Rural Democrats. The muted minority. An embattled species. Here in Adams County, Pa., which borders Maryland, 66 percent of voters went for President Donald Trump in 2020 — about the same that voted for him in 2016, and 3 percent more than went for Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee in 2012. That’s the trend in Pennsylvania, and in many parts of the country. As rural counties grow redder and redder, some Democrats have focused on winning over suburban swing voters turned off by Trumpism and trying to maximize turnout in Democrat-heavy cities.
Fetterman, 52, who is the purported Democratic front-runner for the coveted U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, has made a show of not giving up on the red counties. These are the places where Trump campaign signs still sit in front yards and banners hang from flagpoles and porches. Several are visible along Lincoln Highway, the road leading into Gettysburg. Plus, on the edge of town, a banner on the side of a shed that says “F--- Biden.”
Fetterman campaigned in these areas in 2016, when he ran for the Senate as a pro-Bernie Sanders candidate and finished third in the primary. After a similar strategy helped him become Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor two years later, he visited all 67 counties during a listening tour about legalizing pot. “This is old hat for us,” he says.
It’s mainly Democrats here at the community center, and at other such stops he has made over the months of his campaign. Fetterman has come to see them. To validate them. To listen. To feel their angst.
Then there is this piece by the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin about Tom Nelson, one of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate from Wisconsin. The dateline is Appleton, population 75,000, in the central part of the state, and the headline is "Wisconsin's Tom Nelson Reminds Democrats How Populists Should Sound." Here's an excerpt (with admittedly no mention of "rural"):
With 28 years in politics and 17 years in office, Nelson has put in the work and displays a granular understanding of the state. “You don’t just wake up one day and decide to run for the U.S. Senate,” he tells me. “I’m not running just to check the box.” (That’s an implicit dig at one of his primary opponents, Alex Lasry, the son of a billionaire who has never run for office.)
Unsurprisingly, Nelson names Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), whose career is built around the dignity of work and workers’ rights, as a role model. No one would accuse Brown of being a conservative, yet Nelson points out that Brown wins in a red state by talking directly about issues that affect workers, such as trade deals and, now, the pandemic. His other role model is the late William Proxmire, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin who spoke daily on the Senate floor in favor of the United Nations’ genocide treaty, shook every hand he could find in the state, and popularized the Golden Fleece award to highlight wasteful government spending.
Though Rubin situates Nelson as a populist, he has degrees from Carleton College and Princeton. He previously served as the county executive of Outagamie County, population 190,000, one of three counties straddled by Appleton. He was previously a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly. His ballotpedia entry is worth a look.
Finally, this New York Times piece on Democratic cash flowing to lost causes, while not explicitly about rural, is interesting for ruralists. Here's why: the party seems to see so many rural districts as lost causes and makes that the reason not to channel funds to those Democratic candidates, even as it channels money to urban and suburban "lost cause" districts.
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