What you can learn in a small town (according to a Brooklyn hipster)

Sam Kahn recently wrote for Persuasion (and his own Substack) about what he, as a documentary filmmaker living in Brooklyn, learned when he visited small towns/the flyover states. The headline is, "A Reckoning is Coming for the Democrats." Here's an excerpt:

I always felt a lot wiser every time I returned to my Brooklyn coffee shop or neighborhood bookstore; I always felt like I wanted to start getting into arguments with everyone around me. It wasn’t that my politics were so different from my coastal brethren, but after even a few days in Decatur or Lubbock or Clovis or wherever I was, it would be clear to me that there was a great deal about the country that liberals and progressives—however well-intentioned they might be—were just missing.

Politics would almost never come up on these shoots, but it would just be screamingly obvious that the people I talked to would have had no chance of voting Democratic. The cultural markers were all off. People liked to drive and to shoot. People liked their chain stores. People hated the feeling of being scolded, which was above all what they associated with the Dems. On one of the very first shoots I ever did, a rancher in Clovis, New Mexico, told me, “People like to have a real independent lifestyle around here” shortly before he urinated right off of the bed of his truck. But that general attitude could have stood in for just about any of the shoots I did. People were friendly and interesting, they were eager to form cultural bridges—those same ranchers really wanted to let me know that they knew every word of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Rolling Stones songs, maybe thinking that I assumed they listened to Gene Autry or something—but I strongly felt myself having to shed anything “Democratic,” anything “liberal,” in order to fit in.

In the places I was visiting, the Democratic Party meant, above all, taxes. It really wasn’t much more complicated than that.

* * * 

In the coastal enclaves where I lived, being an “environmentalist” was something like a candidacy for sainthood, but in the places where I was shooting it was a dirty word—and the environmental advocacy organizations seemed really to not get that.

* * * 

And strike three was wokeism. 

There's more to the essay, of course, including an expansion on what the author means by wokeism, which references racial issues, among others.

Returning to the theme of the headline, the author concludes that, "at the national level, [Democrats] seemed to have lost all ability to communicate simply and clearly to hinterland voters."

Don't miss the essay in its entirety here. 

Biden's investments in rural America

Farah Stockman wrote in the New York Times blog yesterday about the Biden administration's investment in rural America.  

Frustration in rural America, which has long felt left behind in federal attention and dollars, has been a major driver of right-wing populism. To counter that, the Biden administration has bet literally billions on the idea that federal investments can turn those places around. The infrastructure act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act all contained special incentives aimed at improving the economic prospects of rural towns and small cities across the country.

It’s too early to tell whether it worked.

Stockman then notes a recently published Brookings Institution Report seeking to assess just that--whether these investments are working.  In particular, it tracks "$525 billion in private investment in advance technologies like clean energy and semiconductors" and "found that a significant portion has gone into economically depressed places that hadn't seen those types of investments before."  Here's a bullet point form the Bookings Institution Report: 

So far, economically distressed counties are receiving a larger-than-proportional share of that investment surge relative to their current share of the economy. With comparatively low prime-age employment rates and median household incomes, these counties account for about 8% of national GDP but have received 16% of announced strategic sector investments since 2021.

The NYT blog post focuses on Haywood County, Tennessee and Matagorda County, Texas, which are seeing the benefit of these investments.  

Literary Ruralism (Part XLIII): GOP pollster Ruffini's Party of the People

In late 2023, GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini published his first book Party of the People:  Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.  It's got quite a few references to the rural vote, and I'm going to highlight here some of the ones from Chapter 1, also titled "Party of the People"  (emphasis mine). 

The chapter leads with the assertion that political parties used to come down to class.  Increasingly, however, the key axis is between those with a college degree and those without one: 

The choice to finish college and to not finish (or event start) is now the choice that says the most about who you are and what you value in life—between self-actualization in a competitive professional field or an honest day’s work mainly as a way to provide for your family; between acquiring knowledge for its own sake or staying close to the people and places you knew growing up. Among whites, this basic cultural divide translated to a modest political divide in the 2000 election—when the concept of rural red versus urban blue first came into view—and a big one in the 2016 election, when one candidate intuited a path to power that involved making implicit cultural differences between the parties very, very explicit.

* * *

 Since a college diploma translates readily to higher incomes, the new education divide has upended the class divides that defined twentieth-century politics. As a result, the Republican Party now has more people in it who are in the bottom half of the income distribution than it ever has, while it bleeds votes among the wealthiest. 

 * * * 

Signs of the class role reversal are also present among Black and Asian American voters, where those in higher-income brackets voted a few points more Democratic than their lower-income counterparts in 2020. The crucial exception to this trend are Hispanics, the group where Donald Trump made his biggest gains in the 2020 election. On the margin, higher-income Hispanics voted 11 points more Republican in 2020 than lower-income Hispanics. In this, they resemble the white voters of the 1970s and ‘80s, a time when there was no appreciable education divide and higher-income members of the group were more likely to support Republicans. 

* * *

How did the class role reversal actually happen? Right in the title, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? talks about the phenomenon as one might talk about an unwell relative. In 2000, the country saw a hard shift to the right among rural voters, powering Bush victories in a raft of Clinton-voting border states or those on the fringes of the South, from Louisiana all the way up to West Virginia, a coal-mining state once considered the most Democratic in the country. Liberal readers craved answers about how poor, rural Americans could be tricked into voting against their economic self-interest. Frank’s story centers around his home state of Kansas, where Republicans had morphed from the party of the country club into the party of Sunday service—banking the votes of lower-income, deeply religious white voters opposed to abortion and gay marriage. In Frank’s telling of the story, it was the Republican bankers and donors in the wealthy Kansas City suburb of Mission Hills—where Frank Grew up—pulling the strings. “Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes,” Frank riffed. “Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization…Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking…Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes.” Mission Hills donors might grumble about the rural riffraff entering the party, but that was a small price to pay for a Republican majority that would deliver on their desired economic agenda.

* * * 

In Wisconsin, Clinton improved Democratic margins in the Milwaukee area, most prominently in the suburbs, but turnout in Milwaukee proper dropped by more than ten points, which meant fewer votes to hold back the rural red tide for Trump.

* * * 

Trump had surged all along the Mexican border with Texas, including a 55-point swing in rural Starr County in the Rio Grande Valley, nearly winning a county that Clinton had captured four years earlier by 60 points. He won next-door Zapata County, the first Republican since 1920 to do so. Votes were slower to report in California, but the surprise election to the House of two Asian American Republicans in Orange County, Michelle Steel and Young Kim, indicated a surprising shift in immigrant-heavy communities that was broad-reaching and not limited to Hispanics. With Trump’s coalition adding more working-class nonwhites and subtracting more college-educated whites, the pro-Republican Electoral College skew became more pronounced. 

* * * 

It needs to be repeated that Trump lost the 2020 election. Neither his gains in key groups nor his false narratives about a stolen election change this fact. But Trump’s performance was testament to the resiliency of a Republican coalition built around the working-class voter, which in 2020 had grown to include more nonwhite voters. The rise of multiracial working-class conservatism, once on track to merit but a small footnote in the story of a landslide Trump defeat, instead became a crucial reason why the election was so close.

* * * 

The challenge for Republicans in 2023 is to show that they can reap the structural benefits of Trump’s realignment of the American electoral without Trump’s chaotic persona at the top of the ticket. Post-Trump elections show this is possible. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the 2021 race for the Virginia governorship, for example, represented a wide-ranging advance from Trump’s 2020 vote in counties across the state—including a stronger performance than Trump in the state’s rural, working-class southwest. Youngkin deftly threaded the needle in 2021, running on a genial business-savvy reminiscent of Mitt Romney, while meeting the populist moment with a campaign against a left-wing, “woke” agenda in the schools and a pledge to suspend the sales tax on groceries.

