See the announcement here for the program on June 26 at 12:00 pm/noon Eastern. I'm cutting and pasting core details below.
Recruiting and Retaining Rural Lawyers: Challenges and Incentives
Join the VSB for its new virtual Lunch & Learn series—monthly CLEs and webinars featuring topics of interest to VSB members. Tune in from your office to learn more about the programs and initiates of the VSB and earn free CLE credits (when applicable).
Recruiting and Retaining Rural Lawyers: Challenges and Incentives
Thursday, June 26, 12–1 pm
Join us for a Lunch and Learn webinar sponsored by the Virginia State Bar’s Entry, Growth & Distribution of Virginia Attorneys Study Committee(EGAD VA), on June 26 at noon. Rural legal practice is vital to ensuring access to justice, yet many underserved communities continue to face a shortage of attorneys due to geographic, economic, and professional barriers. Professor Hannah Haksgaard will examine the landscape of rural legal practice and share research-based strategies for recruiting and retaining lawyers in these areas, including insights on effective incentive programs.
Across rural Pennsylvania, there is a deepening sense of fear about the future as population loss accelerates. The sharp decline has put the state at the forefront of a national discussion on the viability of the small towns that have long been a pillar of American culture.
America’s rural population began contracting about a decade ago, according to statistics drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend.
According to a recent Agriculture Department estimate, the rural population did rebound by 0.25 percent from 2020 to 2022 as some families decamped from urban areas during the pandemic. But demographers say they are still evaluating whether that trend will continue, and if so, where.
The New York Times published this story last week (before the Pennsylvania primary) under the headline, "This G.O.P. Senate Candidate Says He Grew Up on a Family Farm. Not Exactly." Here's the lede:
David McCormick’s origin story goes something like this: He grew up in rural Pennsylvania, southwest of Scranton. He baled hay, trimmed Christmas trees and otherwise worked on his family’s farm. And from those humble beginnings, he rose to achieve the American dream.
“I spent most of my life in Pennsylvania, growing up in Bloomsburg on my family’s farm,” Mr. McCormick, now a Republican candidate for Senate, told Pittsburgh Quarterly in 2022.
“I’ve truly lived the American dream,” he wrote in a fund-raising appeal in October. “My life’s journey — from growing up on a farm in Bloomsburg, to graduating from West Point and serving in the 82nd Airborne Division, growing a business in Pittsburgh, and serving at the highest levels of government — reflects that.”
In January, speaking at the Pennsylvania farm show, McCormick said:
I grew up on a family farm from the time I was a kid.
The journalists reporting this story, however, who have conducted interviews, reviewed public records and news coverage, "suggest he has given a misleading impression about key aspects of his background."
McCormick has also described his parents at school teachers. In fact, his father was president of Bloomsburg University, and he grew up mostly in the house provided by the University.
While the dominant narrative regarding rural America is one of decline and division, Reimagine Rural is a new podcast that visits rural towns across the United States that are experiencing positive change and explores how public investment in rural people and places can lead to increased and equitable prosperity.
Hosted by Tony Pipa, a scholar in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution and a product of rural America, each episode features local voices telling the story of progress in their community and considering the intersection with policy and public resources.
The first episode (published Nov. 22) is out of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, population 6,942, where Tony Pipa grew up, in the central/east central part of the state, the Susquehanna region. Here's an excerpt that intrigued me because of its focus on a place's identity--in this case the need to shift from a work-focused identity (in their case, coal mining) to one based in tourism.
So, think about taking a coal-region town who’s very much brought up in that hard work mentality. And we need our mills and we need our coal and we need to just work hard and transitioning that into a tourism destination. And that’s what we’re doing here. So, it’s been a struggle for a lot of the individuals who have grown up and have been bred in this hard work mentality to really be that destination.
So, about a year and a half ago, the city passed an ordinance to allow a portal so that the AOAA riders could ride right into our town. We were the first city in the country to do that. Many other villages and communities have, but we’re told we were the first city to allow that. Now we have ATVs driving up and down our streets. I personally love it because that’s bringing revenue. That again, changing to that tourism mentality is difficult. But let’s embrace that because that is our future.
Don't miss this inaugural episode. It has me looking forward to more episodes in this series focused on rural economic development and what it means to invest not only in rural individuals, but in rural places and regions. And on that note, here's a November 29 tweet from Tony Pipa:
I'm focused on the bit that says "for both Ds and Rs, the policies are generally focused on individuals. But places, esp. rural places, need investment, too." The first part of the tweet quotes an NPR report on the rural vote, by Ximena Bustillo, "But rural advocates say that the party often fails to communicate policies to rural voters."
