How Democrats can win Wisconsin, with barely a mention of the rural

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair, Ben Wikler, was Ezra Klein's guest last week, and the podcast was published under the headline, "This is How Democrats Win in Wisconsin."  The subhead was "Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, discusses whether Kamala Harris can appeal to voters in the swing state."  In short, Wikler is all in on Wisconsinites embracing Harris, though I did not find myself convinced by his comments.  I didn't hear much evidence or analysis, mostly only broad assertions of Harris' appeal in the Forward State.  

Most striking to me in his comments was the inattention to rural voters.  Below are the only two quotes in which Wikler (or Klein) use the word "rural." 

You know, wherever you go in Wisconsin — and Wisconsin is small towns. It is factory towns or water tower towns as they’re called. It has bigger cities, no huge cities. Milwaukee is well under a million people. It has a ton of rural areas.

* * *

And [Kamala Harris] connects with voters in rural areas, in small towns, in suburbs, in cities. She listens to people. They can tell that she likes them. She has this record. And if you listen to her stump speech, there’s a lot about how she stands up to the big drug companies. She stood up to the insurance companies. She wrote the law that allows people to get on their parents’ health insurance until age 26.

The first mention is just descriptive of Wisconsin's geographic demography, stating the obvious, that it has both small towns and cities!!  The second mention is similar but it asserts, with no support, that Harris is connecting with voters in all of these various sizes of population clusters.  I'm not seeing any effort on the part of the Harris campaign to connect with rural voters on rural issues, and Wikler isn't suggesting that she is doing anything rural specific.  So, really?  

Compare this Ezra Klein interview to this post from last month, which takes Wisconsin's rural voters very seriously as key to the state's electoral outcomes this fall.  Other posts about the Democratic Party's efforts (or lack thereof) in Wisconsin are here.  

Indeed, compare this to Kathy Cramer's book on rural resentment.  

Also, I happen to have been in Wisconsin last week, including in rural areas surrounding Madison, but mostly in Madison.  I saw neither Trump signs nor Biden signs in either place, but perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention.  

Can farmers' markets help bridge the rural-urban empathy gap?

I have spent the last several days at the Rural Sociological Society's Annual Meeting (its 86th!), held this year in Madison, Wisconsin.  It's been fabulous, and it gave me the opportunity to visit the Dane County Farmer's Market, also known as Saturday on the Square.  The market takes place every Saturday from 6:15 am till 2 pm on the sidewalk around the state capitol grounds periphery.  This makes it an enormous market because the Capitol complex is huge.  

An elaborate honey display.

In this post, I'm primarily going to share photos of the market (all are (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024), though I also want to note how emotional I found the experience of watching farmers lovingly present their wares.  Later in the morning, I was participating in a panel about Ann Eisenberg's new book, Reviving Rural America, and the issue of bridging the rural-urban divide came up.  The question was raised:  how do we cultivate the relationships and empathy along the rural-urban continuum to make workable treating rural America as a commons, which is one of Eisenberg's proposals.  The conversation got me thinking about how farmers markets have the potential to help us build those relationships, to cultivate understanding and appreciation.  

Corn was the exclusive focus of this vendor

The market included several extraordinarily 
colorful mushroom displays.

Photo taken just after 6:15, when some vendors were just getting set up.

Rhubarb was a seasonal focus of several vendors.

These last two photos are of the same tomato vendor's display.

Prior posts about farmers markets are here.  

On rural and white working class identity as favored in higher education admissions? The case of J.D. Vance

Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times must have had this in the pipeline because it was published moments after Joe Biden announced he would not seek or accept the Democratic nomination for President--leaving Kamala Harris his heir apparent.  Indeed, not long after he said he would not run, Biden endorsed Harris.  The headline for Polgren's column is "If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance."  Here's the lede: 

Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a “D.E.I. president,” and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.

Polgreen goes on to make the argument that J.D. Vance, Trump's selection to be Vice President, is also a D.E.I. candidate.  Here's how the argument goes: 

Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scottish-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.

And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’.

* * * 

Vance benefited from one of the most powerful forms of affirmative action that elite universities practice to attract low-income students: need-blind admissions.

* * * 

The sort of affirmative action that helped Vance gets easily overlooked; it’s less visible than race, making it easier to ascribe the achievements of white men to merit alone.

Polgreen goes on to note Vance's slim résumé.  She points out, "This champion of forgotten America made his fortune by writing a best-selling book that portrayed the rural white community he came from as lazy and undisciplined, responsible for its poverty and misery."

Then Polgreen turns back to Harris and the comparison she makes to Vance: 

Kamala Harris and JD Vance, despite their political differences, have a few things in common... They both come from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the halls of power. And now they are both engaged in the core work of politics — translating their stories into power.

