On the success of Fetterman's rural strategy

Rural Organizing

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Julia Terruso and Jonathan Tamari report under the headline "How John Fetterman Won Pennsylvania's Senate Race."  Here's the lede: 

It was the strategy from the very beginning: Get John Fetterman, the former mayor of a tiny struggling steel town, into rooms with people from similar places and from rural red pockets of Pennsylvania.

Fetterman’s first campaign event after declaring his run for Senate in 2021 was in bright-red Mercer County in Western Pennsylvania. And in the nearly two years since, he has stopped at union halls and VFWs from Clinton to Venango to Westmoreland, emphasizing an “every county, every vote” strategy.

It paid off. With more than 90% of the results in Wednesday, Fetterman led Republican Mehmet Oz by 3 points, a surprisingly large margin made possible in part by cutting the Democratic margin of defeat in areas where the party typically loses big.

They quote Fetterman's comments early Wednesday morning, after he claimed victory at a rally in Pittsburgh: 

I never expected that we were going to turn these red counties blue, but we did what we needed to do.  And we had those conversations across every one of these counties.

Here's the New York Times coverage headlined, "What Many Pennsylvanians Saw in Fetterman," by Trip Gabriel.  This story is big on Fetterman's relatability to the working class, even how his stroke recovery inspired them.  Here's a quote from a 71-year-old retired hospital cook in Pittsburgh:  

John overcame a lot of obstacles...John is for the people, and it doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, white, Black.

The only mention of Fetterman's 67-county strategy comes at the end of the story, and it quotes Michelle McFall, the Democratic chair of Westmoreland County, east of Pittsburgh, 

When results were announced, she described realizing that his victory came not only because he racked up votes in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but, she said, “because of Westmoreland and Erie and Washington and Fayette and Butler and Beaver and Indiana” — all rural counties in western Pennsylvania. Many were Democratic strongholds in the past but have swung hard for Republicans in recent years.

Ms. McFall cited the Fetterman campaign slogan — “Every county, every vote.”

“Those words were the anthem of this cycle,” she said, “but they must become the model we use in every statewide election. This is how we win elections in Pennsylvania.”

In August, I wrote about Fetterman's rural strategy for Politico, and here's my complimentary essay in the Daily Yonder on the same topic.

Lastly, here's a graph (shown above) put out by Rural Organizing showing Fetterman's performance in relation to Biden's in 2020 and Hillary Clinton's in 2016.

Post script from Nov. 11, 2022:  

Postscript from Nov. 12, 2022 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "John Fetterman Outperformed Biden all across Pennsylvania": 

To understand Fetterman’s win and compare it with prior elections, The Inquirer grouped Pennsylvania’s counties into five categories based on past voting patterns and population size:

• Big urban counties
• The Philly suburbs
• Counties with small- and medium-sized cities
• Exurbs and medium-sized rural counties
• Small rural counties

Here are some screenshots of the data presented in the story: 

And here are some excerpts about the particular geographies

Exurbs and medium-sized rural counties: 

This group of counties contains small population centers as well as the exurban overflow from big cities. It includes the southwestern counties of Washington, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, and Mercer, none of which have a major urban center but share a Pittsburgh-area industrial heritage; Cambria and Blair Counties, which encompass the small city of Altoona; Lycoming in the north; and the southeastern exurbs of Monroe, Schuylkill, Lebanon, Adams, and Franklin Counties.

This cluster also includes Centre County, which contains the left-leaning Penn State campus and its surroundings but is otherwise rural.

With the exception of Centre and Monroe, this grouping is solidly Republican. But Democrats have put up respectable showings in strong wave years such as 2018, when formerly Democratic strongholds in the southwest helped re-elect Casey to the Senate.

Those southwestern exurbs also swung heavily toward Fetterman: Armstrong and Fayette Counties saw some of the state’s heaviest Democratic swings.

Small rural counties:

The largest group of counties consists of Pennsylvania’s most rural and least populous places. These are the tiny counties of the Appalachians and the rural north: Armstrong, Bedford, Bradford, Cameron, Carbon, Clarion, Clearfield, Clinton, Columbia, Crawford, Elk, Forest, Fulton, Greene, Huntingdon, Indiana, Jefferson, Juniata, Lawrence, McKean, Mifflin, Montour, Northumberland, Perry, Pike, Potter, Snyder, Somerset, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, Union, Venango, Warren, Wayne, and Wyoming Counties.

This long list hardly forms a monolith. Some counties are agricultural, others post-industrial, some like Pike are exurban, and others are mostly wilderness. But they are united in being heavily Republican. And while each county is individually small, they together comprise 12% of the statewide vote, and nearly a fifth of the statewide Republican vote.

That means they are also united in having the most ground for Republicans to give up — and on a percentage-point basis, that’s what happened. Although Fetterman lost these counties handily, he kept his losses contained. His biggest improvements compared with Biden came from this group of counties.