The rural vote has garnered a surprising amount of attention since the November 9 election, but I'll highlight just a few recent essays and tweets in this post. First, there is Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect writing under the headline, "The Rural Turnaround," which begins with some data:
For decades, Democrats have been losing rural America by ever-worsening margins. If they could perform even 5 percent better in rural counties, the political landscape would be transformed. In the 2022 midterm, Democrats did increase their share of the rural vote in several states, and it’s worth exploring where and why.
After going over the "appalling" recent history, Kuttner gets to what I believe is the most interesting part of the piece:
My doctoral student at Brandeis, Rachel Steele, has just completed a dissertation on Democrats and rural voters, which will be published as a book. With her permission, I’ll quote a couple of her important insights.
The most important is that Democrats have been losing the white working class, but place acts as an intensifier. If white working-class voters feel abandoned by the economy and disdained by liberal political elites, that is doubly true for working-class rural voters. Their communities as well as their livelihoods have been squandered, and they have had little evidence that Democrats cared. “Place itself has become political,” Steele writes. (emphasis mine)
As late as 2008, according to Steele’s tabulations, 139 rural white working-class counties voted Democratic. By 2016, that fell to six. In 2016, rural white working-class counties favored Trump by a margin of over 51 points. Much of the loss came in the Upper Midwest—Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota—where national elections and control of Congress are determined.
Steele’s extensive interviews with rural working-class voters also reveal a bitter paradox for Democrats. As good jobs have disappeared, people in communities that once took pride in their self-sufficiency express a broad sense that the work ethic has deteriorated along with the job loss. Instead of crediting Democrats for safety-net programs that save people from destitution, many rural working-class voters, who see their neighbors and their children on the dole, blame Democrats for eroding the work ethic.
IN 2022, THE BEST OF THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES resolved to reverse this syndrome. Just showing up turns out to be hugely important, as a sign of respect and commitment.
John Fetterman’s successful slogan and strategy was “Every County, Every Vote.” Fetterman improved upon Biden’s 2020 rural support by 2.4 percent. According to tabulations by the Daily Yonder, this swing, combined with higher rural turnout for Fetterman, resulted in a net rural gain over Biden of more than 110,000 votes.
Among the most creative approaches I’ve seen to recruit activists and voters on the ground, especially in rural areas, is a group called Movement Labs, founded in 2017. Movement Labs provides data, technology, and strategy to help grassroots voter mobilization, especially in red and purple states and rural counties that Democrats tend to write off. One of their marquee projects is called Rural Power Lab.
* * *
Another key insight is that affinity for the Democratic Party may be depressed in many rural areas, but it is far from extinct, and can be rebuilt.
Rural races are different from urban and suburban races; running competitively in them requires a different approach in both style and substance. Two-thirds of rural voters hold Democrats in low esteem and are profoundly antagonized by liberal elites who scorn the “rubes of flyover country.” Though Democrats’ rural deficit runs deep, it’s important to remember that as recently as 2008, Barack Obama garnered 43 percent of rural votes. And this cycle, John Fetterman’s consistent presence in rural places produced a two-and-a-half-point improvement over the 2020 presidential race—enough for him to win statewide in Pennsylvania.
“Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America?” describes more than a dozen strategies used by rural candidates and office holders, four of which we highlight here.
First, candidates must have local credibility. Whether through generational ties to the area or long-standing community involvement and problem solving, Democrats fare better when they have local roots and are fluent in the concerns and values of the people living there.
Second, candidates put local concerns and issues first, rather than trying to mobilize people around their own—or their party’s—policy agenda. ...[I]t means respecting voters enough to put their priorities at the center of the campaign. In so doing, candidates sometimes find meaningful ways to tackle state and national issues by drawing upon local experience, as when a candidate in rural Appalachia stood up for local businesses by fighting the outrageous subsidies used to recruit big box competitors.
Third, candidates and campaigns seek people where they are, rather than strictly following the advice to “go where the votes are.” Canvassing and phone-banking strategies typically focus on people who vote regularly and lean Democrat. By contrast, many of our study’s successful candidates reached out to people usually overlooked by campaigns.
Fourth, successful candidates listen more and talk less.