This is a provocative thesis, and Polgreen may be right about Vance:  He may well have benefitted from a variety of affirmative action although, as she points out, we know nothing of his numerical metrics, e.g, LSAT score or undergraduate GPA.  But Vance entered Yale well over a decade ago, and I"m not at all sure that any of the benefits he may have enjoyed by virtue of his background are alive and well today.  In my world, I don't see any benefit to being a working-class white in higher education admissions.  Indeed, I see a lack of understanding of the working-class white struggle in that context--and an assumption that these students are retrograde in their political values and therefore not welcome, let alone favored.  

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.

Postscript:  Here, a week later, is Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post making a point similar to Polgreen's on identity politics and, one might say, what's good for the goose is good for the gander: 

Harris’s main qualification, at [the point when she was picked to be Biden's Vice Presidential running mate], was that she was easily the safest choice. Absent her identity, it’s hard to imagine she would have been anywhere near Biden’s top choice.

But you know what? You could say the same for almost every vice-presidential pick in recent memory. Would JD Vance be on Donald Trump’s ticket if he weren’t a rural White guy from Ohio? Was Sarah Palin chosen for her vast policy experience? Would Barack Obama have chosen Biden if he hadn’t felt he needed a validator for White working-class voters?

Further postscript:  On August 2, the New York Times Matter of Opinions titled its episode, "‘Mountain Dew and Racism’: Identity Enters the Election."  The first few comments, which I found disjointed, follow:

Carlos Lozada:  Wait, we’re going to talk about identity politics in this campaign and not talk about —

Lydia Polgreen:  Childless cat ladies? 

Carlos Lozada:  — JD Vance and women and parents?

* * * 

Lydia Polgreen:  Well, surprise, surprise. It didn’t take long for Kamala Harris’s identity to be politicized now that she’s running for president. Just this week, Trump questioned her racial identity at a Black journalist conference, insisting that she wasn’t really Black.

Archived Recording from Black journalist conference: 

Trump:  I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she Black? 

Interviewer:  She has always identified as a Black woman.  She went to a historically Black college.

Trump:  I respect either one. But she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way. And then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she went she became a Black person.

Interviewer:  Just to be clear, sir. Do you believe that she is — 

Trump: And I think somebody should look into that, too...

Lydia Polgreen:  And at the same time, race and gender seem to be animating Harris supporters. Have either of you guys seen merch for White Dudes for Harris? Have you stocked up? Or Carlos, maybe the Latinos for Harris is more your speed?

Here's more on the reference to Mountain Dew--specifically on J.D. Vance's assertion that Mountain Dew is considered racist by the woke left. 

Rural legal scholarship: Just a place or a just place? Domestic violence, urban-rural differences, and access to justice

Cassie Chambers Armstrong has posted this piece to ssrn.com.  It is forthcoming in the Kentucky Law Journal.  The abstract follows:

This Article examines rural court systems to understand how they are serving survivors of domestic violence. It does so by gathering quantitative data about civil protective order proceedings from over one hundred courtrooms across more than seventy-five counties. Specifically, it examines the rate of legal representation, provision of non-court resources and information, the structures of a given court system (open or closed docket, virtual or in-person attendance, dedicated family court or not), and patterns of judicial discretion. For each variable, this Study asks: Are outcomes different in a rural community? The answer is, resoundingly, yes. Domestic violence survivors navigating rural court systems are less likely to be represented by counsel, and courts are less likely to provide them with information about supportive resources. They are less likely to have access to a dedicated family court judge and unlikely to have a judge enter ancillary orders to address issues of child custody or child support. They are less likely to have meaningful access to virtual court options and more likely to have a court hear their petition in open court instead of a closed proceeding. These findings, and others, suggest rural survivors face unique challenges in obtaining civil protective orders compared to their urban counterparts. Additionally, these data show that all survivors-whether in urban or rural areas-face barriers navigating court systems. Collectively, these results call for place based study and policy interventions to ensure that all survivors can seek meaningful justice in the courts.

The school vouchers story I've been waiting for because it centers rural schools and communities

This excellent long read comes from Alec MacGillis for ProPublica, and it came to my attention only because it was on the New York Times audio site.   Bottom line:  rural folks, normally conservative, have lots of reasons to oppose conservative state leaders when it comes to school vouchers.  Why:  school vouchers, by depriving public schools of money, will lead to the closure of those schools.  Of course, school vouchers, by channeling public tax dollars to private schools, will hurt all public schools.  But rural schools are more vulnerable to falling student enrollment and therefore to closure.  All of that has big implications for rural communities.  I've blogged about this issue previously, such as here, here and here (among others) 

Following are some key quotes from the story, which features vignettes from rural parts of many states, including Ohio, Georgia, and Texas.  But first, there's this lede from Tennessee:

Drive an hour south of Nashville into the rolling countryside of Marshall County, Tennessee — past horse farms, mobile homes and McMansions — and you will arrive in Chapel Hill, population 1,796. It’s the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s the home of Todd Warner, one of the most unlikely and important defenders of America’s besieged public schools.

