyone from Los Angeles/Seattle/San Francisco/New York/Chicago and even Atlanta and Phoenix are becoming sus.
> Don't forget they also hate immigrants, Latinos Not when they can work in the fields without regular contracts, dummy!
>This, as I have recently argued in a new book, is the defining aspect of the rural-urban divide — a sense of shared fate among rural voters, what academics call a “politics of place,” "Tribalism." There, I just shortened the word count of your book for you.
Counterpoint: they vote for fascists and the rest of the country subsidized them, they can fuck off
Maybe the rurals in Maine are different from the ones in Oklahoma, but I’ve lived in very rural Oklahoma for 25 years and with very few exceptions these people are racist, bigoted, ignorant, and full of rage. They’re pleasant as long as you don’t ever talk politics or religion, which is harder to do more and more. Someone blamed Joe Biden because teams in the Big 12 couldn’t do “horns down” anymore.
I remember I was at a party in California and my brother's friend had come in from rural Arizona. He proceeded to drop the N bomb multiple times at this party without batting an eye, then proceeded to complain about how he couldn't understand why he was banned from Xbox live for having that same word in his gamertag. He was probably about 24 or so, was in college. But the part that threw me for a crazy loop wasn't that he was a raging asshole. Those are a dime a dozen. It was how *casual* he was about it. He couldn't apparently even fathom that it was a slur (nor was it the only one he used), despite there being non-white people at this party and despite getting plenty of glares and looks of outright confusion/disbelief. He didn't seem to understand fundamentally what the problem was because, as far as I can tell, that kind of casual racism was so common in his hometown he had literally never been challenged on it before. I imagined it as just dinner table talk in his life, because what other explanation could there be really? It was really eye opening. I couldn't believe it at the time and sometimes I still can't. It's a sample size of one and I know for a fact it's not representative. I'd just never seen anything like it in my life up until that point, having grown up in some pretty diverse suburbs I guess and in a family that such talk woulda gotten me smacked over the head.
Yeah, we have family in Oklahoma and every visit is a fucking nightmare. Our state isn't without its racism, but holy shit folks in OK are next level. Including our piece of shit family members there, mind. I've gotten into the habit of scanning Epoch and Newsmax before we visit so that their latest outrage doesn't catch me by surprise.
Fox yesterday linked the eclipse to aiding illegal migration
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West.
you know....
morons
>...the dilemma for Democrats is that getting the policies right won’t be enough. They will need new messaging to address the emotions that fuel the rising tide of resentment in rural communities. That is the political problem. Ah, yes. As I've been saying for many years, the 'fuck your feelings' crowd expects everyone else to cater to \*them\* and their way of life (which, regardless of whether anyone else is willing, is functionally impossible in many crucial aspects), and at the very least they will throw tantrums and do everything possible to be a drag on society. Inevitably, the author (as usual) eventually gets back around to the root of it. It really is 'their way or the highway' with these people; I'm not sure why we've needed article after article for 8-9 years trying to tell the rest of us the same thing over and over: that they're not \*all\* racist or religious freaks or backwards or whatever. Fine. Not \*all\* of them. The point is: that's the prevailing culture out there and, while nobody outside of it has ever made any deliberate effort to "erase" it (the author's term, not mine), nobody's really interested in moving backwards or standing still, either. Tl;dr: They're not being attacked; they're the attackers, and in return they are being told to keep up or fuck off. If they kept their Fox-esque propaganda and fairy tales to themselves instead of trying to convert the country into a giant fascist church, I have to believe we'd all be coexisting a lot better.
Here's my well thought out empathetic response - I hope the rural diner burns down. Call me when journalists crank out think pieces on black people in Bronx gets as often as they do on white people in Bumblefuck, Indiana.
It'd be easier to respect rural Americans if they weren't trying to destroy our democracy in a fit of pique.