This is just a smattering of the book's attention to rural voters and their role in this re-alignment.   Indeed, Chapter 9 is entirely about realignment in the largely Latino Rio Grande Valley, which has significant pockets of rural population. 

Literary Ruralism (Part XLII): The Injustice of Place

I've read several books about the impact of place on who gets ahead in life--and who does not.  I assign excerpts of many of these, for example, Sheryll Cashin's Place Not Race, to students in my seminar courses, Law and Rural Livelihoods and The First-Gen Experience in Scholarly and Popular Literature.  The famous economist Raj Chetty has also focused on zipcode as destiny.  

So I was particularly interested to see coverage in the Daily Yonder (a news source oriented to rural issues) of a new book by a famous sociologist who studies poverty and inequality, Kathryn Edin, and colleagues Timothy Nelson and Luke Shaefer:  The Injustice of Place:  Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America.  Here are some excerpts from early in the book that mention rural places specifically.  Indeed, what follows are the book's opening paragraphs:   

IT IS HARD TO SAY exactly when we first noticed the pattern. Just before we hit the outskirts of a Cotton Belt town, the fields would give way to a string of gleaming white antebellum homes with large lawns, old-growth trees, and grand entrances framed by columns reaching two or three stories high. Merging onto the majestic arterial boulevards leading into town, we would see more imposing homes presiding over meticulously manicured grounds. 

In Sparta, a rural hamlet near Augusta, Georgia, it appears as though someone has invested millions to restore an elegant Greek Revival home. New windows and shutters gleam. Yet just across the street lies a dilapidated shack, one room deep, with a sagging roof. Over in Demopolis, Alabama, sits the venerable Gaineswood, a massive structure known for its elaborate interior suites, including domed ceilings, remarkable decorative arts, and original antebellum furnishings. Left out of the photos on Gaineswood’s website and tourist brochures are the aging wood cottages in varying states of disrepair, the tumbledown trailers, and the sagging modular houses that flank the historic home.  (page 1) 

The scholars undertook in this book to study poor places, whereas they had previously studied poor people.  They also decided to study health in addition to income.  Here's more on their methodology:

To assess the level of disadvantage in a community, such as a county or a city, we combined traditional income-based measures with other markers, including health. Especially in the United States, health outcomes vary tremendously by race, ethnicity, and income. In 2008, life expectancy for highly educated white males was eighty years, but only sixty-six for low-educated Black men, whose average life span resembled numbers seen in Pakistan and Mongolia. In 2011, the infant mortality rate for Black mothers in the United States was comparable to that in Grenada and just a bit better than that in Tonga. The rate for non-Hispanic whites was much closer to that in Germany and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, a tidal wave of new research was showing that a person’s health is shaped more by their context—their income, family circumstances, and community characteristics, for example—than by their genetic profiles or the medical care they receive. 

Ultimately, as the scope of our study of place-based disadvantage grew, we chose to incorporate two well-measured health outcomes, one that captured conditions at the start of life and the other at the end. In a particular community, what were a baby’s chances of being born with low birth weight, which is closely associated with infant mortality and other threats to children’s health? In that community, how long could the average person expect to live? 

We also recognized the importance of measuring whether disadvantage in a particular place persisted for children growing up there. Especially in the American context, it is almost an article of faith that kids should have the opportunity to do better than their parents. Recently, a team of economists employed confidential IRS data to create a measure of intergenerational mobility (the chance that children born low-income could rise up the economic ladder) for every city and county in the nation. These researchers used tax records to follow children born in the 1980s through adulthood to see where they stood on the income ladder compared to their parents. It was already understood that there were big differences in intergenerational mobility by parental income, ethnicity, and race, but the most stunning revelation of this new research was how much variation there was by place. In some communities, a child born into poverty would probably stay low-income as an adult. Yet in others, they had a much better chance of reaching the middle class. It seemed clear to us that to measure the depth of disadvantage in a community, it would be important to include the rate of mobility from one generation to the next. (pp. 3-4) 

This follows several pages later--and reveals a rural surprise to the authors:  

Immediately, we could see from the rankings that the geographical pattern was stark. The first surprise—especially for three professors who had spent our careers studying urban poverty—was that the “most disadvantaged” places on our index were mostly rural. There is considerable poverty in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. But in our apples-to-apples comparison, none of those cities ranked even among the 600 most disadvantaged places in the nation. For the most part, the only cities and urban counties to find themselves among the most disadvantaged were a relatively small number of industrial municipalities in the Northeast and Midwest, such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Rochester. 

Among the rural counties at the top of the list, what we found didn’t fit what most people think of as “rural.” While some of these were majority-white, many, indeed most, were communities of Black and Hispanic Americans. We could see, too, that many places with large Native American populations ranked among the most disadvantaged in the nation (19 of the top 200). Beyond these, though, not one community in the western part of the United States registered among the “most disadvantaged” (those in the top fifth). While some might say we ought to have considered the impact of the high cost of living on poverty—those costs are higher in some places—there are trade-offs. Although people pay more for housing in those places, there are at the same time structural advantages in those areas of the country, such as good health care systems, a more generous safety net, public transportation, and higher-quality schools. This, we think, is why some high-cost big cities like San Francisco and Seattle fall further down our index than expected. We also found that those living in the 200 most disadvantaged places on our index were just as prone to have major difficulties paying for housing as those in America’s 500 largest cities. 

Apart from predominantly Native American communities, the places that our index identified as “most disadvantaged” most often are found in three regions—Appalachia, South Texas, and the vast southern Cotton Belt running across seven states. (pp. 5-6) 

* * * 

Across rural America, monuments, celebrations, and museums are markers of local pride. Indeed, Crystal City has vigorously defended its claim to the title “Spinach Capital of the World” against upstart Alma, Arkansas—also a former spinach mecca that has erected multiple statues of Popeye. Yet in South Texas, the vast Cotton Belt, central Appalachia, and the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, these symbols celebrate a past that is fraught, to say the least. They commemorate the very industries that, for a century or more, spelled misery and hardship for thousands, if not millions, while profiting only a few. They memorialize the intensive resource extraction and resulting human exploitation that made these places America’s internal colonies. 

How did the identities of these communities become so bound to the economic legacies of the past? (p. 21) 

And, skipping to much later in the book, this is especially intersting regarding the diploma divide and how higher education is increasingly seen as a culprit: 

Most often, emerging leaders trying to set a new course have the odds stacked against them—as was the case with Cornejo’s coalition and later with the slate of La Raza candidates who came into office in South Texas in the early 1970s. People at every level are hoping for their failure: when they stumble, it is all the easier to blame the community for its own problems. Universities could certainly play a role in helping to equip local leaders with the tools needed to succeed, perhaps through a model like the USDA’s community- and university-based Cooperative Extension System. Recently, one community leader told us that while his state’s flagship university is not beloved in most rural towns, the extension service is immensely popular because it provides knowledge and resources the community values. Using university extension programs as a conduit for equipping local leaders might help higher ed prove its worth in many far-flung communities. (p. 237) 

Altogether, the book uses the word "rural" 67 times, many of which are in footnotes/end notes.  Here's a WHYY segment on the book.    

Edin's prior books did not pay particular attention to rural poverty or other rural issues.  She is perhaps most famous for Promises I Can Keep:  Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage (2005) (with Maria Kefalas); Doing the Best I Can:  Fatherhood in the Inner City (2013) (also with Nelson) and $2.00 a Day:  Living on Almost Nothing in America (2015) (also with Shaefer). 