Warner is the gregarious 53-year-old owner of PCS of TN, a 30-person company that does site grading for shopping centers and other construction projects. The second-term Republican state representative “absolutely” supports Donald Trump, who won Marshall County by 50 points in 2020. Warner likes to talk of the threats posed by culture-war bogeymen, such as critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion; and Shariah law.

And yet, one May afternoon in his office, under a TV playing Fox News and a mounted buck that he’d bagged in Alabama, he told me about his effort to halt Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s push for private school vouchers in Tennessee. Warner’s objections are rooted in the reality of his district: It contains not a single private school, so to Warner, taxpayer money for the new vouchers would clearly be flowing elsewhere, mostly to well-off families in metro Nashville, Memphis and other cities whose kids are already enrolled in private schools. Why should his small-town constituents be subsidizing the private education of metropolitan rich kids?

A further quote from Warner follows:   

I’m for less government, but it’s government’s role to provide a good public education.  If you want to send your kid to private school, then you should pay for it.

Here are some other excerpts, after McGillis notes that 11 states "now have "universal or near-universal vouchers, meaning that even affluent families can receive thousands of dollars toward their kids’ private school tuition" in the name of "school choice."  

Voucher advocates are "again and again ... running against rural Republicans like Warner," the Tennessee politician.  Those rural Republicans are also increasingly "joining forces with Democratic lawmakers in a rare bipartisan alliance.  That is, it’s the reddest regions of these red and purple states that are putting up some of the strongest resistance to the conservative assault on public schools."

Conservative orthodoxy at the national level holds that parents must be given an out from a failing public education system that force-feeds children progressive fads. But many rural Republican lawmakers have trouble reconciling this with the reality in their districts, where many public schools are not only the sole educational option, but also the largest employer and the hub of the community — where everyone goes for holiday concerts, Friday night football and basketball. Unlike schools in blue metro areas, rural schools mostly reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020, and they are far less likely to be courting controversy on issues involving race and gender.

* * *

The response from voucher proponents to the resistance from fellow Republicans has taken several forms, all of which implicitly grant the critics’ case that voucher programs currently offer little benefit to rural areas. In some states, funding for vouchers is being paired with more money for public schools, to offer support for rural districts. In Ohio, voucher advocates are proposing to fund the construction of new private schools in rural areas where none exist, giving families places to use vouchers.

But the overriding Republican response to rural skeptics has been a political threat: Get with the program on vouchers, or else.

That’s what played out this year in Ohio’s 83rd District, in the state’s rural northwest.

* * * 

In Georgia, of the 15 Republican state representatives who blocked a voucher proposal last year, more than half came from rural areas with substantial Black populations. One of them was Gerald Greene, who spent more than three decades as a high school social studies teacher and has managed to survive as a Republican in his majority-Black district in the state’s southwestern corner after switching parties in 2010.

Greene believes vouchers will harm his district. It has a couple of small private schools in it or just outside it — with student bodies that are starkly more white than the district’s public schools — but the majority of his constituents rely on the public schools, and he worries that vouchers will leave less money for them.

The story next turns to Texas: 

The highest-profile rural Republican resistance to vouchers has come in Texas, the land of Friday Night Lights and far-flung oil country settlements where the public schools anchor communities.

* * * 

Among those [legislators] targeted was Drew Darby, who represents a sprawling 10-county district in West Texas and who frames the issue in starkly regional terms: The state’s metro areas depend on his constituents to provide “food, fiber and hide,” to “tend the oil wells and wind turbines to provide electricity to people who want to be just a little cooler in the cities.” But without good public schools, these rural areas will wither. “Robert Lee, Winters, Sterling, Blackwell,” he said, listing some hamlets — “these communities exist because they have strong public schools. They would literally not exist without a good public school system.”

* * * 

“In rural Texas, there’s not a whole lot of private school options, and we want our schools to get every dollar they can. This doesn’t add $1, and it’s not good for rural Texas.”

* * * 

But in Tennessee, Todd Warner and his allies staved off the threat again this year. To overcome rural resistance, voucher proponents in the Tennessee House felt the need to constrain them and pair them with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for public schools, but this was at odds with the state Senate’s more straightforward voucher legislation.

Then the story circles back to Warner, the rural Tennessee Republican, with a vignette hitting on rural intergenerational roots in a place:  

For Democratic voucher opponents in the state, the alliance with Warner and other rural Republicans was as helpful as it was unusual.

