Democrat Beshear re-elected Kentucky Governor, with notable support from rural voters

Major media outlets have just called today's gubernatorial race in Kentucky for Andy Beshear, the Democratic incumbent.  Beshear becomes only the second governor in the Commonwealth's history to serve two consecutive terms.  

Dave Wasserman, the political commentator, tweeted details of several nonmetro counties' election returns, with several showing that Beshear improved his margin over his Republican opponent this year, Daniel Cameron, compared to his margin over his Republican opponent four years ago, then-incumbent Matt Bevin.  

The counties mentioned here are Anderson (population 23,000), Bell (population 25,000), Nicholas (population 7,500), Taylor (population 26,000), along with Elliot (population 7,400) and Magoffin (population 12,000).  Wasserman characterized the latter two as eastern coalfields.

Then Wasserman tweeted (that is, posted on the platform now known as X) this, comparing Beshear's performance in rural Kentucky to that of other Democrats vying for statewide office: 

It says:  

So far, Beshear (D) is running 20-30 points ahead of other statewide Dem candidates on the margins in many of these rural counties, which is a decent early sign for him.  #KYGOV

More evidence of Beshear's rural prowess is found in this data point from Midas Touch.  It contrasts Beshear's margin with Trump's 2020 margin in nonmetro Letcher County.

Letcher County, population 21,548, is in the state's southeastern corner, which is Appalachian.  It happens to be home of the Center for Rural Strategies and Appalshop, both in Whitesburg, the county seat.  The area was badly flooded in late summer 2022.  

A student shared with me this AP piece written by Bruce Schreiner in December, 2022, which sheds light on Beshear's rural strategy.  The feature focuses on both Beshear's rural outreach and on his focus on meeting people's needs, on helping them.  It uses the word caring.  Here's an excerpt: 

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said Wednesday that Democrats have a better chance of connecting with rural voters in his home state and elsewhere when they talk about the things people need and the ways they can help them.

Schreiner quotes Beshear at length:

When we think about how do we communicate with our rural families, the first thing is to care about them. And to show that you care about them, and to earn their trust that you do truly care about them.

The AP story continues: 

Beshear said his party’s candidates need to show up with a core message centered on good-paying jobs, access to quality health care and good public schools — all issues that he sees as resonating with rural voters who have abandoned the party in droves in recent elections.

Beshear, who faces his own tough reelection fight next year in a state dotted with small towns and farms, is better positioned than most Democrats to talk about connecting with rural voters. He has maintained strong job approval ratings in a state where the GOP has become the dominant party.

Beshear has devoted much of his time as governor leading recovery efforts in rural areas of Kentucky stricken by devastating tornadoes a year ago and historic flooding earlier this year.

To make inroads in rural regions, candidates need to focus on the things that matter most to people — whether they’re making enough to support their families, can afford quality health care that’s accessible and can send their children to good schools.

Beshear extended Medicaid in Kentucky to include vision, hearing, and dental care.

Here's another direct quote from Beshear about vying for rural voters: 

I think Democrats should show up more in rural America because it’s America. Every person counts. The great lesson of COVID is that we all matter. And if we’re not lifting up every single part of Kentucky, we’re not doing our job.

On the caring theme, this Twitter thread is fun.  

I don't see any mention of rural people or places in the Washington Post's coverage of Beshear's victory today.   The Hannah Knowles report does note, however, that Kentucky is a "deep-red state."  The New York Times election night coverage also does not mention his rural outreach.  I expect a more in-depth feature tomorrow, and it'll be interesting to see if it notes the rural angle.  

I note that Beshear's Kentucky win with 52.5% of the vote exceeded the margin of Republican incumbent Tate Reeves, who prevailed over Democratic challenger Brandon Presley.  Reeves secured 51.8%.  In that race, a third party candidate won 1.4%.  

My earlier writing on statewide candidates' rural strategies--in particular that of U.S. Senator John Fetterman--is here and here.   