Fetterman’s victory might be uniquely instructive. He defeated a candidate, Mehmet Oz, who was conventionally stronger than those other Democrats’ opponents.
* * *
How this happened is illustrated by the [American Communities Project] data. Fetterman significantly reduced his opponent’s margins of victory — relative to Biden’s 2020 performance against Trump — in three types of counties where Trump has done extraordinarily well.
The Middle Suburbs. These types of suburban counties are Whiter and more working class than your typical inner-ring suburb, which tends to be more diverse, cosmopolitan and professional.
We often think of the suburbs as anti-Trump, but his large margins in Middle Suburbs across the country were key to his 2016 victory.
* * *
In Pennsylvania’s Middle Suburbs, Fetterman limited Oz’s margin of victory to 11 points, significantly down from the 15-point margin Trump racked up in 2020, according to ACP data provided to me.
* * *
Working Class Country. These counties are even Whiter than Middle Suburbs and tend to be rural and sparsely populated. They often have low college education rates.
In Pennsylvania’s Working Class Country counties, Fetterman shaved Oz’s margin of victory to 27 points, down from Trump’s 2020 margin of 36 points. Such counties include ones along the state’s northern border or in the southwest corner of the state, abutting West Virginia.
Rural Middle America. These counties are also rural, but also tend to include a lot of small towns and smaller metro areas. They are somewhat less agriculture-dependent than Working Class Country.
In Pennsylvania’s Rural Middle America counties, Fetterman limited Oz’s gains to 31 points, down from Trump’s 37-point margin in 2020. As Chinni noted, nearly three dozen of these counties are spread throughout Pennsylvania’s vast heartland.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, long-time Speaker of the House, has indicated she will no longer seek to be part of the Democratic leadership. This led to a few Tweets by Matt Barron, a political consultant whose Twitter handle is "Mr. Rural." You can see these below. The first is about the likely new house leadership, including Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, and Pete Aguilar of California.
Matt Barron writes: "So the new House Democratic Leadership will be from NY (45th most-rural state), MA (47th most-rural state) and CA (49th most-rural state). Democrats really have become the party of the coasts."
The second Barron tweet is about Pelosi's failures: "Great news. This is the woman that disbanded the House Democratic Rural Working Group in 2011 and would not enable the creation of a Rural Desk at the DCCC. Take Hoyer and Clyburn with ya."
Meanwhile, the 134 PAC in West Texas has been tweeting about future strategy for rural organizers, here and here:
The first says, "We aren't asking for resources from the central party as they have never provided any. Our work is to raise the resources ourselves to do what the party does not or cannot do."
The second says: "The priority for rural Democrats should be to forget about statewide and national elections and focus solely on building up our local organizations and communities."
This is from Trip Gabriel's story in the New York Times on Sunday, which was headlined "Democrats See a Blueprint in Fetterman’s Victory in Pennsylvania." The subhead was "John Fetterman flipped a key Senate seat in part by attracting white working-class votes, including in the reddest parts of his state."
“It was enormously beneficial,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said of Mr. Fetterman’s red-county incursion. “It’s really what Democrats have to try to do. I know we’ve had a debate in our party—you work to get your urban and suburban base out and hope for the best.” But Mr. Fetterman showed that a Democratic win in a battleground state could also run through rural Republican regions, Mr. Casey said.
Mr. Fetterman’s 4.4-percentage-point victory over Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, outpaced Mr. Biden’s 1.2-point win in Pennsylvania in 2020. Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, who posed for his official portrait in an open-collar gray work shirt, won a larger share of votes than Mr. Biden did in almost every county.
In suburban counties, where the Oz campaign tried to undermine Mr. Fetterman with college-educated voters by painting him as an extremist and soft on crime, Mr. Fetterman largely held onto Democratic gains of recent years, winning about 1 percentage point more of the votes than Mr. Biden did in 2020.
Mr. Fetterman’s biggest gains were in deep-red counties dominated by white working-class voters. He didn’t win these places outright, but he drove up the margins for a Democrat by 3, 4 or 5 points compared with Mr. Biden.
Gabriel quoted Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania elections are about margins, and he cut into the margins Republicans had across the counties that they usually control. He got a lot of looks from voters who aren’t very open to looking at Democrats right now.
The story continues:
In almost no county did Mr. Fetterman improve on Mr. Biden’s margin more than in Armstrong County, in the northern exurbs of Pittsburgh, where more than 97 percent of residents are white and fewer than one in five adults has a four-year college degree.