* * * 

Warner remains unfazed by all this. He is pretty sure that his voucher opposition in fact helped him win his seat in 2020, after the incumbent Republican voted for a pilot voucher system limited to Nashville and Memphis. And he notes that no one has registered to challenge him in the state’s Aug. 1 primary.

Warner is quoted as saying, with a chuckle,

They tried to find a primary opponent but couldn’t.  I was born and raised here all my life. My family’s been here since the 18th century. I won’t say I can’t be beat, but bring your big-boy pants and come on, let’s go.

I'm just remembering that my most recent post on "school choice" is here, out of my home state, Arkansas.  It links to prior related posts, too.  Those posts are about school choice in the context of consolidation.  But vouchers are now also a thing in Arkansas, and a rural school advocate and patron is among the plaintiffs challenging Arkansas' new LEARNS Act, a voucher program and the product of a big push by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Here's an October 2023 guest opinion piece in the Arkansas Times that makes the link between the LEARNS Act and the threat to rural Arkansas, "Disappearing towns: The LEARNS Act and the myth of schools as community panacea."  

Rural legal scholarship: Legal vulnerability and rural ATJ

Brian Farrell, Daria Fisher Page and Ryan Sakoda have posted their new paper to ssrn.com; it is "Theorizing Legal Vulnerability to Enhance Rural Access to Justice."  The article will appear in the forthcoming University of South Dakota Law Review symposium issue that marks the 10th anniversary of the Rural Lawyer Recruitment Program.  The abstract follows: 

The “justice gap” describes a seemingly simple phenomenon: The difference between a community’s civil legal needs and the supply of resources to address those needs. Yet this simple equation has dire consequences, particularly for low-income and rural Americans. Our ability to measure legal need and supply with relative ease and accuracy is critical as measurements of these elements dictate the allocation of scarce resources to increase access to justice. 

This article theorizes our concept of legal vulnerability and presents the contours of a legal vulnerability index to measure this concept. It is an extension of our earlier work interrogating the relationship between the decline in rural attorneys and rural access to justice. We draw on decades of rich scholarship and dialogue around social vulnerability in order to better parse the conditions that make a legal need likely; the nature of that need; and how it becomes an unmet legal need. As geographers use social vulnerability to anticipate how different communities will experience natural disasters, legal vulnerability allows us to anticipate how different communities may experience civil legal problems.

 
Legal vulnerability is a prerequisite to legal need: It describes the potential for a given community to experience justice problems, events (like several missed car payments or the unraveling of a marriage) that have civil legal underpinnings or consequences. Historically, legal needs surveys were the primary tool for understanding the type and frequency of legal problems, though the tool has practical and theoretical shortcomings. The legal vulnerability index (“LVI”) we propose in this article, in turn, would use Census and other publicly available data to measure the likelihood that individuals with certain characteristics (e.g., low-income), histories (e.g., veteran status), and contexts (e.g., limited access to public  transportation) may develop civil legal problems (e.g., unpaid car payments and debt collection lawsuits). The LVI will rely on readily available and replicable data and allow for meaningful comparisons between communities. Rather than capturing information about justice problems in the past, the LVI will give us forward-looking insights. The LVI will be a useful tool in several contexts and has the potential to provide much-needed awareness and understanding of the justice problems of rural communities, the differences between rural communities, and the tailoring of interventions to increase access to justice in rural areas.

"Rural" makes an appearance in chatter about J.D. Vance, but not in his convention speech

This is from the New York Times right now:  

Live Election Updates: J.D. Vance Addresses Republican Convention

A night focused on foreign policy featured fiery denouncements of President Biden on his policies and age. Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, assailed Democrats and the president.

Here’s what’s happening:

In the biggest speech of his political career, Senator J.D. Vance connected his difficult upbringing in rural Ohio to challenges now confronting the working class, decrying Democratic policies and Wall Street.

To be clear, Middletown, Ohio, population 50,000, is not rural by any measure.  Also, Vance did not himself use the word "rural" in his speech. 

Here's a report from The Hill's live reporting on Vance's speech, which played to "rural" and/or "hillbilly" themes:

Vance shared a story about his grandmother that drew loud applause from the audience.

“My Mamaw died shortly before I left for Iraq in 2005, and when we went through her things we found 19 loaded handguns,” Vance said, prompting cheers and chants of “Mamaw.”

“Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over her house … This frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family,” Vance said as the crowd cheered. 

— Julia Mueller

This is a quote from the NewYork Times story about Usha Vance's introduction of her husband's acceptance speech (emphasis mine):  

She leaned into the story about her husband’s impoverished upbringing and the laws of opposites attracting, highlighting their different backgrounds.

