Further parsing the rural vote in this week's Virginia election

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2011
Food Lion Parking Lot, Kilmarnock, VA

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post are running big features today on what the rural vote in this week's election in Virginia tells us.  Both pieces conclude that the Democrats don't have any firm answers for how to go forward.   Here, I'm primarily going to highlight some of the folks the stories quote:  

Astead Herndon and Shane Goldmacher writing for NYTimes report from Hot Springs, Virginia, in Bath County, population 4731, in the southwestern part of the Commonwealth.  While their focus is on this community as a microcosm, they include a key national data point on the rural vote:  

From 1999 to 2019, cities swung 14 percentage points toward the Democrats, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center report. At the same time, rural areas shifted by 19 percentage points toward the Republicans. The suburbs remained essentially tied.

The story includes many colorful quotes of Bath County residents, most of them elderly, including this one  from 74-year-old Charles Hamilton: 

We’re a county of old country folk who want to do what they want.  They found out the hard way.

This reminds me of a bumper sticker I photographed in the Northern Neck of Virginia about a decade ago, "We're rural, not stupid."   

The journalists also quote Steve Bullock, former governor of Montana and a Democrat who lost his bid for the state's U.S. Senate seat last year:  

Look at some of those rural counties in Virginia as a wake-up call. Folks don’t feel like we’re offering them anything, or hearing or listening to them.

Bullock was a long-shot candidate for U.S. President early in the 2020 primary, and he has argued that the Democrats need to work harder at reaching rural voters.  Interestingly, no mention is made of another Montanan, Senator Jon Tester who has written a book about what the Democrats need to do to win back rural America.  I reviewed that book earlier this year here.  

Cheri Bustos, the Illinois congresswoman who led the House Democratic campaign arm early in the Trump administration and who is retiring from a heavily rural seat Trump carried in 2016 and 2020, is also quoted.  

It’s not sustainable for our party to continue to tank in small-town America... We’ve got a branding problem as Democrats in way too many parts of our country.  

Bustos also called Democratic neglect of rural places “political malpractice” and “disrespectful to think it’s OK to run up the score in big cities and just neglect the smaller towns.”

Dean Phillips, a congressman from exurban Twin Cities who flipped a seat blue in 2018, said the Democrats are afflicted with a "disease of disinterest."  

He especially lamented how his party’s strategists routinely tell candidates “to fish where the Democratic fish are instead of taking that canoe out a little further out on the lake.”

“For a party that predicates itself on inclusivity,” he added, “I’m afraid we’re acting awfully exclusive.”

Mr. Phillips called for Democrats to include “geographic equity” in their agenda along with racial and economic equity, noting that he is a proud member of the state’s Democratic Party, which is formally known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “I’m a D.F.L.-er and yet the F’s and the L’ers aren’t voting for us,” he said.

In her launch video, Monica Tranel who is running as a Democrat for the new Montana house seat, lamented that the people she grew up with "feel like the Democrats look down on rural America."  

A Democratic consultant in Virginia, Ben Tribbett, comments: 

I don’t know what our message is there. Which is a problem, because I’m supposed to be creating content for political campaigns.

Ethan Winter, a senior analyst with Data for Progress, which studies voter behavior, was even more pessimistic, commenting

In rural America the bottom for the Democratic Party is zero. I am serious about this.

As for the Bath County residents, another quote is also worthy of note because it gives a nod to the perennial debate between race and the economy as factors that motivate voters.  It also highlights how rural folks resent being labeled racist, notably by a definition far more capacious than their own narrow one.   

In Bath County, a smaller group of voters cited economic concerns for why the area has become more conservative. They spoke of a time in almost mythical terms, when both parties had a foothold in the region — before rising gas prices, inflation and stagnant wages.

Sharon Lindsay, a 69-year-old librarian, said people were offended that today’s liberals assume their area is inherently racist or bigoted. “We know they wrote us off,” Ms. Lindsay said. “They never talk to us. We never see them. And we see Republicans all the time.”

Dan Balz wrote the Washington Post's story headlined, "Democrats again lament their weakness in rural areas, but they don’t have an answer to the problem," which is equally pessimistic.  He quotes Heidi Heitkamp, former Senator from North Dakota, who "has been preaching about the [Democratic] party's lack of support in rural areas for years."  

We go through this every time after an election, and we just never learned the lessons.

Heitkamp is quick to point out that this problem did not begin with Trump's candidacy:  

If you make it all about Donald Trump, then it’s transactional, as opposed to an institutional failure that the Democratic Party has had in the last how many years of not paying attention to rural America.

On that note, readers may find of interest my analysis of rural bashing in the 2008 presidential race, when Palin took up the mantle of "Main Street," code for rural.   

Politico is in on the Virginia post-mortem, too.  Their story includes this quote from Jane Kleeb, chair of the Democratic Party of Nebraska:  

What happened in Virginia and New Jersey is a warning sign for what will happen in every statewide election, either U.S. Senate or any statewide office, because the only way you win statewide in a red or purple state is by getting at least 30 to 40 percent of the rural vote. And we used to be able to get that.  Why don’t we anymore? We’ve completely lost touch with them.

That story by Zach Montellaro and Elena Schneider also notes the work of American Bridge, a "Democratic outside group [that] spent $62 million on persuading and mobilizing predominantly rural voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Biden squeaked out a victory, in part, by improving his margins with rural voters."  

American Bridge found in a post-election analysis that Biden received 750,000 more votes in rural areas in those states than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. The group targeted these voters for months, through TV, radio and digital ads featuring voters who had voted for Trump in 2016 but were no longer supporting him.

Plus, there's been lots of action on my Twitter feed the past few days, including from rural organizers like Anderson Clayton in Person County, North Carolina (@abreezeclayton on Twitter, a great, energetic follow) and others.   

Here's a Twitter thread from Tom Perriello, a former congressman from Virginia who ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Virginia against Ralph Northam in 2017: 

Part of his thread is captured here, and he also wrote this op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago, reflecting on Youngkin's election.  

David Axelrod, the Obama aide, also got in on the discussion--but mostly as a "me, too," tweeting the Washington Post story.

Meanwhile, as indicated by the screenshot above, RuralVote.org held a National Strategy session yesterday. J.D. Scholten, a former Democratic candidate for Congress in Iowa, is involved in that effort.  He famously visited every community in the district he ran to represent, crossing the territory in an RV he called Sioux City Sue.  

Another resource is Rural Voices USA, which says it "organizes rural people to advocate, communicate, and hold policy makers accountable for rural issues. We are a nationwide network of rural leaders, farmers and community members working ensure rural voices are being heard on key policy issues that impact them and their families."   Rural GoundGame says its mission is "to develop and execute programs for the support, training, and development of rural Democratic candidates, campaigns, and committees, securing a deeper level of investment in and by Democrats in every zip code in order to get Democrats elected and uphold our shared values."

Here's a report from the Daily Yonder in late October about what the respective parties were saying a few days before the election regarding what they would do for rural Virginia.  

A very good podcast about rural organizing is here--Chris Hayes interviewing George Goehl of People's Action.  

Here's a 2017 story on Virginia's uneven recovery from the Great Recession.   This was published in the run up to the last gubernatorial election in that state.  And here's a visual history of 73 years of election results in Virginia, this published after that 2017 election.