Cross-posted to FirstGenCourse Blog.  

School choice in Texas... It's not over yet

Texans' love for their public schools was tested this past legislative session. In April 2023, the Texas State Senate passed a bill that would provide families with a $8,000 credit they could use to send their kids to private schools or put towards homeschooling expenses. This school voucher movement has gained enormous traction recently, particularly in conservative states, as parents and politicians "battle public schools over books in the libraries, the teaching of race and racism and transgender issues." 

Texas is not alone in this movement. More than 12 states have currently adopted some form of voucher program. Across the border in Oklahoma, the state board of education is discussing the approval of the first religious charter school in the United States. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1, expanding school choice options by eliminating financial eligibility restrictions and the enrollment cap. 

While the school voucher proposal in Texas failed in May 2023, it is likely not the end of the road for the Texas school choice movement. As recently as September 23, 2023, Texas Senator Ted Cruz stated that the domestic issue he cares most about is school choice. Additionally, a Texas House committee recently proposed a "path forward" for the movement on a smaller scale that prioritizes "high-need" students. 

The voucher bill failed partly due to the alliance between Democrats and rural Republicans in the Texas State House. Historically, this coalition of House Democrats and rural Republican representatives voted together to ensure funding for Texas public schools. Despite this longstanding alliance, the future of the school voucher program in Texas remains uncertain. As such, it is worthwhile to address the impact the school choice movement may have on rural districts in Texas. 

Texans' support for public schools is deep-rooted, particularly in rural districts, as these public schools are not only some of the biggest local employers but are also commonly the center of community life. Texas has more schools in rural areas than any other state (more than 2,000 campuses) and employs a Task Force "charged with identifying current challenges and best practices for rural school districts statewide." 

According to The Heritage Foundation, some of the highest levels of support for education savings accounts (another term for school vouchers) in Texas came from rural counties. It is worth noting, this news source is a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. The poll numbers that The Heritage Foundation is reporting are not necessarily lies. But Graydon Hicks III, a superintendent in Fort Davis, a rural community in Texas, thinks some of the rural "support" for the bill arose from the complicated language of the bill itself.

Previous blog posts discussed Fort Davis, Hicks, and the school choice movement in depth. You can read them here and here.

Hicks is struggling to keep Fort Davis' lights on. The school district doesn't have an art teacher, a cafeteria, a librarian, bus routes, or a track. Given that Fort Davis cannot afford to hire security, Hicks and 11 others carry firearms in place of a security guard. Fort Davis' district only has 184 students enrolled from pre-K to 12th grade. Since every student who leaves the school represents a more significant proportion of revenue compared to larger urban schools, Fort Davis is particularly vulnerable to the school voucher system. 

In addition to Fort Davis, those in Robert Lee, Texas, are concerned about the school voucher movement. The school is already struggling with a "razor-thin" budget that is heavily reliant on revenue from attendance numbers. Given that there are only around 18 students per grade, any drop in enrollment "can force rural schools like Robert Lee to make hard decisions."

While the House Bill failed during the regular session, some Texas lawmakers are committed to creating a school voucher program one way or another. It is safe to say that the battle of school choice laws is not over in Texas. 

Texas Monthly takes a deep dive into the consequences of vouchers and school choice for rural schools

Forrest Wilder reports for Texas Monthly out of Fort Davis, Texas, on the way Texas' school choice legislation is hurting rural schools.  Fort Davis is the county seat of Jeff Davis County, population 1,996, on the southwest edge of the state.  The story features a "conservative, gun-toting superintendent" named Graydon Hicks III, who says that, recently, he "has never felt farther from the state's political center of gravity."  

For years Hicks ... has been watching helplessly as a slow-motion disaster has unfolded, the result of a deeply flawed and resource-starved public school–finance system. Over the past decade, funding for his little district, which serves just 184 students from pre-K through twelfth grade, has sagged even as costs, driven by inflation and ever-increasing state mandates, have soared. The math is stark. His austere budget has hovered at around $3.1 million per year for the past six years. But the notoriously complex way the state finances schools allows him to bring in only about $2.5 million per year through property taxes.

Hicks has hacked away at all but the most essential elements of his budget. More than three quarters of Fort Davis’s costs come in the form of payroll, and the starting salary for teachers is the state minimum, just $33,660 a year. There are no signing bonuses or stipends for additional teacher certifications. Fort Davis has no art teacher. No cafeteria. No librarian. No bus routes. The track team doesn’t have a track.

But Hicks can’t cut his way out of this financial crisis. This school year, Fort Davis ISD has a projected $621,500 funding gap. To make up the difference, Hicks is tapping into savings. Doug Karr, a Lubbock school-finance consultant who reviewed the district’s finances, said Fort Davis ISD was “wore down to the nub, and the nub’s all gone. And that pretty much describes small school districts.”

“I am squeezing every nickel and dime out of every budget item,” Hicks said. “I don’t have excess of anything.” When I joked that it sounded like he was holding things together with duct tape and baling wire, he didn’t laugh. He said, “I literally have baling wire holding some fences up, holding some doors up.”

The district’s crisis comes at a time when the state is flush with an unprecedented $32.7 billion budget surplus. Hicks is a self-described conservative, but he thinks the far right is trying to destroy public education. For years, the state has starved public schools of funding: Texas ranks forty-second in per-pupil spending, according to Raise Your Hand Texas, a pro–public education nonprofit founded by H-E-B chairman Charles Butt. And yet Governor Greg Abbott is spending enormous political capital on promoting a school-voucher plan, which would divert taxpayer funds to private schools. Public education, Abbott has repeatedly said, will remain “fully funded,” though public-education spending is projected to be lower this year than when he took office, in 2015, and the Legislature recently passed a $321.3 billion budget with no pay raise for teachers and very little new funding for schools. Unable to get his voucher plan through the regular legislative session, Abbott is threatening to call lawmakers back to Austin until he gets his way.

* * * 

With each passing month, his rural district inches closer to financial ruin. If nothing changes by fall of next year, Fort Davis will have depleted its savings. He doesn’t know the exact day that his schools will go broke, but he can see it coming.

Wilder, by the way, does an admirable job breaking down and describing Texas' complex school funding system.  One of the challenges of that funding formula for places like Fort Davis is that local property values are going up, which leads to a diminution in funds received from the state but not necessarily any commensurate rise in local funds to support the schools.  

Near the end of the story comes this, highlighting the tension between the state's rural reaches and decision makers in Austin: 

As we were sitting outside his office in his red pickup with the engine idling, Hicks told me that he’d given up on lobbying the Legislature. He mentioned again that [Lt. Gov] Patrick and other GOP lawmakers are trying to destroy public education by using vouchers to privatize schools, and he said that most other politicians “don’t give a s— about West Texas.” But for the time being he was still fighting: writing op-eds, firing off plaintive missives, asking concerned citizens to contact their legislators.

Toward the end of our visit, I asked Hicks what’s going to happen to his schools. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not patient enough to spend time with assholes in Austin, and I’m not rich enough to buy any votes.” TEA has suggested that Fort Davis consolidate with another district—most likely Valentine, which is 35 miles away—but Hicks said both districts would suffer for it.

And the very end of the story gives us the news that Superintendent Hicks has announced his retirement. 

An earlier New York Times story about the school funding situation in Texas--as it relates to vouchers--was more positive about the survival of rural schools-- in part because residents will fight for them.  And in places like New Home, which is economically embedded with Lubbock, those fighting for rural schools are more numerous and will perhaps have enough political clout to influence legislators in Austin.  