Postscript:  Here's a Nov. 13 Politico analysis of Beshear's win, featuring an interview with the governor's campaign manager, Eric Hyers.  

New insights into the rural vote?

Christian Paz reported last week in Vox under the headline, "Democrats have a huge opportunity to win back rural voters."  Here's an excerpt: 

[A]s the 2024 campaign map begins to take shape, Democratic candidates, the state and national parties, and their outside partners will have to make a choice about how seriously to invest in outreach and persuasion operations in these communities. Democrats have long struggled in rural communities, but their decline in support has only accelerated in recent years, cementing the idea for many that the party caters to highly educated and primarily urban voters. That narrative has only entrenched itself since the ’90s, when former President Bill Clinton essentially split rural voters with his Republican opponents in his two presidential campaigns and won over 1,100 rural counties in 1996. Since then, Democratic presidential candidates have endured dramatic losses in rural areas: in 2008, Barack Obama won 455 rural counties; in 2020, Joe Biden won only 194.

That crumbling of rural support has led some in the party to write off this section of voters entirely. Biden’s 2020 victory is illustrative of this dynamic: He won the presidency despite winning just 33 percent of rural voters. (Trump won 65 percent, up from the 59 percent he won in 2016.)

But the 2022 midterms reversed that slide.

If Democrats decide to take these communities more seriously this cycle, activists, strategists, and former candidates say the party stands to shore up its margins in battleground states and make up for any possible loss in support from the suburbs. If candidates and their campaigns show up and work with the right local partners, they might have a better chance of replicating some of the rural progress they made in 2022. 

* * *

The brightest spots for Democrats came in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Gov. Josh Shapiro, respectively, improved on Biden’s performance in rural counties by 10 and 15 percentage points. Candidates like Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) improved by more than 6 points — and even candidates who lost, like former Rep. Tim Ryan in Ohio’s Senate race, still improved on Biden’s numbers (winning 4 percent more support from these counties).

* * * 

Until 2022, it seemed to many rural Democrats and progressive activists that the Democratic Party leadership was content to abandon these communities to Republican dominance. Especially after Trump’s rural dominance in 2020, the narrative that Democrats had given up competing beyond the suburbs had solidified among many in the party. Rural Democratic politicians, like [former Montana governor Steve] Bullock, who lost a Senate election in 2020, were beginning to sound the alarm ahead of the midterms.

Now, however, Bullock is more optimistic:  

We have a long way to go as a party, but I think that certainly we saw through the midterms that you can’t cede any parts of the country.

Don't miss the rest of this interesting feature from Paz.  

The rural vote and interest convergence

In Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma Derrick A. Bell, Jr. analyzes Black people's ability to achieve civil rights victories only when satisfying an "interest convergence." The interest convergence he describes happens when the political and social aspirations of Black Americans, or any marginalized group, aligns with an interest of upper class, decision-making, white Americans. Only when this happens, he states, will there be any changes made for marginalized groups. This is an interesting way to analyze the rural vote. 

One of the first questions we discussed in our class about the rural vote was basically: Why do we even care about the "rural vote?" Obviously, we are taking a class about Law and Rural Livelihoods so that is one reason. The researchers, statisticians, journalist, etc. that write about the rural vote, however, are not in our class but they still spend a lot of time and effort analyzing this topic. Moreover, many politicians seem to care, at least as of lately. This is because rural Americans refusal to blindly support the Democratic party has allowed for an interest convergence. 

We also discussed the commonly held idea that these people are voting against their own self-interest. After all, as Sara Smarsh's Aunt Pud says in Heartland, "The Democrats are for poor people, and the Republicans are for the rich." Although I agree with Aunt Pud, if rural Americans continuously showed up for Democrat candidates, would these candidates still have the same motivation to win them over as they do now? Probably not. In other words, by refusing to give loyalty to the Democratic party, rural Americans made their interests converge with the ruling class in a way that actually better fulfills their self-interests in the long run.