“I expected him to win, but I didn’t think he’d do that well,” said Robert Beuth, 72, a retired factory worker in the county who voted for Mr. Fetterman, speaking of the statewide result. “I think the biggest drawback for a lot of people about Oz is that he moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to run for election. To me that’s not right.” He added that he hoped Mr. Fetterman and other Democrats in Congress would “come up with some ideas” to help “poor people working two or three jobs just to get by.”
To be sure, Dr. Oz carried deep-red Armstrong County, whose biggest employers include Walmart and a coal mining company, with 71 percent of the vote. But Mr. Fetterman’s 29 percent share was 5.4 points higher than Mr. Biden’s support two years ago.
Postscript: This is from a NYT piece titled, "How Democrats Can Create a Fetterman 2.0" by Michael Sokolove, who also wrote about Fetterman just after he won the primary. Here's the bit most salient to Fetterman's rural strategy:
Rural voters in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere in America, have been increasingly beyond the reach of Democrats. So why bother when you can just mine the deep trove of Democratic votes in the cities and close-in suburbs?
But Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor and an unconventional politician in almost every way, did not waver. And the results showed that he had substantially cut into the huge margins that Donald Trump ran up in Pennsylvania’s deep-red communities in defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and again four years later in losing the state, just barely, to Joe Biden.
* * *
One lesson from Mr. Fetterman is that he showed up, repeatedly, in places that Democrats rarely visited. He began during his run for Senate in 2016, when he lost in the primary. After he was elected lieutenant governor in 2018, a job with few official duties, he traveled the state constantly.
The essay then quotes Jeff Eggleston, chair of the state's Democratic Rural Caucus:
He has physically spent more time in rural Pennsylvania than any candidate I’ve ever seen,He got to know people. He spent time in our backyards. He made real, meaningful relationships, so people were willing to make a huge sacrifice in order to get him over the finish line.
And here's the bit most salient to his Working Class vibe:
Mr. Fetterman’s style and appearance are the first things that set him apart. Neil Oxman, a Philadelphia consultant who has run more than a dozen statewide races, including those of the two-term governor Ed Rendell, said that “you can’t discount the look” — his signature outfit is a Carhartt hoodie and cargo shorts. Mr. Oxman noted: “It’s an entry. He can talk to blue-collar people in a way that other Democrats have been failing at.”
Finally, Ezra Klein talked a lot about Fetterman on his podcast last week, including how Fetterman literally embodied a working class vibe. (Same sort of stuff I wrote in my two essays above in Politico and the Daily Yonder). There was a particularly memorable line about Fetterman not only being at the bar, but being in the bar fight.
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.”
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.
For Democrats here at the intersection of several bright red counties, the running joke to political outsiders — according to the county party chair — is that the last Democratic presidential candidate to visit Indiana County was John F. Kennedy.
It’s not often that a big name comes to town, as Democrats, by and large, haven’t always seen value in places that won’t turn out in high numbers for them in statewide races. But that’s not John Fetterman, insiders said Tuesday, as the U.S. Senate candidate took to the campus of Indiana University of Pennsylvania to give a quick stump speech.
Mr. Fetterman — whose campaign slogan is “Every Vote, Every County” — has made it a point to try to trim the margins in rural Pennsylvania, hoping that it will pay off in a race that could be decided by a few percentage points or less.
He reaffirmed that commitment on Tuesday.
* * *
Fetterman boasted that he got more votes in the May Democratic primary in Indiana County than Mr. Oz did in his GOP contest — and that’s true; Mr. Fetterman won 3,829 votes and Mr. Oz garnered 3,537. However, Mr. Oz was locked in a particularly brutal intraparty contest with Republican Dave McCormick, in which millions of dollars poured onto the airwaves.
* * *
Wearing a Fetterman shirt inside the event center, Will Latinette, a 70-year-old retired researcher who lives near Blairsville, said he comes from a town where residents have a pretty negative view of Democrats. He applauded Mr. Fetterman’s approach of coming to the reddest of counties.
“Republicans try to be populist, but their policies are not. His are,” Mr. Latinette said, “and they have been from the very beginning.”
* * *
Sam Bigham, president of the IUP College Democrats, said even if Mr. Fetterman doesn’t win Indiana County — which is likely — the votes will be well worth it.
