More on the rural vote, Democratic messaging, and the Build Back Better bill

NPR interviewed Michael Bennet, the senior U.S. Senator from Colorado, earlier this week, and the discussion included trends and challenges the Democrats are facing in relation to rural voters.  Broadly speaking, the story is about the Build Back Better bill, but at the end, Bennet is drawn out on what Democrats need to do to win (back) rural voters.  Here are some key quotes from Bennet's conversation with Steve Inskeep (emphasis mine):  

INSKEEP: You had a listener in this town hall meeting, a kind of remote town hall meeting, a kind of big conference call, who said I come from a coal-producing area - Colorado, of course, produces coal - and said, what's going to happen to people who work in the coal industry...

BENNET: Yeah.

INSKEEP: ...If the industry shuts down?

BENNET: You know, a lot of times, I refer to the climate stuff we do in our office as my Craig, Colo., project. That person was from Craig, Colo., an area that's worried because they think they're likely to lose half their revenue because of coal mines shutting down and because of power plants shutting down. And I have long believed that unless we have meaningful ways for people to transition, it's going to be very hard for us to move ahead on climate change. But I think the most important thing is to make sure that we're investing in a new economy. There are discussions in northwest Colorado about the possibility of producing hydrogen there. There are discussions about how to train young people for the 21st-century jobs that are going to be there. But it can't just be lip service, you know?

This isn't just about, you know, a transition on the back end of this. It has to be central to what we're doing. And there's $27 billion in forestry work, which is incredibly important to my region of the country, where we - you know, and Colorado, for example, had three of the worst fires in our state's history last year as a result of climate change. Now we're actually going to be putting money on the landscape and creating jobs, doing the forest mitigation and watershed protection up front. And that's the kind of thing that I think can begin to create momentum in rural America for the work that we have to do on climate change.

INSKEEP: I'm really interested hearing you talking about rural Colorado. As a senator from a state with a lot of rural voters, what did you think about when you saw the election results in Virginia a few weeks ago, where Democrats in rural counties did even worse than they have in recent years? The trend was very bad.

BENNET: I think we have to try much harder. The Democratic brand is terrible in rural America. And - but we've got a path to it, to say people in rural America, look; we're trying to address the things that you need us to address. This infrastructure bill, which is bipartisan but signed by a Democratic president, is the most significant investment in infrastructure since Eisenhower. The work that we're trying to do to lower costs for preschool and for - and to make early childhood education available, the work that we're doing to limit the cost of prescription drugs for seniors to $2,000, the tax policies that favor our farmers and ranchers in Colorado over, you know, the biggest corporations and wealthiest people in the country, the broadband that we're creating as part of this legislation - now, none of that stuff is going to sell itself. One of the people on my town hall asked the question, why don't Democrats ever go on Fox News to try to explain what you're doing? And she's right about that. We've got to be out in rural America describing what we're doing and explaining what we're doing. The president is going to have to be out there in rural parts of this country saying, we're thinking about you. And we are.

Another post on the Democrats messaging problem in rural America is here, and my review of Jon Tester's book, which discusses the topic, is here.  I'll also add that Tester's recent messaging about the infrastructure bill has been phenomenal, calling out specific infrastructure projects in Montana that will benefit in many separate tweets.  He also never fails to point out that he "co-sponsored" the bill.