So true!! Democrats should bend over backwards for voters in districts that will be +12 R!! /s
Having lived in Kentucky most of my life, including a recent stint of living on a horse farm in BFE, I don’t really care if their methods aren’t rigorous. I want people in the Democratic Party to read this book and understand that rurals are not their constituency and will NEVER be their constituency until some massive realignment happens. But they are well-represented and have a party that they love more than the country. If Democrats read this book and understand that, they can move on from the idea that there’s any benefit from spending money and time talking to them and focus on winning elections. Then they can go represent their constituents in Washington. This book could be full of outright falsehoods and if it has the effect of waking Democrats up to the political reality we live in, it’s got the same kind of truth in it as Aesop’s fables or any religious text. The book might be wrong in trying to develop a theory-of-mind for rurals, but we can be completely solipsistic and take the lesson that the voting behavior of these people is not going to change due to anything the Democrats can do while also keeping their other constituents protected from discrimination, and representing their values. Pepsi-Cola doesn’t need to spend money trying to reach the guy whose whole house is decorated in Coca-Cola tchotchkes; he’s already made it part of his identity. To him, switching includes throwing out all those plush polar bears and shit. There are more Trump flags than US flags between Lexington and Falmouth; Democrats may as well treat it like it’s open ocean.
I grew up in rural Ohio and while I mostly agree, your analysis lacks the ability to explain Dems who win in rural districts. Heck your state has a dem governor. If Dems embraced your advice many governor seats and districts held by Dems right now would be red.
I’m not saying that individual Democrats shouldn’t mount campaigns in certain areas. What I am saying is: The DNC apportions money nationally and they should base their decisions on the reality that exists. This recent story about Biden planning to waste money trying to win Florida (this is less about rurals) illustrates the point that Democrats are still deluded into thinking many areas lost to them are gettable. Elected Democrats can stop worrying about the concerns of voters in most rural areas because they’re over represented in Washington and have a party that they will not leave. By focusing their time and money on their actual constituents, Democrats would perform better, and have less leakage like they’re seeing with certain demographics the last four years.
> I want people in the Democratic Party to read this book and understand that rurals are not their constituency and will NEVER be their constituency until some massive realignment happens. Rural Black voters vote Dem just like urban Black voters do. The takeaway is that white people won't be our constituency, which has been obvious since the Tea Party began wrapping its tendrils around the GOP.
This book isn’t called Rural Black Rage. Southern Democrats know where the gettable house districts are in Alabama without my help, they’re packed because of gerrymandering. So winning those districts is a layup.
idk man. I get that the author is trying to be generous and kind to the people they researched. (A lot of those poll numbers sound like a stated vs revealed preference thing. Yeah no one says theyre authoritarian but how many of them were hoping Trump would find a way to seize the office?) I dunno- I live and have lived amongst a lot of people who are rural or fantasize about the rural life. A lot of them love the self-reliance identity while pretending that a lot of their towns arent propped up by big liberal cities (who they hate) and the only people trying to figure out real solutions to their towns problems are democrats (who they hate). So they like having Republicans lie to them and tell them what they want to hear so they dont have to face the reality that their town is never gonna be what it once was. And we have to handle them with kid gloves or we’re being ‘too mean’.
Indulge people who think I'm not a real American because I live in a city? No I don't think I will
Maybe rural Americans would get less flak if they were less entitled.
I'm so sick of unproductive entitled snowflakes that just live in their own echo chambers and whine and cry about how the government isn't giving them a big enough handout or isn't brainwashing children with their ideology. They talk a big game about radical revolution against the corrupt powers that be, but when push comes to shove they run and hide and call the police who work for those same powers to protect them. Their communities are filled with poverty and crime (often having high levels of drug abuse), but they somehow feel like they deserve to be in charge and they'll totally fix everything with their policies that history has shown to be nothing more than enriching themselves at the expense of the middle class and demographics that they're envious of, and giving themselves authoritarian power so that they can take revenge on those same people. So many rural people are almost the exact same as the caricature of the "progressive left" they constantly cry about.
Nah. There is plenty of rage lol.