More Elon Musk havoc in rural (well, exurban) Texas

I earlier blogged about the disruption caused by Elon Musk's SpaceX activities in Boca Chica, Texas, on the coast.  Now, the Washington Post is reporting on how residents of exurban Austin--Bastrop County, population 97,216 (so barely nonmetro)--are tiring of the consequences of Musk's undertakings there.  Jeanne Whalen writes under the headline, "Texas welcomed Elon Musk. Now his rural neighbors aren’t so sure":  

Chap Ambrose has always been a fan of Elon Musk. He spent $100 to join the waiting list for Tesla’s first pickup in 2019 and bought internet service from Musk’s satellite provider.

But then the billionaire’s companies moved in next door to the computer programmer, who works from his rural, hilltop home.

Two years later, massive construction sites and large white warehouses have taken over the green pastures where cattle used to graze. Semis barrel up and down the narrow country roads. And the companies — rocket manufacturer SpaceX and tunneling company Boring — are seeking state permission to dump treated wastewater into the nearby Colorado River.

“I just have no faith that the leadership there values the environment and these shared resources,” said Ambrose, who leads a group of local residents pushing Musk’s companies to slow down and address concerns about the environmental risks of the development. “I would say, I’m still a fan [of Elon], but I want him to do better here and be a good neighbor.”

The backlash in Bastrop, a largely rural county 30 minutes east of Austin, shows the dust Musk is kicking up as he builds a new empire in Texas. His companies are spending billions of dollars on campuses across the state, from SpaceX’s rocket launchpad on the Gulf of Mexico to a giant Tesla factory in Austin producing 5,000 Model Ys a week.

* * *

Signs of Musk’s move-fast ethos have mounted in Bastrop County. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has hit the Musk building sites with several violations over poor erosion controls and other matters. Texas’s transportation department reprimanded Boring for building an unpermitted driveway that it said posed traffic-safety concerns, and Bastrop County issued a violation over unauthorized wastewater holding tanks.

Spatial inequality in Texas indigent defense provision

William Melhado for the Texas Tribune reports under the headline, "In rural counties, Texas law puts low-income defendants at a disadvantage."  The subhead is, "A two-tiered system gives less populated counties more time to provide court-appointed lawyers, requiring creative responses to a long-standing problem."

Here's an excerpt:  

While indigent residents — those who can’t afford an attorney — of counties with more than 250,000 people must be provided with a court-appointed lawyer within one day of requesting counsel, the wait for rural Texans could stretch up to five days.

Lawmakers approved this system 22 years ago, in part to address a long-standing problem — a persistent shortage of lawyers working in rural Texas — by requiring counties to create appointment procedures and establish qualifications for attorneys representing indigent clients.

The law, however, also gave the state’s less populous counties more time to assign a court-appointed attorney, jeopardizing the right to legal representation as guaranteed by the U.S. and Texas constitutions.

“That’s changing the law to make the problem legal. It’s not fixing the problem,” said Pamela Metzger, a law professor and director of the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

For low-income residents of almost 200 rural counties, where few if any lawyers may practice, delays in representation can translate into more time in jail and rushed plea deals — both of which can lead to loss of jobs, housing and child custody.

* * *

The problem has drawn the attention of several Republican lawmakers who recently filed identical House and Senate bills to establish a favorable loan repayment program for lawyers who choose to work in rural parts of the state where relatively lower salaries and few law firms can limit opportunities, particularly for young lawyers struggling with law school debt.

Under House Bill 4487 and Senate Bill 1906, lawyers would receive up to $180,000 to repay student loans if they practice criminal law in a rural area for four years. The goal is to encourage novice legal professionals to build careers, families and community ties in rural Texas.

In addition, some rural counties have banded together to create public defender offices that provide lawyers for indigent residents. Although the offices are providing needed relief, hundreds of rural defense attorneys have retired, died or moved away in recent years, leaving some areas underserved.

* * *

According to research by the Deason Center at SMU, there were 181 different plans for appointing counsel in 2019, each with their own standards of determining when someone meets the financial threshold to receive a court-appointed attorney. Those plans can consider income, assets, financial obligations and more when considering if someone is “not financially able to employ counsel,” which is the state’s definition of indigent.

My work on spatial inequality in indigent defense provision in Arizona is here. 

Texans dig in to keep rural schools open in face of conservative school choice movement

J. David Goodman wrote in the New York Times today about a topic that's been on my mind for a while: the threat that the school choice movement presents to rural schools and how that's playing out in so-called red states.  The dateline is New Home, Texas, population 334, in the state's panhandle.

Some key excerpts from the story follow: 

The school voucher movement, which seeks to direct public money to private or religious schools, has rapidly gained steam in conservative states as parents battle public schools over books in the libraries, the teaching of race and racism and transgender issues. More than a dozen states have adopted some form of school vouchers. This year several, including Florida, Iowa and Utah, voted to create expansive new programs open to all students, an approach pioneered in Arizona.

But Texas has been an outlier so far, in large part because of the longstanding support for public schools in deep red communities like New Home. In far-flung districts around the state, parents and educators have defended their schools, which are often the biggest local employer and the center of community life.

 * * *

Amid a growing national movement to give parents public money to spend on private schools, it is in places like New Home — where the football coach is a local fixture and students learn both how to read and how to judge the quality of a cut of meat — that the conservative campaign has run up against the realpolitik of rural Texas.

* * * 

The governor’s aides point to polls showing support for school choice even among rural Republicans, though opponents argue that such numbers are dependent on how the question is framed.

“There’s no groundswell for this in my district,” said State Representative Travis Clardy, a Republican who represents rural counties in East Texas. He voted against vouchers last week.

In New Home, nearly 400 miles northwest of Austin, parents said they were not yet seeing the issue as a threat.

“Let’s say they did this,” said Kayla Ferguson, a Republican who owns The Spot, a recently renovated small restaurant by the school, where her three daughters are students. “It wouldn’t be something where they wouldn’t have public schools, right?”

Martina Torres, a parent who works at the restaurant, chimed in from behind the counter. “To me, the big scare would be if so many parents chose to go with that decision, and it would cut the money for the public school,” she said.

“I don’t like the idea,” Ms. Ferguson said. “I would never send my kids to a private school.”

Unlike many rural districts, where the public schools are the only nearby options, New Home is close enough to the city of Lubbock that parents could choose to send their children to nearby private schools at their own expense.

Instead, the opposite has been taking place: Many parents unhappy with the public schools in Lubbock have been moving to New Home, instead of enrolling their children in private schools. Others remain in Lubbock but drive their children 25 miles each way to school. Enrollment is soaring.

Many say they are transferring from more politically and culturally diverse Lubbock in search of smaller classes and a place where the values more closely align with their own.

I've marveled that commitment to rural schools and communities hasn't brought more attention to this issue in Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, which have also gotten swept up in strong school-choice movements.

New Census Bureau data show exurbia thriving

A story in the New York Times today based on just-released Census Bureau data reveals that many major metropolitan counties lost population between 2021 and 2022, even as immigration boomed in these same places.  An area of overall population growth, however, is what the Times writers label exurban, which includes some areas in the West experiencing gentrification.  Here's an excerpt highlighting the latter trends from the story by Robert Gebeloff, Dana Goldstein, and Stefanos Chen:

Counties identified as exurbs by the American Communities Project account for about 12 percent of the nation’s population, but they could claim about half the national population growth in 2022.

Counties tagged by government economists as specializing in recreational activity account for 9 percent of the national population and 28 percent of the growth in 2022.

Kaufman County, Texas, about 35 miles southeast of downtown Dallas, is among the fastest-growing counties in the nation. Traditionally a hub for ranching and farming, Kaufman County has steadily suburbanized, and also encompasses parts of Cedar Creek Lake, a popular fishing and recreation area. Its population grew by 9 percent in 2022, and stands at 172,000, up from 40,000 in 1980.

