First, I want to features this piece from The Nation on Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's victory in Washington's third district, which includes Vancouver, just north of Portland. She defeated Trumpist Ed Kent, who had deposed moderate Republican Jamie Butler-Herrera in the Republican primary. (I've previously written about the race here and here). What follows is an excerpt from the story by Nick Bowlin, who writes for the High Country News, with a focus on rurality:
Without party support, Gluesenkamp Perez built a different kind of Democratic campaign. She talked candidly about the decline of the timber industry and the loss of manufacturing jobs, while promoting right-to-repair legislation, which would give people the tools and legal authority to repair everything from cell phones to John Deere tractors to medical equipment. Right-to-repair is an especially important issue in rural areas, where repairing heavy machinery can be banned by manufacturers.
I will just note here that Senator Jon Tester, the only farmer in the Senate, also talks frequently about right to repair.
Here's more from the piece about Gluesenkamp Perez:
Gluesenkamp Perez did not run as a centrist. She put abortion access at the center of her campaign, often telling the story of her own miscarriage. She also pledged not to support Nancy Pelosi as House caucus leader and talked openly about the guns she owns.
The Democratic Party’s collapse in rural areas ought to be obvious to all at this point. In the 2020 presidential election, Trump won 65 percent of rural voters.
The rest of the article is presented as Q & A between Bowlin and Gluesenkamp Perez:
NB: It’s my understanding that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee [the party’s arm for House races] didn’t spend on your behalf, is that right? How did you pull off the win with minimal party support?
MGP: The DCCC never put in any money. Near the very end, I believe the House Majority PAC did come in [The House Democratic caucus’s main Super PAC spent $300,000 on her behalf in the final week]. I listen to my friends at home. I found allies. I found neighbors. I built a coalition. And I really got to stay focused on what matters to my district.
It was very frustrating to never be taken seriously by many in the party establishment. But it’s also not surprising, because people like me who work in the trades are used to being treated like we’re dumb.
NB: Do you think that perception explains why it took so long for them to even consider you as a viable candidate?
MGP: Yes, I do. I don’t think they think that, but when I went to a meeting with the DCCC after I won, I asked, “How many of your candidates don’t have graduate degrees? How many didn’t go to college? How many work in the trades?” And they said, “I don’t know.” Well, maybe you should know. Maybe that should be important to you, because it’s important to many, many Americans.
They really need to reassess what they think makes a qualified candidate. I’m not special. There are a lot of people like me, who really can serve our districts who understand them deeply. We have got to do a better job of recruiting those folks to run if we want to be relevant in rural places.NB: I’m glad you brought up health care monopolies in rural areas. When we talk about corporate consolidation and power in the US, these conversations can leave out the specific ways these issues impact rural economies. On the campaign trail, you talked a lot about right-to-repair and other monopoly issues. Can you say more about this?
MGP: Right-to-repair is honestly one of the biggest reasons that I ran for Congress. Democrats love to talk about how they support the trades or being pro-labor. I think this is this is a crisis for the middle class, and it’s a crisis for the trades. Supporting the trades means ensuring that there are things to fix. That’s also part of being an environmentalist, ensuring that we have things to fix, that things are made to last and we don’t dispose of them. And it’s about cars and tractors, but also electronic waste. This is about home medical equipment. It’s this creeping, metastasizing problem, and it’s taking away a fundamentally American part of our identity. DIY is in our DNA. And I really believe that we’re being turned into a permanent class of renters who don’t really own their stuff.
Despite the language used in this story, it's worth noting that Washington's third district is not very rural--at least not depending on one's definition. Matt Barron, a rural-focused political consultant, points out:
"Why do you and other writers keep calling WA-3 a 'mostly rural district' when it is only 19% rural. Perez only won one rural county (Pacific) by 2 points, while losing the other five. I'm glad she won but this district is urban and suburban."
Gotta say I agree with Barron on this one--at least I don't think it's helpful to call this area rural when its proximity to Greater Portland is what it is. In fact, much of the district is metropolitan Portland.
Other recent coverage of the rural vote in the midterm election includes these stories:
Josh Kraushaar writes for Axios under the headline, "Democrats show signs of life in rural America." It features this visual of Democrats from the recent midterms who out-performed Biden's 2020 performance.
Here are some key rural datapoints:
- The four Black Senate and gubernatorial nominees in the biggest battlegrounds (Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin) all underperformed Biden in their states' rural counties. Only one other Democrat in the analysis (defeated Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak) did worse than Biden in rural counties.
- In the Georgia runoff, Sen. Raphael Warnock underperformed Biden by 1.8% in the state's rural counties, even as he overperformed the president by 5.3% in the urban counties.
- Among Senate candidates, the party's top overperformer in the suburbs was Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who ran 4.7% ahead of Biden.
Here's a piece from Newsweek titled, "How these Democrats bucked the trend and won over rural voters." Erica Etelson, who works for the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative, writes:
The GOP's lackluster performance in the midterms came as an enormous relief to most Democrats. But in rural America, with a few notable exceptions, Democrats sunk to a twelve-year low water mark. If Democrats are to regain ground with rural voters, an absolute necessity given the Electoral College map, they will need to up their game.
Luckily, we have just the playbook. For the past year, the non-profit Rural Urban Bridge Initiative has interviewed 50 Democratic candidates who ran in rural races in 2016, 2018, and 2020. Most of these candidates significantly outperformed the partisan lean of their district, and we wanted to know what they did right.
What we learned from Democratic "over performers" in previous electoral cycles is that they did a lot of the things that helped propel 2022 midterms candidates like John ("every county, every vote") Fetterman (D-PA) and Marie ("not your typical candidate") Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) to victory.
For starters, they and their campaign staff have deep roots in and knowledge of their communities' values, history, and problems. Local fluency engenders trust even across lines of ideological difference and enables candidates to find islands of common ground in a sea of disagreement. An elderly Iowan family farm couple might not be keen to cancel student debt, but they may want to break up Big Ag monopolies, make sure their local hospital stays open, and regain the right to repair their John Deere tractor. They may appreciate if their state created a public bank like the beloved Bank of North Dakota that would extend them a non-usurious line of credit.
When it comes to personality, Democratic over performers in rural areas are typically humble, plainspoken problem-solvers, not dogmatic or grandstanding ideologues. They come across like ordinary people who care about the well-being of the places they seek to represent. They do not see their constituents as "deplorables," nor do they seek to "school them" on where their self-interest lies.
There's a lot of wisdom here, including that last bit that echoes Gluesenkamp Perez, so don't miss this piece in its entirety.
No comments:
Post a Comment