“When J.D. met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm,” Ms. Vance said. “He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like.”

The couple met at Yale Law School, where Ms. Vance helped Mr. Vance organize his ideas about social decline in rural white America, the basis of his breakout memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” They were married in 2014 in Kentucky and have three children. She is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Here's an interesting tweet from the right, but it doesn't ring true.  

I exist in a very lefty media ecosystem, and I've not (yet) seen the left talking of Vance's "insufficiencies."  I've not seen his class of origin made an issue--nor, as of yet, any "insufficiency."  What I am seeing made an issue of is Vance's increasingly intolerant leanings.  

J.D. Vance's rise prompts hillbilly musings from Latino columnist

Columnis Gustavo Arellano writes in today's Los Angeles Times under the headline, "I know what a true hillbilly is, and it's not J.D. Vance."  Here's an excerpt, which at least nods to the rural connotation of hillbilly:  

From the moment I learned about hillbillies as a child, I was entranced.

Good ol’ boys and girls born high up in the mountains? That’s my parents. People who moved from rural towns to metro areas in search of a better life? Story of both sides of my family. Working class? My upbringing. Lovers of things — food, fashion, music, diction, parties — that polite society ridiculed? Yee-haw! Stubbornly clinging to their ancestral lands and ways? ¡Ajúa!

I learned to love bourbon, bluegrass, “Hee Haw” reruns and Jeff Foxworthy’s “You Might Be a Redneck If ...” series. As an adult, I drove through the small towns of central and eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, feeling at home in areas even my white friends warned wouldn’t take kindly to “my type.” I might not have outwardly resembled the ’billies I met — I’m a cholo nerd, after all — but we got along just fine, because they were my brothers and sisters from another madre.

That’s why I was intrigued when J.D. Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was released in 2016. From what I heard about it, the familial dysfunction, generational poverty and inherent fatalism that Vance overcame were similar to the pathologies of my own extended clan. The up-from-bootstraps message he preached in interviews was what my parents had always preached, and what I still subscribe to. Vance’s critique of conspicuous consumption among the poor is something everyone should consider.

But the parallels between the clean-cut Vance and me only went so far. He was a Yale graduate and venture capitalist, while I’m a community college kid who chose a dying profession. He was far removed from his roots, while I experience mine nearly every other weekend at family parties. More importantly, Vance cast himself as an extraordinary exception to his fellow Appalachians, describing ’billies as encased in a toxic amber that kept them from improving their lot and left them embittered with a country that has moved on without them.

My Mexican hillbilly family never had time to whine and mope.

And that's where I'm more like Arellano than Vance, even though I'm non-Hispanic white.  I wasn't raised to talk about how the deck was stacked against me.  I was raised to reach for what I wanted, for what would empower me.  No one ever suggested any shame at the public university route to that success.  

But we live in a different time.  Now, everyone is encouraged to play up their disadvantages and to downplay their agency.  And that is as big a difference b/w Arellano and Vance as their different ethnicities--indeed, I'd say it is a greater difference.  

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law. 

My Rural Travelogue (Part XL): Esmeralda County, Nevada

Esmeralda County Seal on county vehicle behind courthouse in Goldfield
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

I got interested in Esmeralda County, Nevada (population 729) last month after reading Eli Saslow's piece in the New York Times about how conspiracy theories regarding elections have taken over there, threatening the recall of a Republican county clerk in this remote corner of The Silver State where the population density is 1 person per five square miles.  Here is an excerpt from the story, which centers on Cindy Elgan, the County Clerk, a Republican, who some residents wanted to recall once they became suspicious of her handling of the 2020 election results:  

They falsely claimed the election was stolen by voting software designed in Venezuela, or by election machines made in China. They accused George Soros of manipulating Nevada’s voter rolls. They blamed “undercover activists” for stealing ballots out of machines with hot dog tongs. They blamed the Dominion voting machines that the county had been using without incident for two decades, saying they could be hacked with a ballpoint pen to “flip the vote and swing an entire election in five minutes.” They demanded a future in which every vote in Esmeralda County was cast on paper and then counted by hand.

And when Elgan continued to stand up at each meeting to dispute and disprove those accusations by citing election laws and facts, they began to blame her, too — the most unlikely scapegoat of all. She had served as the clerk without controversy for two decades as an elected Republican, and she flew a flag at her own home that read: “Trump 2024 — Take America Back.” But lately some local Republicans had begun referring to her as “Luciferinda” or as the “clerk of the deep state cabal.” They accused her of being paid off by Dominion and skimming votes away from Trump, and even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.

* * *  

[Elgan] took the recall petition back into her office, and over the next several days she continued to flip through the pages in disbelief. She counted at least 130 signatures, which at first glance appeared to be enough to force a recall election if the signatures and corresponding addresses proved legitimate. 