Kaufman County became a popular place from which to telecommute during the pandemic, the story explains, and 70,000 homes are currently in the construction pipeline there, with prices in the $250,000 range.  

Regarding amenity rich places, Gebeloff, Goldstein and Chen write: 

Because of their growing populations, many exurban and vacation counties are in economic and cultural flux, said Jaap Vos, professor of planning and natural resources at the University of Idaho.

Affluent newcomers to areas like Sun Valley, Idaho, known for its ski resorts, may bring new political and spending habits and deplete natural resources, he noted — or may not live in their new homes year round.

“They may not care so much about the local coffee store and rather go to Starbucks,” Professor Vos said, adding, “Do they have kids? Can we convince them to spend money in our local stores? Are they as likely to volunteer for organizations or sit on boards?”

Then regarding immigration and natural decline, the story notes:

Overall, three-quarters of the nation’s counties experienced more deaths than births last year, a statistic that is “a rarity,” said Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire. In 2018, just 45 percent of counties had more deaths than births.

* * * 

But because the country was aging and experiencing low fertility rates even before the emergence of Covid-19, the numbers point toward immigration as a key driver of future growth. That puts pressure on the country to integrate newcomers into the job market, housing and schools.

This quote from Johnson, perhaps best known as a rural demographer, closes the story, which does not use the word "rural":   

If places are going to grow, it’s immigration that helps.

This is a good occasion to share this recent story from the San Jose Mercury News about Livermore, California, between the Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley and arguably exurban of a sort.  The gist of the story is captured in the headline, "As the Bay Area Urbanizes Around it, Livermore is one of the Last Ag Cities Standing."  The "ag city" juxtaposition is curious--and one that I find confusing.  Here's an excerpt from Will McCarthy's story that perhaps helps to unpack the paradox in that headline:   

From certain places on Darrel Sweet’s ranch near Altamont Pass, the world looks no different than it did 150 years ago. Wildflowers blanket the hillside. A ranch dog named J.J. chases squirrels across a muddy dirt track. Cows stand near a cattle pond, looking out at a range of rolling hills that seem to act as a bulwark against time.

But from one of the ranch’s hilltops, it’s clear that much has changed. Towering wind turbines dot every mountain. To the west are sprawling developments in Dublin. To the south, the suburban center of Livermore.

“When you’re in downtown Livermore, you’d think this place is all developed,” Sweet said. “But it’s not.”

As cities around it have undergone explosive growth, residents say Livermore has maintained a sense of identity tied to its agricultural and ranching history. But that identity has also come into conflict with suburban development and the changing culture of the Bay Area.

Working farms and vineyards still surround the city of 86,000. An ancient ranch, part of the original Mission San Jose, is preserved in the center of town. And at Livermore High School, dozens of students continue to enroll in an agricultural sciences program — the last of its kind in Alameda County.

Thus, as one long-time resident put it, Livermore is a place where "you can find 'a physicist, a rancher, and a gravel pit worker all sitting together at the bar.'”  The reference to physicist is because of the presence of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  

Postscript:  Here is what the Daily Yonder had to say about the new Census Bureau data in relation to rural communities.  

The latest on the rural lawyer shortage, nationally and in Texas

Stateline News by Pew published this piece on the rural lawyer shortage a few weeks ago.  Elaine Povich writes:  

Despite efforts in recent years by a handful of states, universities and legal associations to ease the problem, there remains a glaring lack of lawyers in many far-flung places. This leaves those areas and their residents without easy access to legal advice for family issues, wills, estates and property transactions, in addition to any criminal or civil legal disputes. Residents often have to drive long distances to another city or rely on remote video meetings.

“That’s an access problem when you are asking someone to drive 100 miles or more to do a simple will or a simple divorce,” said Sam Clinch, associate executive director of the Nebraska State Bar Association, a state with few lawyers outside its largest cities, Lincoln and Omaha. Nebraska has a small state loan repayment program to help a few attorneys who agree to practice rurally; in a decade, the program has placed 39 lawyers in rural parts of the state.

Some 40% of all counties in the United States — 1,272 of 3,141 — have fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents, so few that they are considered “legal deserts,” according to the most comprehensive survey of attorneys available, conducted by the American Bar Association in 2020.

The story is chock full of details from several states, including South Dakota, which founded the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program a decade ago.  Here's a startling data point:

However, while the program has made an impact, the rural-urban attorney gap is still wide. The South Dakota Searchlight reported that 72% of all South Dakota attorneys still live in four cities: Aberdeen, the capital city of Pierre, Rapid City and Sioux Falls, while only 35% of South Dakotans live in those cities.

Meanwhile, the Deason Center for Criminal Justice Reform at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law published a brief on how the shortage of criminal justice practitioners is playing out in rural Texas.  An abstract for the brief follows a screenshot of some key data points:    

Texas’ rural communities urgently need more prosecutors and public defense providers. Many rural prosecutor’s offices cannot recruit and retain enough staff, so the Constitution’s promise of equal justice for all remains unfulfilled. This policy brief outlines three solutions to recruit more criminal lawyers to serve rural Texans: Educational pipelines, financial incentives, and rural public defender offices. Rural Texans deserve the same constitutional protections as their urban and suburban counterparts. With strong recruitment strategies, targeted incentive programs, and new rural defender offices, Texas can green its criminal law deserts.

And here are some key data points: 

• On average, Texas’ most urban areas have 28 lawyers for every 100 criminal cases, but rural areas have only five.
• In rural Texas, people charged with misdemeanors are four times less likely to have a lawyer than people in urban Texas.
• In 2021, no local lawyer accepted an adult criminal appointment in 65 rural counties. •
• The problem is getting worse. Since 2015, Texas has lost one-quarter of its rural defense lawyers and an untold number of rural prosecutors.

Here are the proposed solutions: 

1. Educational Pipelines. Texas should adapt its “grow your own teachers” model to recruit and retain rural criminal lawyers. Legislators should also fund rural criminal law pipeline programs and create post-graduate fellowships and incubators for prosecutors and defense providers.

2. Financial Incentives. Texas should create incentive programs modeled on the successful Physician Education Loan Repayment Program. Texas should also fund the THECB's program for rural prosecutors and expand it to include rural public defenders.

3. Rural Public Defender Offices. Legislators should allocate funds to create new rural public defender offices. They should also invest in research that identifies the rural areas with greatest current and emerging needs.

Lastly, here's an American Bar Association profile of a student at the University of Alabama School of Law, Emily G. Sims, who worked in Covington County, Alabama (population 37,570) last summer.  Sims writes in the first person: 

Covington County would perhaps appear to be an unusual location to fully maximize early professional connections and final pregraduation experience. However, summer 2022 in that rural community was more valuable than any job a big city could have afforded me.

Although overlooked by many aspiring attorneys, small-town law practice can be a rewarding and fulfilling career. The Finch Initiative at the University of Alabama School of Law aims to convey just that. Named after the lead character in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the Finch Initiative provides law students the opportunity to spend part of their summer working with a judge in a rural Alabama community.

The objective of the program is to immerse law students into the life of a small-town lawyer and hopefully facilitate unexplored enthusiasm for a similar professional path. Having grown up in a rural area, I have always appreciated all that a small town has to offer; therefore, the Finch Initiative appealed to me from the start.

Don't miss the rest of these stories about law practice in rural places, from the deep South to Texas to the plains. 

