New York Times "The Run-up" turns to how the U.S. presidential candidates are vying for rural voters

Here's the beginning of today's episode of The Run-Up, the NYTimes podcast, titled "JD Vance, Tim Walz and the Fight for Rural America."   Note that host Astead Herndon is the first speaker, and the other speakers quoted are voters Herndon interviewed in Minnesota.  

Speaker 1 (Astead Herndon)

How do you think candidates talk about rural issues and rural communities?

Speaker 2

How do candidates talk about rural communities? I think it’s generally an afterthought.

Speaker 3

They don’t. I’m peanuts to them.

Speaker 4

I don’t think they really relate.

Speaker 5

They know what counties, what states, what it takes to win. They care more about the electoral college than they do about us.

Speaker 6

I think cities win elections. I don’t think we mean anything. Do we?

These are poignant and telling quotes about how rural voters think they are viewed in relation to national politics.  (In fact, I think their perceptions are accurate).       

The podcast also features a lengthy interview with Nick Jacobs, co-author of The Rural Voter.   Here are some quotes from Jacobs:  

In terms of their partisanship, ruralness and a rural identity is becoming nationalized. And part of that nationalization is that wherever in that vast swath of rural America you are, the likelihood has been, year over year for about the last 40 years, you are increasingly drawn to Republican candidates, particularly at the top of the ticket.

* * *  

Rural voters made up a larger share of Donald Trump’s 2020 coalition than Black voters did for Democrats, than the youth did for Democrats. They are almost as important to Republicans, or rural voters were almost as important to Donald Trump’s win in 2016 and his coalition in 2020 as union voters were to Democrats.

* * * 

We find three characteristics of that identity that are more important than others. One, it’s a different way of thinking about the economy than we often think about. It’s much less individualistic, deep concerns about the well-being of my community. There are parts of this rural identity that are inseparable from attitudes towards government. To be rural is to feel that government has treated rural communities in a particular way, in a negative way. So there is a grievance that is a part of that identity.

At the same time, there’s enormous cultural pride in being rural. Despite all the talk we hear about rural poverty and as important as rural poverty is, when we ask people would you leave rural America, they say no. Because it’s a part of themselves, and they love living in rural America.

* * * 

I can tell you when you go into many parts of rural America, they know a five-letter policy. And it’s NAFTA. They know who signed NAFTA, and they have a very clear understanding. Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe it’s right. But they have a very clear narrative of how NAFTA affected their community.

And it’s not only that they lost. Not only was it their community that lost their mill that shut down. And in some of these communities, it is the single mill. It is the single factory. It was done to their detriment and to somebody else’s benefit.

* * * 

Yeah. When you’re talking about a group of people who do not feel heard, that they lack influence, that their perspective is not respected or not included when it comes to government decision making, some of that resistance is, of course, driven by core values, a principle belief in limited government. But some of that resistance is also driven by the belief that when government comes in to fix your problems, it’s going to make things worse.

* * * 

The guy [Trump] that has done the best in rural America in history makes no pretensions of being rural. He doesn’t pretend at all. ... In fact, he lays it on thick in the other direction. That’s a curious way in which rural identity politics manifests itself because we often think that the trick to identity politics is to out-identity the other person. He wasn’t rural. He didn’t pretend to be rural. He didn’t lean over to the kid at the rally and say, you catch a big one lately, son?

* * * 

So we see that trend in rural partisanship begin to take off for Republicans in 1980. It almost becomes a lost cause midway through the Obama administration. And by the time you get to 2016. And it’s in the aftermath of the 2016 election that we all start talking about the rural-urban divide, even though it had been percolating for nearly 30 years, that it almost seems like the Democrats not only have given up on rural areas, but almost seem to openly celebrate the fact that they do so poorly in rural areas. Hillary Clinton, in the aftermath of her loss, goes on a speaking tour and openly celebrates the fact that she won the places that were dynamic, moving ahead.

* * * 

I think there is a mentality that has made up its mind ... that these [rural] voters... cannot be won over. They’re irrational. They’re extremists. They’ve been radicalized. And, boy, that isn’t to deny that there isn’t the occasional rabble-rouser out here in the countryside, but to just write off one fifth of the electorate as irredeemable, I don’t know if there’s another segment of the electorate that we do that with, in all honesty, a legitimate segment of the electorate. And yet that seemed to be commonplace with thinking about rural voters.

I've similarly lamented that so many powerful, progressive institutions seems to have written off rural folks as irredeemable.  It's not a winning strategy for the Democrats.  

Here's more on Walz and Vance and their competing Midwestern rural narratives, this from National Public Radio, and this from A.O. Scott of the New York Times.