“A lot of rural counties in this country are being forgotten. They’re being neglected. ... That’s why Democrats don’t win rural counties like they used to 80 years ago. That’s why they don’t win the working class like they used to 80 years ago,” Mr. Bigham said. “So I think it’s important for him to reconnect with the voters the Democrats have lost.”
My own thoughts on rural aspects of Fetterman's campaign are here and here.
Paul Woodburne and his fellow rural Democrats sometimes feel disconnected from their political party while living in deeply Republican areas, worrying about nabbed signs and lost friendships.
That’s why Mr. Woodburne and hundreds of others from across rural northwest Pennsylvania camped out at the Venango County Fairgrounds this weekend for Demstock — an annual convention of sorts billing itself as “all things Democrat.”
“If you’re isolated, you don’t realize what power you have,” said Mr. Woodburne, who leads the Clarion County Democrats. “We’re marginal, but sometimes the margins are what drive the elections.”
* * *
A trio of women strummed ukuleles outside the main hall, playing Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin,'” as attendees ranging from State House candidates to the state party chairman, State Sen. Sharif Street of Philadelphia, chatted up attendees.
* * *
Mr. Woodburne said a key takeaway from the event was that rural Democrats aren’t alone and together can flex their electoral muscle.
“They know and we know our votes are very important,” he said.
* * *
“Providing organizational spaces in which folks – who are in the minority within their own counties, but having had shared experiences and shared values and visions – can sort of find each other and network across those spaces has been really important,” said "Laura Putnam, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied grass roots politics]. “Demstock is an example and sort of an outcome of that.”
Ms. Putnam added that Democrats must campaign in all parts of the state to win, and sees the current candidates not repeating what she described as mistakes made in previous election years. She said some party strategists had made a “false diagnosis” by solely focusing on voters in big cities and their surrounding suburbs, while Republicans racked up ever-larger vote margins in rural areas.
The website for Demstock is here. Needless to say, I think the decision to associate with rural Pennsylvania was brilliant. A description from the Demstock website follows:
Simply put, Demstock is like your local county fair except it is all things Democrat! Camp out for the weekend with Democrats from across Pennsylvania, enjoy an evening bonfire with your congressional candidates, throw a few rounds of cornhole, and then check out The Big Dipper through a telescope once the stars come out. Have breakfast with some hard-working Democratic County Commissioners, then, drink a locally sourced craft brew while you meet with advocates from groups on the front lines fighting for the issues we care about the most. Snap a picture in our photo booth and share it, (maybe use #Demstock too) listen to some live music from a local musician, and try to win a basket at our silent auction. Browse the Demorabilia from campaigns past which have been carefully curated by PA’s most dedicated collectors. Take a selfie with Senator Casey, eat dinner with your new Democratic friends, and hear remarks from Pennsylvania’s most respected lawmakers. Demstock is the biggest rural Democratic festival in the country and you don’t want to miss it!
Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by about a million voters, but that margin is down sharply in recent decades. Some of my writing about Democrats in Pennsylvania (especially John Fetterman) is here and here.
This list of towns in the Keystone State’s so-called rural “T”—the vast area that lies between the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metro areas, stretching north to the New York state line—could have been either.
In fact, this was U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman’s campaign itinerary on Saturday, May 7, just ten days before the Pennsylvania primary. This 245-mile, five-town circuit was part of his commitment to visit each of the state’s 67 counties, a very literal execution of his “every county, every vote” slogan.
In doing so, Fetterman deposed opponents associated with the state’s urban centers, State Senator Malcolm Kenyatta, of Philadelphia and U.S. Congressman Conor Lamb of Pittsburgh. Not a bad showing for a boy from York who served for 13 years as mayor of Braddock, population 1,761 (albeit part of the Pittsburgh metro area), before he was elected Lt. Governor in 2018.Extraordinary Rural Outreach
If you’ve never heard of the five Pennsylvania towns Fetterman visited that day in early May, you’re surely not alone. With populations between 3,000 and 10,000, they’re small enough that many folks in Philly or Pittsburgh would be hard-pressed to place them on a map.
And that seemed to be the point. Fetterman’s messaging wasn’t aimed at metro Pennsylvania. He was talking to rural Pennsylvanians, letting them know he sees them. He put his body—all 6 ft. 8 inches of it—where his mouth is and showed up to meet them in their community centers, VFW halls, and churches.