After Trump's 2016 election, political discourse began acknowledging the "forgotten Americans." Isabel Sawhill's What the Forgotten Americans Really Want--and How to Give it to Them describes this group as people without a college degree and lower income. She also notes that they represent thirty-eight percent of the working age population. She describes their issues with feeling like the government is out of touch and like current policies are not reflective of the values held by forgotten Americans. 

Bill Hogseth discusses the rural vote in Why Democrats Keep Losing Rural Counties Like Mine. He states that while roughly two-thirds of rural voters voted for Donald Trump, in his opinion it wasn't because there was a lack of Democratic organization in these areas but because the Democratic Party "has not offered rural voters a clear vision that speaks to their lived experience. The pain and struggle in my community is real, yet rural people do not feel it is taken seriously by the Democratic Party."

By not just refusing to vote but voting overwhelmingly Republican, rural voters have created an interest convergence between their wants and the wants of both parties--to win elections. Now, politicians on both sides have no choice but to take their demands seriously and show tangible ways they will improve rural lives.

This blog, by Professor Pruitt, discusses how Democrat candidate John Fetterman's "every county, every vote" strategy secured him enough votes to win the senate race in Pennsylvania. 

Most people in my life outside of school, who are working class, don't vote. The ones who do vote mostly do so because I have lectured them of its importance, and they just ask me who/what I'm casting my vote for and go along with my choice. It is safe to say that nobody on either side cares very much about politics. 

Most of their ambivalence comes from similar feelings as the forgotten Americans Sawhill interviewed: that the government is "ineffective, untrustworthy, and out-of-touch." Although I would never advise anyone in my life to vote Republican (and honestly probably not forgive them for doing so, depending on how much I dislike the candidate), I can't help but admire the way rural voters fortitude has forced their issues into the hearts of legislators. I hope politicians remember the power that the working class has in every election.

Rural voters in Wisconsin protect abortion rights: Democrats should take note

Last week, on April 4, progressive Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, thereby creating the high court's first liberal majority in 15 years. Protasiewicz won out over her conservative opponent Daniel Kelly, a former state Supreme Court justice, in the contest to replace retiring conservative Justice Patience Roggensack. Notably, the race became the highest profile and most expensive judicial election on record in the United States, with campaign spending totaling over $45 million.

While the campaign was hotly contested, in the end, Protasiewicz defeated Kelly by more than 10 points in what represented a significant shift towards the Democratic party by Wisconsin voters. Perhaps the most interesting voting pattern that emerged during this election was that the statewide voting trends were bolstered by a pivot on the part of rural voters towards the democratic candidate. While Protasiewicz did ultimately lose the rural vote, the 45% of the rural vote that she was able to accumulate constitutes a significant 5-point gain for Democrats with this demographic when compared to the 2020 presidential and 2022 Senate elections. 

The headway Protasiewicz was able to make with rural voters might come as a surprise to some, given that the existence of a widening urban-rural divide with regards to Americans' political ideologies and partisan affiliations has come into sharp focus in recent years. Specifically, over the past few decades, urban voters have increasingly leaned democratic and rural voters have overwhelmingly supported republican candidates (previous posts on America's urban-rural divide here, here, and here). Moreover, Wisconsin is no outlier from these trends; like elsewhere throughout the nation, Democrats in Wisconsin have struggled to pick up votes in the countryside and in small towns (another posts on the rural vote in Wisconsin here). This is particularly evident in the rural western and northern portions of the state, where Democrats continued to watch their voting bloc erode through the 2022 election cycle. In fact, less than a year ago a post on this blog discussed multiple news reports forecasting bad news for Democrats in rural Wisconsin, highlighting how they have gone largely unsupported by the Democratic national party.

So, what changed? One predominant theory is the United States Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (recently discussed on this blog here and here). Dobbs is the Supreme Court case that reversed Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, stating that the constitution does not confer a right to abortion.  

