On Democrats' political neglect of the rural South and, as a related matter, how they fail the rural poor

I'm old enough to remember when Democrats counted on Southerners, including rural residents, to win presidencies and control the U.S. Congress.  Lately, of course, that has not been the case.  Most attribute that to the racism of Southerners.  The conventional wisdom is that Southerners moved toward the Republican Party during and after the Civil Rights era, alienated by the Democrats' concern for and assistance to people of color.  Republicans efforts to leverage the Democrats' assistance to Black folks is referred to as The Southern Strategy (though Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields have written a more nuanced analysis in a book called The Long Southern Strategy).  

But what role does Democrats' neglect of Southern voters play in Republicans' recent dominance in that region?  That is, how hard has the Democratic Party worked over the past few decades at attracting these voters?  I was struck by this from a recent New York Times guest column by a woman who lives in Alabama: 

The South has flaws, but so does every place. Every time I write an essay about my home, I get hate mail. It’s less directed at me and more directed at the South — a place that I am sometimes told should no longer exist. It’s easy to write off an entire region from afar, less easy when you live here.

There’s so much beauty in rural Alabama, and it often abuts terrible poverty. A brilliantly hued hydrangea next to a trailer with blacked-out windows. A row of abandoned old houses next to a field of unmown wildflowers. I do believe that Democratic policies are friendlier to the poor, but how would you know that if you live in a trailer without running water or internet in the middle of a state that has long been out of play for Democratic candidates in national elections? (The victory by a Democrat, Doug Jones, in the U.S. Senate special election in 2017 was anomalous; three years later, he was beaten by a Republican former college football coach with no political experience.)

I understand why Democratic presidential candidates wouldn’t want to waste time and money campaigning here; Alabama feels as if it belongs to Republicans. This is a state with three abortion clinics. As of 2017, there were 113 of them in New York.

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I can believe in the ideals of the Democratic Party while believing that the party has, in certain respects, lost its way; I can become enraged at its recent, hollow attempt to codify abortion rights into federal law. The party’s leadership seems to be looking at this moment as a way to improve its chances in the midterms.

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I look at this moment quite differently. I think of all the poor women who live in this state, the women who will disproportionately be forced to carry pregnancies they do not want, who cannot afford to travel to the nearest clinic that legally provides abortion. Is it naïve to wonder why Democrats at the national level didn’t try harder to provide easier access to abortion in red states when they could have? Why don’t elected officials truly serve both the people who vote for them and the people who don’t? That these questions seem naïve, that I already know the answers, doesn’t make them any less pressing.