You'll have to read the rest of the story to find out what happened with the petition. 

A place of business, apparently, in Goldfield

 So, when I drove through a few different parts of Esmeralda County a few weeks after Saslow's story appeared, the place was definitely on my radar screen.  I stopped--even amidst 100 F temperatures--to  take lots of photos.  

Esmeralda County Courthouse, Goldfield, NV
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

One of many flyers on front door of the courthouse
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Back of Esmeralda County Courthouse, presumably jail
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

A church across from the county courthouse, Goldfield
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Esmeralda County Transit 
(c) Lisa R Pruitt 2024

Public School Gymnasium, Goldfield
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

Yesterday, The Daily, the NYTimes podcast, featured Saslow's story as its Sunday read, so it seemed the time was right to publish my photos of Esmeralda County and Goldfield, the tiny county seat where the vast majority of residents live in what looks like an outsider to a time warp, or maybe a twilight zone.  

Surprise:  an electric car charger at the Visitor Information Center, Goldfield
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

On the rural-urban divide in food insecurity and the role of federal aid

That is not the primary point of Annie Gowen's Washington Post story out of Elk City, Oklahoma, population 12,000, but it is a point that ultimately gets made in the story headlined, "A mom struggles to feed her kids after GOP states reject federal funds."   One of the consequences of Oklahoma's decision to turn away federal food aid is a burgeoning reliance on the local food pantry.  Here's that part of the story, which explicitly highlights rural disadavntage: 

Inside the Elk City Help Inc. Food Resource Center, volunteers assemble grocery carts full of U.S. Department of Agriculture-branded peas, applesauce and pork patties as well as donated items for residents who meet income guidelines. On Fridays, Executive Director Meghan Palmer puts out a call on Facebook that they’ll be offering perishable leftovers for anyone in town. The hopeful begin arriving two hours early.

There is a growing number of families among the 1,900 people Palmer feeds every month — a distressing though not surprising development given the city’s poverty rate of 26 percent, more than double the national average. Donations fund the center’s $98,000 annual budget. She’s tried for federal grants in the past, but those often require a recipient to be located near a larger city to capitalize on existing infrastructure and maximize impact.

Here's a direct quote from Palmer: 

One of the biggest issues we have is that all of the organizations and programs are tailored for larger cities and larger communities.  In rural America, we often get forgotten. It’s really powerful and extremely frustrating.

* * *  

We were pretty beside ourselves.  The ball has been dropped for Oklahomans. We’re constantly on the bottom — in mental health, poverty, food insecurity, education. It was just another slap in our face.

The story continues: 

The town’s rural location hampers its ability to respond to needy residents in other ways, too. In the eastern part of the state, two Native American tribes — the Cherokee and the Chickasaw — are administering the summer card program on their own and reaching 250,000 children, according to federal officials.

The tribes, nonprofits and local school districts expanded the spots where kids can get free meals or pick up a sack lunch. Yet a large swath of Oklahoma remains unserved. The closest location to Elk City is 25 miles away.

Here's a post from a decade ago detailing the struggle to effectively distribute food aid in rural locales.  

Both NYTimes and LATimes cover the matter of electric school busses in rural America

Last December, Hailey Branson-Potts wrote this LA Times story about electric school busses in far northern California,  The dateline was Susanville, population 17,000, county seat of Lsssen County, which is about the size of Delaware, with a population density of 7.2 persons per square mile. The headline is "California is pumped about electric buses.  Rural schools say they're a pain." (The alternative headline is "California rural schools say electric buses won't work."

Dionne Searcey wrote this NY Times story about electric school busses in Nebraska, published just this week.  Her story is out of her hometown of Wymore in Gage County, population 21,000, in the more populous eastern part of the state.  Because Searcey is writing about her hometown, she frequently mentions having been in school with several of the men featured in the story.  Her headline is "A Brand New Electric Bus, No Charge. (That Was One Problem)."  The subhead is "In tiny Wymore, Neb., a sleek new battery-powered school bus became a Rorschach test for the future."

As reflected in their respective headlines, both of these stories engage the politics of the rural-urban divide, as well as the practical challenges of traversing the long distances associated with rural living and doing so with little charging infrastructure.  Here's a representative paragraph from the NYT story:

[T]he electric bus became a surrogate for far bigger issues this quiet corner of the nation is facing. In conversations in the school boardroom, at the volunteer fire hall and at the American Legion bar, the bus exposed fears of an unwelcome future, one where wind turbines tower across the flatlands, power generated by Nebraska solar farms is sent out of state and electric cars strand drivers on lonesome gravel roads.

Both pieces are well worth a read.  Here's a prior post I wrote about the federal program supplying the electric buses--and how it was playing in my hometown. 