Since Dobbs, there has been an emerging national trend by which support for abortion rights has appeared to translate into electoral gains for Democrats. In August 2022, Kansas voters shocked much of the nation by rejecting an amendment to their state constitution attempting to decoding abortion rights. Strikingly, the high-turnout, pro-abortion outcome represented a 30-point deviation away from the support former president Donald Trump garnered in 2020, with the most significant and surprising departures from Republican partisan loyalty coming from small cities and rural areas (more on the Kansas abortion referendum here). Considering these results, one possible takeaway is that rural voters, at least in Kansas and where abortion is concerned, are not completely behind every aspect of the leading Republican agenda. 

It is likely that similar forces were at play in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last week. Abortion rose to the fore of debate surrounding the election as, post-Dobbs, it was almost guaranteed that access to abortion in the state would hinge on whether it was progressives or conservatives that would secure a narrow majority on the state's supreme court. Wisconsin's current governing law on the matter is a 1849 statute criminalizing abortion in virtually all cases, with a singular exception carved out for situation in which it would be necessary to save the pregnant person's life. 

Adopting a slightly controversial strategy, Protasiewicz openly campaigned on the issue of abortion, not only publicly announcing her personal pro-choice beliefs and collecting endorsements from pro-choice groups, such as EMILY's List, but also running ads painting Kelly as a staunch pro-lifer who would surely uphold the state's 1849 abortion ban. Kelly, on the other hand, feigned impartiality, but accrued endorsements from the state's top three anti-abortion groups, including Wisconsin Right to Life, and was perceived as very likely to act in accordance with his well-documented pro-life stances.

While it is difficult to assert an exact or singular cause, the theory that Protasiewicz's pro-choice position contributed to her victory is supported by a recent Marquette University Law School Poll indicating that a majority of Wisconsin citizens support abortion in most or all cases. That said, the election was also undoubtedly influenced by the other hot-button issues spotlighted during the campaign, including gerrymandering (Wisconsin's district maps are considered among the most undemocratic in the country) and election administration (Wisconsin is a perennial swing state in which the most recent presidential election results in favor of Joe Biden were upheld by the state supreme court by a margin of only one vote).    

Regardless of the exact mechanics of the outcome of Wisconsin's Supreme Court election, Democrats should take note and stop writing off rural voters as a lost cause. In conjunction with the referendum in Kansas and other rural Democratic success stories, such as the rise of John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Protasiewicz's gains in rural Wisconsin suggest that rural counties might be much more politically contestable than many believe. It is even possible that inroads with rural America could be the key to Democratic success in 2024... but only if the party begins investing sufficient time and money into rural communities, constituents, and candidates. 

More on the rural vote, starting with Gluesenkamp Perez and WA-03

Coverage of the rural vote in the 2022 midterms continues to stream in, and I'm going to highlight some of it here.

First, I want to features this piece from The Nation on Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's victory in Washington's third district, which includes Vancouver, just north of Portland.  She defeated Trumpist Ed Kent, who had deposed moderate Republican Jamie Butler-Herrera in the Republican primary.  (I've previously written about the race here and here).  What follows is an excerpt from the story by Nick Bowlin, who writes for the High Country News, with a focus on rurality:

Without party support, Gluesenkamp Perez built a different kind of Democratic campaign. She talked candidly about the decline of the timber industry and the loss of manufacturing jobs, while promoting right-to-repair legislation, which would give people the tools and legal authority to repair everything from cell phones to John Deere tractors to medical equipment. Right-to-repair is an especially important issue in rural areas, where repairing heavy machinery can be banned by manufacturers.

I will just note here that Senator Jon Tester, the only farmer in the Senate, also talks frequently about right to repair.  

Here's more from the piece about Gluesenkamp Perez: 

Gluesenkamp Perez did not run as a centrist. She put abortion access at the center of her campaign, often telling the story of her own miscarriage. She also pledged not to support Nancy Pelosi as House caucus leader and talked openly about the guns she owns.