On politics in California's Imperial Valley

This LA Times column by Jean Guerrero, out of Imperial County, California, speaks to what Democrats need to do to attract the Latino/a vote there, on the Mexico border.  Here's the lede:

For Democrats who mistake demographics for destiny, Imperial County is a mystery. It’s California’s most heavily Latino county, and yet Republicans have been making gains here.

This isn’t south Texas, where former President Trump’s appeal was rooted in cowboy-idolizing Tejano culture. This is Southern California. The GOP’s allure here is more complicated.

About 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles, the still-blue county does have similarities to the Rio Grande Valley, such as proximity to Mexico and a rural economy. The sprawling fields of the Imperial Valley supply the country with winter vegetables such as lettuce and carrots.

Voting patterns among the valley’s more than 180,000 residents look like a paradox: trending progressive in some local races while inching toward Republicans in state and national ones. Michael Luellen II, an 18-year-old out gay Latino, won a City Council seat in Calipatria. Raúl Ureña, 25, who is transgender, was reelected to Calexico’s City Council, alongside their ally Gilberto Manzanarez, 29. Countywide leadership is becoming younger and more diverse, reflecting a desire for change.

At the same time, Democrats’ margins of victory for top-of-the-ballot positions, such as governor and attorney general, shrank in the midterm elections last month. The GOP is continuing to make inroads here after Trump won 36% of the county’s vote in 2020, up from 26% four years before. There’s one through-line here: rejection of the status quo.

At the county’s southern end in Calexico, where the border wall’s steel columns and barbed wire cast shadows over farms and houses steps from neighboring Mexicali, common adjectives that people used to describe Trump to me were “loco” and “racista.” Crazy and racist.

In this part of the county, people roll their eyes at Republican rhetoric about “open borders.” Locals see the reality: The region is militarized and has been for years. Border Patrol vehicles are everywhere. Green-clad agents stroll on the sidewalks and eat in the taco shops, guns on their hips. Nearly 50 miles to the north, a Border Patrol checkpoint serves as a second border.

The column is worth a read in its entirety.   

Interestingly, California's new Chief Justice grew up in the Imperial Valley.  She is the first Latina Chief Justice in the state.  Former Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, Cruz Reynoso, also grew up in the Imperial Valley. 

Big NYT feature on the federal effort to save rural hospitals, by ending inpatient care

Emily Baumgaertner reported yesterday for the New York Times under the headline, "A Rural Hospital's Excruciating Choice:  $3.2 Million a Year or Inpatient Care?"   Here are some excerpts from an important feature: 

For 46 million Americans, rural hospitals are a lifeline, yet an increasing number of them are closing. The federal government is trying to resuscitate them with a new program that offers a huge infusion of cash to ease their financial strain. But it comes with a bewildering condition: They must end all inpatient care.

The program, which invites more than 1,700 small institutions to become federally designated “rural emergency hospitals,” would inject monthly payments amounting to more than $3 million a year into each of their budgets, a game-changing total for many that would not only keep them open but allow them to expand services and staff. In return, they must commit to discharging or transferring their patients to bigger hospitals within 24 hours.

The government’s reasoning is simple: Many rural hospitals can no longer afford to offer inpatient care. A rural closure is often preceded by a decline in volume, according to a congressional report, and empty beds can drain the hospital’s ability to provide outpatient services that the community needs.

But the new opportunity is presenting many institutions with an excruciating choice.

“On one hand, you have a massive incentive, a ‘Wow!’ kind of deal that feels impossible to turn down,” said Harold Miller, the president of the nonprofit Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. “But it’s based on this longstanding myth that they’ve been forced to deliver inpatient services — not that their communities need those services to survive.”

Some rural health care providers and health policy analysts say the officials behind the rule are out of touch with the difficulties of transferring rural patients. Bigger hospitals — bogged down with Covid surges, pediatric R.S.V. patients and their own financial woes — are increasingly unwilling to accept transferred patients, particularly from small field hospitals unaffiliated with their own systems.

There are also blizzards, downed cattle fences and mountain pass roads that close for months at a time.

“I really want to give this policy a chance to work well,” said Katy Kozhimannil, director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center. But gambling with transfers could mean that “some of the most extremely remote and marginalized communities could end up with no care at all — and that’s what we were trying to avoid in the first place.”

More than 180 rural hospitals have closed since 2005.   

There's lots more recent reporting on rural healthcare worthy of note.  Here are just a few: 

This one, from the Texas Tribune, is about rural hospital closures in the Lone Star State, with Jayme Lozano reporting: 

Texas hasn’t had a hospital close since 2020, a much-needed relief following the previous decade of closures that were predominantly seen in rural communities.

That could change soon: A new report from Kaufman Hall, a health care consulting agency, that was made public Wednesday shows that nearly 1 out of every 10 Texas hospitals are now at risk of closure, twice as many as before the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020.

“Ultimately, our concern is this will impact patient care,” said John Hawkins, president of the Texas Hospital Association.

The report highlights the pandemic’s striking toll on hospitals in the state as they face growing strain from surges in respiratory illness, workforce shortages and rising costs of medication, medical supplies and labor. This has caused hospital expenses to increase greatly — the total expenses for Texas hospitals this year have cost $33.2 billion more than before the pandemic.

While the risk is greater for all Texas hospitals, it’s higher for rural hospitals than for urban facilities — a 26% risk of closing compared with a 5% risk. Hawkins said there is concern about the challenges rural hospitals could face in the near future.

Health experts have long credited support from the federal spending spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic for lessening the closure risk in 2020 and 2021. Those funds are expiring soon, leaving hospitals without that financial safety net. Nearly half of all Texas hospitals are in negative operating margins because revenue is not covering the cost of patient care.

“We know, as that federal funding runs out, we’ve created a fiscal cliff,” Hawkins said. “These operating challenges are going to continue to be real for rural hospitals.”

And two recent stories about rural health care in Colorado are here and here, both from the Colorado Sun.  

On the importance of Texas's two million rural voters

Drew Landry, an assistant professor of government at South Plains College in Levelland, Texas, wrote today for for the Dallas Morning News:  under the headline, "The rural Texas vote is more powerful than you think."  

On election night, as losing political campaigns across Texas look back at what they should have done differently, they should consider that big red section of the state map west of Interstate 35. 

* * *  

The difference in Texas politics is the rural vote. In a state like Illinois, Pennsylvania or New York, the big-city vote is the end all, be all. To win statewide in Illinois, one must win Chicago, its surrounding counties and a few other counties to capture victory. A map of its 2020 presidential vote easily shows this. The same rule applies to Pennsylvania and New York. In those states, the rural vote is not strong enough to overcome the urban vote. Unlike those states, however, Texas’ rural vote is powerful.

According to 2022 county election data, from the Panhandle to the Concho Valley, West Texas has roughly 1 million voters. About half of the rural vote comes west of I-35. Add that to the registered voters in Central, East and South Texas, that equates to roughly 2 million voters in rural Texas.

Readers may wonder why that matters. There are more voters in the metros and suburbs than West Texas. There has been speculation that Dallas County — with its star power and resources — could boost Democrats statewide.

But observers often forget the numbers and turnout. In 2020, Trump got more than 40% of the vote in Harris County, around 35% in Dallas County, 40% in Bexar County and a tick over 30% in El Paso County. Trump barely got a quarter of the vote in Travis County. How did Trump win Texas without winning the urban vote? The rural vote came to his rescue, as it did with Sen. Ted Cruz in his 2018 reelection.

Texas Democrats acknowledged the need for an improved rural outreach at the state convention this past summer. But what has been done since the acknowledgment?

Voter outreach usually falls to down-ballot candidates, and in a lot of rural areas, that is a tremendous challenge for Democrats. In West Texas, there are Republican advertisements in almost every commercial break on radio and television, urging voters to support all Republican candidates. The Democratic response? One group purchased a billboard ad.