For contrast, here's a Los Angeles Times story on the uber-urban Oakland (California) School District going all electric with its school bus fleet. 

Luxury housing market goes rural--in SoCal, and likely elsewhere

The Los Angles Times ran a story today by Jack Fleming, "Mansions in the desert: Why Californians buy big in cheap, remote areas."  There's a rural angle here, though it is not called out as such.  Here's an excerpt: 

DeeAnn Noland has crafted her own slice of paradise in Southern California.

Her property is perched in the hills, overlooking the city below. It spans nearly 7 acres and feels more like a resort than a home, boasting a 6,000-square-foot Spanish-style villa and a swimming pool topped by palm trees.

Her dream house isn’t found in Beverly Hills or Bel-Air or Malibu.

It’s in Hemet — and it cost her $740,000.

Southern California is riddled with luxury enclaves, but it’ll cost you. As housing prices soar, some Angelenos are bailing on the big city in favor of places that are hotter, dryer and more remote, sprawling out into Riverside, San Bernardino and Kern counties in search of dirt-cheap mansions.

In L.A., $1 million might not even buy a second bedroom. A few hours outside L.A., $1 million can buy a dream house. 

* * *  

Noland does well, but she’s far from rich. Her late husband was a civil engineer, and she breeds animals for extra income. But in Hemet, she lives like royalty.

Tucked in the San Jacinto Valley, Hemet has a median family income of $49,901, and a median home value of $444,221, according to Zillow. Five years ago, Business Insider named it the 44th most miserable city in the country, citing high poverty and crime rates.

“It’s no Beverly Hills,” said resident Eric Hernandez on a walk through the Hemet Valley Mall. “It’s a nice community, but not luxurious.”

The story features several other illustrations of what it calls a trend. 

This recent post about home prices in remote parts of California is related.  As they say in real estate, it's all about location, location, location.  To state the obvious, rural and remote locations typically do not add much, if any, value to home prices.  That said, some of the owners of massive homes featured in this LA Times story talk about enjoying the privacy associated with their remote locales. 

On loss of services--aka "desertification"--as a reason for rural disgruntlement

"In the French Countryside, a Deep Discontent Takes Root" is the headline for the pre-election story by NYTimes Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen.  The subhead is "In northern Burgundy, services have collapsed and the far-right National Rally has risen."  What's striking to me about this story is the similarity between this French form of rural neglect/resentment and what we have seen in the United States of a similar ilk.   Here are some relevant quotes: 

Residents in this sparsely populated region of France — the Yonne district in northwestern Burgundy has only about 335,000 inhabitants — describe what is happening to their community as “desertification,” by which they mean an emptying out of services, and of their lives.

Schools close. Train stations close. Post offices close. Doctors and dentists leave. Cafés and small convenience stores close, squeezed by megastores. People need to go further for services, jobs and food. Many travel in their old cars but are encouraged by the authorities to switch to electric cars, which are priced way beyond their means.

At the same time, since the war in Ukraine, gas and electricity bills have shot up, leading some to switch off their heating last winter. They feel invisible and only just get by; and on their televisions they see President Emmanuel Macron explaining the critical importance of such abstract policies as European “strategic autonomy.” It is not their concern.

Along comes the National Rally, saying its focus is on people, not ideas, the purchasing power of people above all.

The story quotes National Rally party candidate Sophie-Laurence Roy, whose reference to territory I read to be linked to "place," even land. 

My party is anchored in this territory, it is not, like our president, trying to give moral lessons to the whole world.

As for the receptivity to these appeals, here is a quote from André Villiers, "a centrist allied to the party of Mr. Macron — and Ms. Roy’s opponent in Sunday’s runoff":  

Our French heartland has the feeling of being forgotten.  What you see here in the National Rally surge is anger and alienation.

Note how similar some of these thoughts are to what has been labeled rural resentment--and often dismissed as unreasonable--in the United States. Another relevant post is here.   Recall that Kathy Cramer's 2016 book about the shift in Wisconsin politics was titled The Politics of Resentment. 

The yellow vest protests of a few years ago also seem relevant.  Some posts about those protests are here.

NY Times magazine's long read on Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez invokes rurality (and, of course, class)

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's X (formerly Twitter) bio

Jason Zengerle's story appears in the New York Times Magazine this week under the headline, "The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party’s Other Big Problem."  The subhead deploys the "r-word," which is frequently used to describe Gluesenkamp Perez's southwest Washington district.  "Marie Gluesenkamp Perez flipped a rural red district to get to Congress. Now she wants to help her party do more of the same."  I'm going to refer to her as MGP in this post.