The Democratic Party’s collapse in rural areas ought to be obvious to all at this point. In the 2020 presidential election, Trump won 65 percent of rural voters.

The rest of the article is presented as Q & A between Bowlin and Gluesenkamp Perez: 

NB: It’s my understanding that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee [the party’s arm for House races] didn’t spend on your behalf, is that right? How did you pull off the win with minimal party support?

MGP: The DCCC never put in any money. Near the very end, I believe the House Majority PAC did come in [The House Democratic caucus’s main Super PAC spent $300,000 on her behalf in the final week]. I listen to my friends at home. I found allies. I found neighbors. I built a coalition. And I really got to stay focused on what matters to my district.

It was very frustrating to never be taken seriously by many in the party establishment. But it’s also not surprising, because people like me who work in the trades are used to being treated like we’re dumb.

NB: Do you think that perception explains why it took so long for them to even consider you as a viable candidate?

MGP: Yes, I do. I don’t think they think that, but when I went to a meeting with the DCCC after I won, I asked, “How many of your candidates don’t have graduate degrees? How many didn’t go to college? How many work in the trades?” And they said, “I don’t know.” Well, maybe you should know. Maybe that should be important to you, because it’s important to many, many Americans.

They really need to reassess what they think makes a qualified candidate. I’m not special. There are a lot of people like me, who really can serve our districts who understand them deeply. We have got to do a better job of recruiting those folks to run if we want to be relevant in rural places.

NB: I’m glad you brought up health care monopolies in rural areas. When we talk about corporate consolidation and power in the US, these conversations can leave out the specific ways these issues impact rural economies. On the campaign trail, you talked a lot about right-to-repair and other monopoly issues. Can you say more about this?

MGP: Right-to-repair is honestly one of the biggest reasons that I ran for Congress. Democrats love to talk about how they support the trades or being pro-labor. I think this is this is a crisis for the middle class, and it’s a crisis for the trades. Supporting the trades means ensuring that there are things to fix. That’s also part of being an environmentalist, ensuring that we have things to fix, that things are made to last and we don’t dispose of them. And it’s about cars and tractors, but also electronic waste. This is about home medical equipment. It’s this creeping, metastasizing problem, and it’s taking away a fundamentally American part of our identity. DIY is in our DNA. And I really believe that we’re being turned into a permanent class of renters who don’t really own their stuff.

Despite the language used in this story, it's worth noting that Washington's third district is not very rural--at least not depending on one's definition.  Matt Barron, a rural-focused political consultant, points out: 

"Why do you and other writers keep calling WA-3 a 'mostly rural district' when it is only 19% rural.  Perez only won one rural county (Pacific) by 2 points, while losing the other five.  I'm glad she won but this district is urban and suburban."  

Gotta say I agree with Barron on this one--at least I don't think it's helpful to call this area rural when its proximity to Greater Portland is what it is.  In fact, much of the district is metropolitan Portland.  

Other recent coverage of the rural vote in the midterm election includes these stories:   

Josh Kraushaar writes for Axios under the headline, "Democrats show signs of life in rural America." It features this visual of Democrats from the recent midterms who out-performed Biden's 2020 performance.

Here are some key rural datapoints:

• The four Black Senate and gubernatorial nominees in the biggest battlegrounds (Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin) all underperformed Biden in their states' rural counties. Only one other Democrat in the analysis (defeated Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak) did worse than Biden in rural counties.
• In the Georgia runoff, Sen. Raphael Warnock underperformed Biden by 1.8% in the state's rural counties, even as he overperformed the president by 5.3% in the urban counties.
• Among Senate candidates, the party's top overperformer in the suburbs was Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who ran 4.7% ahead of Biden.

Here's a piece from Newsweek titled, "How these Democrats bucked the trend and won over rural voters."  Erica Etelson, who works for the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative, writes:

The GOP's lackluster performance in the midterms came as an enormous relief to most Democrats. But in rural America, with a few notable exceptions, Democrats sunk to a twelve-year low water mark. If Democrats are to regain ground with rural voters, an absolute necessity given the Electoral College map, they will need to up their game.