It’s surely significant, too, that Fetterman’s 67-county primary campaign tour was not his first visit to the state’s rural reaches. In fact, his inaugural circuit was in 2019 when, as newly minted Lt. Governor, he visited every county to conduct town hall meetings on the issue of cannabis legalization. As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch expressed it, when Fetterman returned to ask for their votes, he was “shrouded in the purple haze of a political rock star.”
According to a Meet the Press segment on the Democrats’ rural problem this spring, rural voters’ declining support for Democrats is a long-term trend that has only accelerated in recent years. Bill Clinton carried roughly half the nation’s rural counties (1,117) in 1996, but Barack Obama carried only 455 in 2008. Joe Biden won just 194 in 2020, a mere 17 percent of what Clinton garnered a few decades earlier.
Trump is one reason for the sharp recent decline in the Democrats’ rural fortunes. He tapped not only rural nostalgia but also rural anger over crummy job markets associated with the widening regional inequality that has left most nonmetropolitan areas struggling. Trump openly bashed urban phenomena, as when he linked inner cities to “American carnage.” Though progressives heard this as a racist dog whistle, it proved an odd salve on the deep rural wound of being unseen and underappreciated.
Of course, that rhetoric also aggravated polarization along the rural-urban axis, and some bad behavior predictably ensued. An Associated Press feature in February included vignettes of small-town Democrats removing bumper stickers and yard signs to avoid harassment by conservative neighbors.
Great as his investment in rural Pennsylvania has been, Fetterman faces the added challenge of endorsing especially progressive policies in places that tend conservative. His stances on abortion, unions, LGBTQ rights, and legalizing “dreamers” are all pretty far left—and articulated firmly and decisively. He recently declared health care “a right, NOT a privilege” in relation to the anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid.
Fetterman has called repeatedly for abolishing the filibuster to advance a progressive agenda, and he’s criticized his neighbor, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, for obstructing the Democratic agenda in Washington. The only issue on which Fetterman doesn’t align with the progressive playbook is fracking, which he supports. It is, after all, a staple of the Pennsylvania energy economy.
In short, having played the everywhere card, Fetterman is now prioritizing the everyman card. And even some Republicans admit he wins the “someone-I’d-like-to-have-a-beer-with” contest. The question is: will Fetterman’s relatability be enough to bring conservative-leaning rural voters along with his progressive agenda?
A Shift in Focus for the General Election
Fetterman’s energetic engagement with rural Pennsylvania came to an end just a few days before the Pennsylvania primary in mid-May. Less than a week after traveling that 245-mile loop to visit those five small cities on May 7, Fetterman was hospitalized following a stroke. He is on the mend after getting a pacemaker, but barely back on the campaign trail. (The two July stops he publicized on his Twitter feed were both in the Philly metro—still in hoodie and gym shorts among the well-heeled crowd).
Meanwhile, Fetterman’s messaging has shifted as much as how he spends his time. The colored dots in his Twitter feed are more recently used to illustrate rhetoric about flipping the seat from red to blue (Republican Pat Toomey is retiring). Fetterman is now trolling his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz (television’s “Dr. Oz”) for only recently having moved to Pennsylvania, to his mother-in-law’s address, no less.
It remains to be seen how Fetterman’s new focus will play in rural Pennsylvania, especially since a less energetic candidate isn’t likely to make a third circuit of the Keystone state. But it may not matter much with rural voters, given that Fetterman has probably already done what he can to woo them—just by showing up and demonstrating his respect for the forgotten places, the forgotten people.
Meanwhile, one can only hope that other Democrats running for statewide office—among them Senatorial candidates like Tim Ryan in Ohio, Mike Franken in Iowa, Trudy Busch Valentine in Missouri, and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin—are looking with envy at what Fetterman built in rural Pennsylvania and rethinking their own rural strategy.
Or maybe they’re finally asking if they even have one.
They might start with a listen to Johnny Cash’s traveling song.
I published this opinion piece today in Politico Magazine, "John Fetterman is Running a Test that Democrats Need to Watch."
Here's an excerpt:
As a scholar who studies rural people and places, I’ve noticed one Democratic candidate who defies th[e] trend [of failing to vie for rural voters]. While consultants and organizers talk about the need for rural talking points and investments in rural newspaper and radio buys, this politician has deployed the most obvious strategy for making inroads with rural voters: He showed up in every county in his state.
Then, he did something really remarkable: He showed up again.