I've written a lot about MGP here on the blog.  For this post, I'm just going to excerpt the bits of this story with the word "rural" in them; there are nine including the subhead.  (Elsewhere, on the Working Class Whites blog, I emphasize the parts of this story that are more explicitly about class).  

The first use of "rural"  comes in the opening paragraph where the lede describes her as "a first-term Democrat from a rural district in Washington State."  The story elsewhere describes her district as "includ[ing] Portland’s northern suburbs and exurbs but is more than 7,000 square miles and largely rural."

The next mention comes much later in relation to another rural congressperson, Jared Golden, whose politics are similar to MGP's:

Representing Maine’s almost entirely rural Second Congressional District, [Jared Golden] was one of only four Democrats who deviated from the party during the vote on Trump’s first impeachment (two of them subsequently became Republicans) and the only Democrat to vote against President Biden’s $1.9 trillion Build Back Better Act (over a tax break for the wealthy); at the same time, he voted for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and Biden’s $700 billion Inflation Reduction Act. “The Republican Party spends millions of dollars telling people I’m a progressive,” Golden told me. “The Progressive Caucus spends time telling people I’m a conservative. A lot of people, especially the media, like to call me a moderate. I would say I’m none of these things and I’m all of these things. And my constituents are too.”

Describing MGP and her husband Dean, who have an auto repair shop:

They lived in a school bus that Gluesenkamp Perez bought off Craigslist, vagabonding around Portland until they found a rural piece of land on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, where they built a house for themselves and, eventually, their son.

* * * 

The most intriguing is Rebecca Cooke, who’s running to unseat the Republican firebrand Derrick Van Orden in a rural Wisconsin district. Cooke, age 36, operates a small hospitality business and works as a waitress. On the campaign trail, she is attacking Van Orden on abortion, Jan. 6 and a well-reported incident last year in which he cursed out a group of teenage Senate pages in the Capitol; she touts her parents’ dairy farm and her own employment history as crucial touchstones. “You don’t see a lot of people my age or with my type of background running for Congress,” she says. “And it’s because we’re all busy working.” 

At a campaign stop MGP talked about what this year's vote will say about her constituents and their community:  

I’m trying to get the political machine to understand that rural people aren’t going to put up with Joe Kent’s [expletive].  People think that we’re just ignorant, that we are small-minded, that we are uneducated in rural communities. And we know that’s [expletive].

I'm thinking about how there's a lot of Michael Sandel's Tyranny of Merit in her messaging. 

A a rally in Longview, Washington, population 37,818, MGP said,

The reason that I am on the top of the R.N.C.’s hit list is not because of my bangs. It’s because if Democrats figure out how to hold and represent seats where people work for a living in rural communities and in small towns, places like here, we will break the map on what it means to have a governing majority.

I'll also note here that MGP's X (formerly Twitter) account seems to claim her rurality where it includes "lives in the woods."  

Playing on the presumptive conservativism of rural customers to quash private-sector DEI efforts

Sarah Nassauer reported yesterday for the Wall Street Journal under the headline, "How Tractor Supply Decided to End DEI, and Fast."  

The gist of the story is that in a period of less than a month, Tractor Supply Hardware abandoned its diversity efforts after former Hollywood director turned conservative activist" Robby Starbuck posted on X, "It’s time to expose Tractor Supply."  Starbuck then "laid out a string of complaints about stances taken by the company and its leaders, from a warehouse displaying pride flags to the CEO promoting the Covid-19 vaccine."  Starbuck encouraged the company's shoppers, who he assumed to be conservative based in part on the rural locales of many Tractor Supply stores, to take their business to other retailers.  

According to the WSJ, the Tennesse-based retailer quickly began to talk about "how to  quash criticism before the controversy was seized on by conservative media."  

The story continues: 

Three weeks later, Tractor Supply delivered its decision: Diversity, equity and inclusion at the rural chain were over, including related job roles, and so were some of its environmental initiatives and other causes frequently championed by social progressives.

* * *

The effectiveness of Starbuck’s campaign—and Tractor Supply’s swift and decisive reversal—show how the tide has turned against efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in American corporations. Four years ago many companies saw it as a necessity to support these policies. Today some see it as too much of a risk.

* * * 

The retailer was particularly vulnerable to the attacks. The chain, known for selling animal feed and workwear, boasts a customer base that executives say skews more male and rural than other major retailers. Its shoppers tend to support conservative political candidates, they say.

Postscript:  Interestingly, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette features this headline in today's paper, "Walmart says it has no plans to change diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives."  Serenah McKay reports:

Conservative groups continue pressuring [Walmart] to modify or drop such efforts altogether, placing businesses in a position in which they risk drawing the ire of customers on both sides of the political spectrum.

"We want everyone to feel they belong whether shopping in or working in our stores, clubs and offices," Walmart said in a statement.