Luckily, we have just the playbook. For the past year, the non-profit Rural Urban Bridge Initiative has interviewed 50 Democratic candidates who ran in rural races in 2016, 2018, and 2020. Most of these candidates significantly outperformed the partisan lean of their district, and we wanted to know what they did right.

What we learned from Democratic "over performers" in previous electoral cycles is that they did a lot of the things that helped propel 2022 midterms candidates like John ("every county, every vote") Fetterman (D-PA) and Marie ("not your typical candidate") Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) to victory.

For starters, they and their campaign staff have deep roots in and knowledge of their communities' values, history, and problems. Local fluency engenders trust even across lines of ideological difference and enables candidates to find islands of common ground in a sea of disagreement. An elderly Iowan family farm couple might not be keen to cancel student debt, but they may want to break up Big Ag monopolies, make sure their local hospital stays open, and regain the right to repair their John Deere tractor. They may appreciate if their state created a public bank like the beloved Bank of North Dakota that would extend them a non-usurious line of credit.

When it comes to personality, Democratic over performers in rural areas are typically humble, plainspoken problem-solvers, not dogmatic or grandstanding ideologues. They come across like ordinary people who care about the well-being of the places they seek to represent. They do not see their constituents as "deplorables," nor do they seek to "school them" on where their self-interest lies.

There's a lot of wisdom here, including that last bit that echoes Gluesenkamp Perez, so don't miss this piece in its entirety.  

Finally, here's the Daily Yonder on how the gap between the rural and urban Congressional vote has been widening over the last 16 years.  

More analysis of the rural vote, this time from Mr. Rural

"Mr. Rural" is the Twitter handle of Matt Barron, a political consultant based in western Massachusetts.  He published this reflection on the 2022 Midterms a few days ago in the Daily Yonder.  A few highlights follow:  

First, on John Fetterman, who won the U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania:

Fetterman’s “Every county, every vote” strategy involved his repeated trips to all 48 rural counties in the Keystone State. Although he only won two rural counties, Centre County (home of Penn State University) and Monroe County, that candidate face time paid off as Fetterman moved the needle by improving on President Biden’s rural vote in the state by three points – from 26 to 29%.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette said it best: “Mr. Fetterman’s victory could offer the Democratic Party a new pathway to assembling a winning coalition in an electorate that’s undergone fundamental shifts since Mr. Trump’s surprise win in the 2016 presidential election. He has long advocated campaigning in deep-red areas full of white, working-class voters that have shifted toward the GOP in recent decades, not to win majorities there but to cut into Republican advantages by splitting their voting coalitions.”

Of course, I wrote about Fetterman's rural strategy several months ago, here and here.   

Barron continues with another example of a "good" rural strategy:

North Carolina Democratic Party Spotlights Representative Budd’s Anti-Rural Record

Many state Democratic parties don’t lift a finger to expose the voting records of Republicans with respect to how they screw over rural constituencies in their states and districts. This is important because most county-level parties and rural caucuses lack the specific information with which to write informed letters to the editor or post cool memes to social media platforms or lob-biting calls to talk radio shows that can skewer these GOPers for these votes.

But the North Carolina Democratic Party issued a series of press releases that shadowed Representative Ted Budd, the Republican nominee for Senate, as he fundraised across the state, like this one in Greenville that slammed him for voting against a series of programs and projects aimed at rural needs in the area.

Barron then turns to the bad, highlighting a blunder by Congresswoman Susan Wild in Pennsylvania, who faced a "tough re-election after rural and Republican leaning Carbon County was added to her Lehigh Valley district centered in Allentown:

During a virtual meet and greet on July 18, Wild said “Carbon County has many attributes, but it is a county that – although it was once an Obama county – it since has become a Trump county,” she said. “I’m not quite sure what was in their heads because the people of Carbon County are exactly the kind of people who should not be voting for a Donald Trump, but I guess I might have to school them on that a little bit.”