Democrats, by and large, do not want to advertise west of I-35, and that is to their detriment. All roads come through West Texas when it comes to winning statewide. Republicans get it. Both Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick visited the area knowing they need to win there, and win big.

One of the ways Democrats are finding to crack into the “Red Wall of Texas” — a.k.a. West Texas — is by discussing kitchen table issues like public education, health care and property taxes. They like to point out the support from Abbott and Patrick for school vouchers. Rural communities orbit around public schools. And Democrats make the case that if voters want to lower property taxes, the Texas Legislature must make public education funding a top priority, not fund wealthier families in the suburbs. Also, Democrats pin shrinking access to rural health care on Republicans. Democrats argue the Republicans’ decision not to expand Medicaid coverage came at the cost of losing local hospitals, 26 of which closed between 2010 and 2020 in rural Texas, according to the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals.

Does that strategy cause enough rural voters to cross over or simply leave the ballot blank? We will see in two days. But let us remember a critical fact: Republicans need West Texas, and in a big way. If statewide Republicans’ support in their most reliable area is in question, then so is their ability to win.

For Democrats to win statewide, they not only need to win the urban areas, key suburban areas and South Texas, but they also need to compete in West Texas. Until the Texas Democratic Party realizes that, Republicans will continue their dominance; for as West Texas goes, so goes the state.

Here are two pieces from earlier this by Jon Mark Hogg of the 134 PAC, the "leading voice for rural Texas Democrats."   The first is headlined "Nobody Knows What They are Doing," and includes this lede:  

I am going to say the quiet part out loud. Nobody knows how to win an election as a Democrat in rural Texas, at least not in deep red rural Texas. The Texas Democratic Party doesn't, none of the statewide campaigns do, political professionals, activists, consultants and operatives don't either. We have completely lost that institutional memory. Anyone who tries to tell you they know what will work in rural Texas politics is either lying to you or selling something,

So why does The 134 PAC think it does? We don't. We admit it. But The 134 PAC is not about knowing what works in any given county. The 134 PAC is about being a political laboratory, free from the restrictions of the party and unreasonable expectations. Over the next twenty to thirty years we are going to figure out what works and what doesn't by being present and fostering county parties with the freedom to throw away the book and start experimenting.

A few weeks earlier, Hogg wrote "A Plan to Rebuild Rural Texas," including:  

When the party Chairman joined us for our fundraiser event in Amarillo in July, he told me that while he knew that I had been critical of the party, after he won his reelection as Chair he wanted to sit down and talk with The 134 PAC about what the party should be doing in rural Texas. That was in July. Tomorrow is Labor Day. We still have not heard from the Chair.

Last week the party announced a media tour to talk about the party platform and issues in "every corner of the state". Every corner of the state did not include The 134.

This theme of Democratic Party neglect of rural reaches is a recurring one among rural political organizers.  

Where white majority is fading, election deniers thrive

The New York Times reported last week from several places that are not necessarily rural, but which may be exurban, and where politicians who are election deniers are thriving.  The Times reporters Michael Keller and David Fitzpatrick see a correlation between this phenomenon and a fading white majority.  

The first place featured is Fort Bend County, Texas, which is part of the greater Houston metro area.  Another region featured is far southwestern Virginia, the more rural Buchanan and Wise counties, with populations of 20,000 and 36,000 respectively.  

Here's the gist of the story:    

A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.

* * * 

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.”

* * *  

Lawmakers who objected were also overrepresented among the 70 Republican-held districts with the lowest percentages of college graduates. In one case — the southeast Kentucky district of Hal Rogers, currently the longest-serving House member — about 14 percent of residents had four-year degrees, less than half the average in the districts of Republicans who accepted the election results.

* * *  

Representative H. Morgan Griffith’s [district] in southwest Virginia is among the poorest in the country. Once dominated by coal, manufacturing and tobacco, the area’s economic base eroded with competition from new energy sources and foreign importers. Doctors prescribed opioids to injured laborers and an epidemic of addiction soon followed.

Residents, roughly 90 percent of them white, gripe that the educated elites of the Northern Virginia suburbs think that “the state stops at Roanoke.” They take umbrage at what they consider condescension from outsiders who view their communities as poverty-stricken, and they bemoan “Ph.D pollution” from the big local university, Virginia Tech. After a long history of broken government promises, many said in interviews they had lost faith in the political process and public institutions — in almost everyone but Mr. Trump, who they said championed their cause.

From Marie March, a restaurant owner in Christiansburg, Virginia, had this to say about local support for Trump's dispute of the election results: 

You feel like you’re the underdog and you don’t get a fair shake, so you look for people that are going to shake it up.  We don’t feel like we’ve had a voice.

March attended the January 6 rally and won a seat in the Virginia state legislature last year.   The story continues:  

[March] said she could drive 225 miles east from the Kentucky border and see only Trump signs. No one in the region could imagine that he received fewer votes than President Biden, she insisted.

“You could call it an echo chamber of our beliefs,” she added, “but that’s a pretty big landmass to be an echo chamber.”

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

How refusing to expand Medicaid has hurt folks in east Texas, and the quest of three men to meet the need

Kim Krisberg and David Leffler reported last month from Gun Barrel City, Texas, population 6,190, in Henderson County, on the years-long effort to establish a Federally Qualified Healthcare Center (FQHC) to meet the needs of low-income folks in the region.  The clinic, known as the East Texas Community Clinci (ETCC), is now up and running, serving some of the nearly 30% of Gun Barrel City's residents who don't have health insurance.  That's considerably higher than the 18% of Texans without health insurance, which is the highest state average in the nation.  Yet the clinic, which now has two locations, still does not have its FQHC status.  

Here's more on the two physicians and one administrator behind the ETCC, detailing their efforts:

Doug Curran and Ted Mettetal have practiced medicine for 80-plus years combined, most of it in a thriving private practice in the town of Athens, about 20 miles east of Gun Barrel City. In 2019, at an age when most physicians are ready to retire, the longtime friends set out on a new venture: opening a safety-net clinic that would treat anyone, regardless of their ability to pay.

* * * 

The Gun Barrel City clinic opened at 8 a.m. on May 20, 2020. As Curran waited for the first patients to arrive, he wondered — for a moment — what he had gotten himself into.

“Here I am, 70 years old, starting a new adventure,” he said. “You kind of ask yourself, what in God’s name am I doing?”

His friend Mettetal was 69. And Robison, then 45, had left a steady job and taken a pay cut to join them. The plan may have seemed crazily ambitious to an outsider, but the three men had seen firsthand the consequences of people having to forgo care because they couldn’t afford it. They felt compelled to help.

Retirement didn’t suit the doctors, anyway. They relished the joys and pace of small-town medicine: delivering a baby in the morning, stitching up a wound in the afternoon, making a house call after work.

“When you’re used to going 90 miles an hour, you kind of go stir crazy,” Mettetal said.

* * * 

Curran has tried for years to persuade the Republican-dominated state Legislature to address these problems. When he served as president of the Texas Medical Association from 2018 to 2019, he made it his mission to get Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature on a bill to expand Medicaid coverage, a position 69% of Texans now support, according to a 2020 poll by the Episcopal Health Foundation. But Texas remains among 12 states that have refused expansion, even though the federal government would pay at least 90% of the cost.

“I basically spent a year of my life trying to convince Texas legislators that they really ought to value our people more, they ought to provide better access for all our people, especially our working poor,” said Curran, who leans conservative but has grown increasingly progressive. “But our state has not had the wisdom of engaging that.” 