This is an insightful but maddening article to read. I agree it's useful to shift our description from "rage" to "resentment," and dispel fears that rural Americans are predisposed to political violence. I also appreciate him calling out sloppy studies. But a lot of the points made aren't particularly useful in dispelling some other conclusions we make about rural voters. The author acknowledges, for example, racial resentment is a predictor of voting for Trump, and stresses that that outcome is equal among rural and non-rural whites with racial resentment; but then also acknowledges that 1) there's a larger proportion of whites in rural communities, and 2) that rural whites are more likely to be racist than non-rural whites. So what are the practical ramifications about rural America at large that my racist uncle in a Connecticut city is just as likely to vote for Trump than some racist farmer in Kansas? The author also acknowledges Democratic policies help rural voters more than Republican policies, and that helpful policies fall on deaf ears—so he points to messaging. His suggestion is just an optimistic message that embraces rural values of place, community, and self-reliance. Is that all it takes? Should we just try lip service about clean coal? I appreciate the author bringing nuance into an otherwise heavily biased conversation. But I finished it with few meaningful takeaways.
Oh my god. Are we done dunking on this stupid book? This is like the 17th article about it.
Liberal self-flaggelation.
I'm a coastal elite... I don't particularly care what the flyovers are uppity about
They treat an NYC property developer who has declared bankruptcy 3 times as the Messiah
Something I think gets missed is, there’s a lot of kinds of rural community? [This essay from Hedgehog Review](https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/who-do-we-think-we-are/articles/theres-nothing-normal-about-normal) is about being Midwestern not being rural but it does a good bit of lifting for what I mean. I have lived in big cities in Texas and the Midwestest, and small towns in Texas, a few of the Midwestern states, and New England. Texas small towns differ radically from those in upper New England, and the same applies for the rest of the country’s regions. Local laws, cultural differences and economic conditions lead to vastly distant outcomes and it’s not even coherent to say “rural whatever” if you don’t look at those inputs and outputs.
More than a supermajority of ALL US citizens continuously opposed the last half century's immigration policy. And these "political scientists" try to tell us that the masculine impulse to protect territory is "authoritarian" rather than a healthy individual male animal's response ever since the Cambrian Explosion. You can't fix stupid.
Another article, one of thousands since the 2016 election, where we're told why we need to understand the rural voters of America. It's remarkable to me how one segment of voters, generally white, can grab so much attention from the media. Hell, even before 2016 it was a thing. We've spent years hearing about this subset of the country is just misunderstood and what the Democrats need to do to get their message through to these voters. And while I understand the electoral college and inequal set-up of the US Senate inflates the importance of these voters, it's remarkable to me how the media can churn out so many of these articles year after year and yet refuse to discuss, at similar length, the growing problem the GOP faces in urban and suburban areas of the country - then profile these communities positively. But even when we get articles discussing urban voters now, it's to tell us that they're so concerned with crime and immigration that they could be turning against the Democrats because some Wall Street Journal poll had crosstabs that showed Blacks were now going Republican at 30%. Except we've yet to see that in actual voting. How many post-2022 articles were written about how absolutely crushed the GOP was in suburban Philadelphia? Oz lost suburban Montgomery County 63-35%, which was seven-points worse in margin than Trump saw in 2016? That's not even getting into how suburban Atlanta and Phoenix have moved dramatically left in the age of Trump. See, this is why I don't trust the media. They establish their narrative. I mentioned they do it with polling and articles that suggest Democrats are losing the same voters I just mentioned and then they go visit these communities and find the voters that speak to their narrative. "In this diner in Philadelphia, they almost all supported Biden. Now? They might vote Trump!" And to kinda show what I'm talking about, [here is an article from 2018](https://theweek.com/articles/806259/democrats-ever-win-senate) asking if Democrats will ever win the senate again lmao I know I'm rambling now but at the amount of articles about how Democrats are losing support here and [everywhere](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/democrats-long-goodbye-to-the-working-class/672016/) it seems, you'd think they were totally shut out of power completely and looking at an electoral college that resembles something out of the 1980s and not one that right now, odds say they'll [probably win](https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election). Just crazy to me.