Ouch.

In playing the elitist card, Wild might as well have told her audience that her favorite perfume is Eau de I’m-better-than-you. But these kinds of intemperate cracks go viral very fast and contribute to the continuing damage of the Democratic brand across rural America. Wild wound up winning her race by 1.6% or just over 4,700 votes and (full disclosure) I produced digital and print ads for My Rural America Action Fund as an independent expenditure which were all targeted at voters in Carbon County and three rural hamlets in southwest Monroe County to try and keep her losing margin manageable in the new turf.

This part, "the bad," also includes vignettes from Texas and Taiwan (yes, Taiwan). 

And then there's "the ugly," which focuses on Wisconsin and Democrat Mandela Barnes failed attempt to oust Republican Ron Johnson, who had plenty of liabilities--including a July 4 spent in Moscow several years ago.  Here's Barron's analysis: 

The Senate race in the Badger State offered Democrats their best chance to unseat a sitting Republican – two-term incumbent Ron Johnson, who won his 2010 and 2016 races over Russ Feingold by margins of 51.9 and 50.2%. Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes emerged from the Democratic primary as the nominee carrying all kinds of baggage from his stands on defunding police and abolishing ICE. September was a pivotal month for Barnes as he was napalmed by an onslaught of attack ads from the Senate Leadership Fund (the super PAC allied with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell). Barnes never recovered and Ron Johnson eked out a 50.4% win.

Barnes swept the vote in large and medium metro areas, rolling up margins of two to one or more in those urban demographics. But Johnson dominated in the suburbs and got his highest vote share of more than 61% in the rural counties which comprise a third of the state’s voters. Democrats would have been smart to clear the field for Tom Nelson a former state legislator and county executive from Outagamie County who had all the progressive bona fides without Barnes’s liabilities.

Most of the Barnes attacks on Johnson were centered on abortion and saving democracy with some chunks of red meat on Social Security and Medicare. Like Feingold before him, Barnes failed to prosecute Johnson’s abysmal record on issues of concern to rural communities such as the fact that Johnson voted against the Farm Bill three times in 2012-2013, opposed reforming federal milk marketing orders so important to “America’s Dairyland,” and voted against reauthorizing the Secure Rural Schools Act to provide full funding for Payments In-Lieu of Taxes for the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest which covers more than 1.5 million acres of Wisconsin’s Northwoods.

Barnes also never hit Johnson on his record with veterans.

Finally, there's this out of North Carolina, where Barron's focus is on the failure of Cheri Beasley's campaign to call out her opponent Ted Budd's failures to support the state's rural communities: 

But Beasley never laid a glove on Budd for a series of votes with a profound impact on rural North Carolinians. Some examples would be Budd’s 2019 vote against the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a big deal as agriculture is the Tarheel State’s largest economic sector. Budd also voted against funding in 2019 for disaster aid for the victims of Hurricane Florence, which ravaged much of the eastern part state in late summer 2018. PFAS has contaminated drinking water supplies in Pender, Harnett, Chatham, and other rural counties but Beasley never made an issue of Budd’s 2020 vote against the PFAS Action Act to deal with these “forever chemicals.” In the last few years, North Carolina has received almost $53 million from USDA’s ReConnect rural broadband grant and loan program which has served more than 13,800 households for high-speed broadband infrastructure.

More post-election commentary on the rural vote

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.

The column also talks details of Michigan, Wisconsin and Kansas.  Kuttner cites to his own September piece about the role of rural organizers, a topic I've also taken up on this blog and in my own writing about the Democrats' lackluster effort to win back the rural vote.  

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.

The Nation also published a piece this week on the rural vote.  It's titled "Democrats Must Do Better in Rural America."  Here's an excerpt from the piece by Anthony Flaccavento, Erica Etelson and Cody Lonning:  

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.