That candidate is John Fetterman, who secured the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania’s May primary with a robust 59 percent of the vote and currently holds the lead in general election polling.
Fetterman lived up to his “Every County, Every Vote” slogan. On a single Saturday in early May, for example, he visited five counties in north-central Pennsylvania, part of the state’s “rural T” — the vast area which form a big “T” on the map between the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh metro areas and north to the New York state line.
* * *
The attention a high-profile candidate like Fetterman has paid to rural areas of his state may begin to ease the rural inferiority complex that’s been festering for decades, as rural economies have stagnated, small towns have lost population and country folks have become the butt of jokes.
* * *
Whatever happens in the general election, Fetterman’s rural success in the primary raises the question: Why aren’t more Democratic candidates pursuing rural voters like Fetterman has?
Mural in Millheim, Pennsylvania (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2018
Here are some select excerpts focusing on geography and the rural vote:
The state’s urban-suburban-rural divides are also growing between — and within — the parties. Pennsylvania Republicans are increasingly relying on rural areas, while Democrats are becoming a party of city dwellers and suburbanites. Those shifting coalitions have far-reaching effects.
* * *
Geographic sorting between the parties is continuing
The parties’ long pattern of geographic self-segregation continues: Republicans are increasingly a rural and exurban party, while Democrats rely on urban and suburban voters.
What’s less obvious, but equally important, is that there are also important geographic divides within the parties.
Consider rural counties. They’ve always been more important in Republican primaries than in Democratic ones. But Democratic primary votes from rural counties now make up just one-sixth of the statewide total — half the share they did 20 years ago.
Penn Valley (c)Lisa R. Pruitt 2018
By contrast, rural votes have consistently made up a third of the Republican primary electorate, even as overall turnout has increased and the rural population has significantly declined.
Many of these voters were mobilized by Trump’s 2016 campaign and have stayed engaged.
* * *
Democratic growth continues in the suburbs. For decades, the four Philadelphia collar counties were a more significant source of primary votes for Republicans than for Democrats. But over the last decade, that pattern has reversed.
In 2000, Democrats got only 10% of their primary vote from these suburbs. Now, it’s almost 25%. Since Trump’s election, that’s been a bigger share than Republicans get from the suburbs.
* * *
Rural Republicans vote differently from urban and suburban ones
It’s clear rural Republicans aren’t just becoming more reliable voters — they also tend to vote for different candidates.
While Oz and McCormick [Republican contenders for the U.S. Senate; Oz was ultimately declared the Republican nominee] performed almost equally well in all regions of the state, smaller counties had a special affinity for far-right candidates Barnette [Republican candidate for U.S. Senate] and Mastriano [Republican nominee for Governor].
What’s more, rural voters — as well as supporters of Barnette and Mastriano more broadly — also voted heavily in person, shunning mail voting even more than other Republicans, who already generally avoid it.
Madisonburg, Pennsylvania (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2018
The three candidates with the lowest share of mail votes were Mastriano, Oz, and Barnette. The first two were endorsed by Trump, who has railed against mail voting. The third claimed Trump’s mantle all the same.
The Center for Rural Pennsylvania's definition of rural and urban is based on population density. Population density is calculated by dividing the total population of a specific area by the total number of square land miles of that area. According to the 2020 Census, the population of Pennsylvania is 13,002,700 and the number of square miles of land in Pennsylvania is 44,742. Therefore, the population density is 291 people per square mile.
A county or school district is rural when the number of people per square mile within the county or school district is fewer than 291. Counties and school districts that have 291 people or more per square mile are considered urban.
A municipality is rural when the number of people per square mile in the municipality is fewer than 291 or the municipality is in a rural county and has fewer than 2,500 residents. All other municipalities are considered urban.
According to the Center's definition, there are 48 rural counties and 19 urban counties in Pennsylvania. In 2020, nearly 3.4 million residents, or 26 percent of the state's 13.0 million residents, called these rural counties home.
At the school district level, 238 of the state's 500 public school districts are rural. During the 2020-2021 school year, 374,732 public school students attended schools in rural districts, or 25 percent of the state's nearly 1.41 million public school students.
At the municipal level, 1,649, or 64 percent, of the state's 2,560 municipalities are rural and 911 municipalities, or 36 percent, are urban. In 2020, rural municipalities had a total of 2.9 million residents or 22 percent of the state's population. Urban municipalities had 10.1 million residents or 78 percent of the state's population.
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