* * * 

The idea was to build a network of safety-net clinics to serve a mostly rural area east of Dallas, beginning with the clinic in Gun Barrel City. They’d combine the clinics with a medical residency program to bring desperately needed new doctors into the region.

To launch the East Texas Community Clinic, or ETCC, they persuaded two local organizations to put up $200,000 in seed money. For long-term funding they set out to apply to a federal agency, the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, which offers millions of dollars in grants and enhanced Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements to qualified clinics in poorly served areas.

The doctors have repeatedly gone back to these two organizations, along with a third funder more recently, for more money as they await approval of their FQHC status.  It's a story chock full of details and personality and well worth a read.  

And here's an October 6, 2022 follow-up story in Public Health Watch with some good news in the aftermath of the late September story--and attributable to that reporting. 

In the two weeks since its publication, the story has caught the attention of policymakers and audiences around the country. It has been shared on social media by Texas lawmakers of both parties, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, and U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat. It has been published by The Texas Tribune, The Daily Yonder and the Forney (Texas) Messenger. It has also inspired follow-up stories, including this broadcast from an ABC affiliate in Tyler, Texas. People from around the country sent words of support and small donations.

The story’s impacts went beyond shares, likes and page views.

One of the problems Curran and Mettetal face is getting the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration to approve East Texas Community Clinic as a [FQHC]. That designation allows safety-net clinics to receive enhanced Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements and gives them access to millions of dollars in federal grants. The doctors had expected to receive the designation by the end of 2021. But when our story was published, the crucial last step in that process — a site visit by federal inspectors — wasn’t scheduled until March 2023. That meant the clinic would have to continue relying on donations to stay afloat.

After reading the story, staff from Cornyn’s office contacted Curran, who had been trying to secure the senator’s help in moving up the visit. Just days after publication, Glen Robison, the clinic’s operations manager, got an email from the Health Resources and Services Administration saying it would reschedule the visit for mid-December.

That means Robison should be able to meet the end-of-year deadline to apply for $3 million in federal funds to support the clinic’s medical residency program.

Both stories are part of the Public Health Watch series, "The Holdouts" on what has happened in the dozen states that refused federal funding available under Obamacare to expand Medicaid.  

On the panhandle's key role in the Texas gubernatorial race

The Houston Chronicle reports today on the importance of the ruby red Texas panhandle in the state's race for governor.   Jeremy Wallace of the Austin Bureau leads with lots of atmospherics from Beto O'Rouke's 49-day Drive for Texas, but the headline is an ominous one for incumbent Greg Abbott, "How the biggest Republican stronghold in Texas could cost Gov. Abbott his job."  Here's the lede:  

Beto O'Rourke invited them into the shade on a searing 100-degree summer day.

He gave them cold water.

And then, they gave him hell.

Greatly outnumbering his own supporters at Blodgett Park just miles from the Oklahoma border, protesters wearing Trump shirts and holding homemade signs quickly overwhelmed the El Paso Democrat's plans for a rally and charm offensive with shouts about their guns, their oil-based economy and the freedom to raise their cattle.

As they surrounded him, O'Rourke declared his support for the 2nd Amendment and his loyalty to the gas-burning pickup he just drove to the furthest reaches of the Texas Panhandle. As for beef, he testified to having "just ate a hamburger for dinner last night."

The rally never really got off the ground.

Instead, O'Rourke was stuck knocking down more incoming questions from the opposition than from his own small contingent of supporters in Spearman, a town of 3,100 people who voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump in 2020.

"We wanted to send him a message. He's not welcome here," said Gyene Spivey, the Republican Party chairwoman for Hansford County. "I wish he'd just go back down the road to El Paso."

The exchange in the vast flatlands of the High Plains is more important to the future of the governor's race than at first glance. Voter registration data and recent election results show the campaign just might come down to places like Spearman and other sparsely populated towns in the Texas Panhandle and the plains to the south.

The story includes a cool map showing just how red the panhandle is.  Don't miss it.  

Among other posts about Beto O'Rourke's rural-focused campaign are the ones here and here.  

Washington Post on Beto O'Rourke's forays into hostile, rural territory

The latest coverage of O'Rourke's effort to cultivate the rural vote in his run for Governor of Texas is by Jada Yuan in the Washington Post,"Beto O'Rourke's risky quest for votes in deep-red Texas."  Here are some excerpts, with a focus on issues barely touched on--or ignored altogether--in prior coverage:  

Could a victory for Beto lie not in liberal cities such as Austin or Houston but in spending these last precious three months of the campaign driving his Toyota Tundra to the least populous, most Republican parts of the state, mining for untapped votes?

“I mean, there’s a reason to do this,” Beto says in Spearman, sweating through his white button-down. Having been married for 17 years, Beto often says, he knows no two people agree on everything, but he’s hoping people around here might at least like his plans to repair Texas’s power grid or to pay teachers more.

If nothing else, maybe they’ll respect that he came.

“I understand that if we’re only interested in those who are already with us, we’ll never get there,” he says, “We’ll end up in the same place every Democrat has for the last 28 years.” That’s how long it’s been since Texas had a Democrat as governor, when Ann Richards held the job.

* * *

In these rural areas, Beto is essentially drilling for oil. “There are a lot of votes out there,” Beto says. “There are 7 million people who didn’t cast a ballot who were eligible in 2020.” There are the first-time voters and the Democrats who need an extra push to vote in the midterms and the people who don’t stick to party lines. “I would say they are persuadable,” he says.

* * *

And then there are the votes no political scientist could tell him how to find. In Dumas, a Panhandle city that’s 55 percent Hispanic, truck driver Pablo Campos tells Beto he woke up at 3:30 a.m. so he could complete half his work shift and have enough time to go to the town hall gathering during his break. There, Mary Jane Garcia, 47, a devout Catholic, stood up to talk about the “spontaneous abortion” that saved her life when she miscarried at 17, and how scared she is that her daughters might be denied that medical care.

Over in Quanah, a city of 2,272, Darby Sparkman, 23, was astounded to see 64 people at Beto’s town hall meeting, since she’s an election worker and “like 10 people vote Democrat.” Edith Aguirre, 26, was among the nearly 200 people who showed up in Bowie, a growing city of 5,534 in verdant North Texas, where the radio stations veer from country to worship to worship country. She was brought here as a child from Mexico so her father could work in the oil fields. She’s not a citizen and can’t vote but brought her sister, Ashley, who turns 18 this year. They wept while talking about how Ashley will be the first voter in her family.

* * *

If deeply conservative places like Spearman are his path to victory, though, it’s going to be a bumpy road.

Beto is holding his town hall gathering in a park. According to Beto’s press director, Chris Evans, the owner of the restaurant they originally booked called and explained that his staff might have signed off, but he was not okay with it.

By the time Beto arrives, people in MAGA and NRA hats, carrying “Pro-life” and “Build the Wall” signs or wearing “Team Jesus” T-shirts make up three-quarters of the 70-person crowd. Beto’s staff has invited them to join the town hall meeting in the shade.

As a related matter, don't miss Jon Mark Hogg's column in the San Angelo newspaper today, where he writes under the headline, "What we have lost in Texas politics":

Whether you like or vote for Beto O’Rourke or not, his campaign has sparked a political memory among the people of Texas. He reminds us of a time when candidates for Governor barnstormed into every nook and cranny of our state, spoke with and listened to anyone who wanted to talk about what they as persons were facing. There was a time that was expected of every candidate. That is something we have lost.

These are some of the issues, e.g., margins among rural voters, the way candidates used to show up, that I touched on in my recent Politico piece analyzing John Fetterman's quest for Pennsylvania's rural vote.