Another major piece, this one focusing on John Fetterman, appeared in the Washington Post's Plumline.  Here's the heart of Greg Sargent's column:

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.

In the ACP’s taxonomy, those three county types are known as the Middle Suburbs, Working Class Country, and Rural Middle America.

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."

Lastly, I'll just note that Adam Frisch (D), who ran against Lauren Boebert (R, incumbent) in mostly rural and exurban CO-03 (western and southern parts of the state), has conceded the race to Boebert.  He did so even though he lost by just about 500 votes and was entitled to a recount.  Indeed, NPR is reporting that the recount will go ahead regardless of Frish's concession--and that Frisch has already re-filed to run against Boebert again in 2024.

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

Postscript.  Here's a piece by George Goehl in Newsweek, and another about the rural vote by The National, from before the election.

More on the role of rurality in Fetterman's Pennsylvania win

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.

I've written a lot about Fetterman in the last six months, and my most recent post is here.  My August Politico piece about his rural efforts is here, and my Daily Yonder piece on the same theme is here.  

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.  

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

On the success of Fetterman's rural strategy

Rural Organizing

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Julia Terruso and Jonathan Tamari report under the headline "How John Fetterman Won Pennsylvania's Senate Race."  Here's the lede: 

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.”

In August, I wrote about Fetterman's rural strategy for Politico, and here's my complimentary essay in the Daily Yonder on the same topic.

Lastly, here's a graph (shown above) put out by Rural Organizing showing Fetterman's performance in relation to Biden's in 2020 and Hillary Clinton's in 2016.

Post script from Nov. 11, 2022:  

Postscript from Nov. 12, 2022 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "John Fetterman Outperformed Biden all across 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.

On Fetterman's continuing commitment to show up in rural Pennsylvania

Julian Routh of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports on the recent visit of U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman (D) to Indiana, Pennsylvania, population 13,564 (but part of the Pittsburgh metro).  

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.  

Reporting from Demstock ("all things Democrat") in rural Pennsylvania

Here's an excerpt from the story by Jon Moss of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, dateline Frenchcreek Township, population 1,412 in Venango County, population 54,984.

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.  

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.  

John Fetterman went full-on rural in the Pennsylvania primary

Lock Haven. Coudersport. Wellsboro. Towanda. Sunbury… A scenic road trip through north central Pennsylvania? A line for a Pennsylvania version of Johnny Cash’s 1996 hit, “I’ve been everywhere, man”?

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.

(Source: John Fetterman’s Twitter)

And the strategy paid off. Fetterman won every Pennsylvania county to claim his party’s nomination, with 59% of the Democratic vote.

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.

Fetterman thus swam against the tide: In recent years, most Democratic candidates for statewide office have left rural voters to the GOP, letting them slip away without a fight. New York Senator and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer admitted as much in 2016—specifically referencing Pennsylvania. “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,” Schumer said, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

That strategy didn’t work out so well for the Democrats. Pennsylvania was one of three states (along with Michigan and Wisconsin) that handed the presidency to Donald Trump by a relative handful of votes. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by just 44,000 Pennsylvania votes (out of 6 million cast) in 2016 to claim the state’s 20 Electoral College delegates.

As it happens, that Trump margin over Clinton is about as many votes as were cast in both party primaries combined in the five counties Fetterman visited that Saturday in early May.

Rural votes, it turns out, do add up.

Truth is, Fetterman didn’t just show up in rural Pennsylvania. The rhetoric of his primary campaign regularly elevated rural people and their concerns. He talked frequently about reaching both red and blue voters—sprinkling red and blue dots generously throughout his tweets to illustrate the point.

In sharp contrast, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh got barely a mention in his Twitter feed this spring, which touted no appearance in either city in the run-up to the primary. When Fetterman did mention the population behemoths anchoring the eastern and western ends of the state, he used them as a foil to remind voters in overlooked places that they matter, too. “Don’t forget that a vote in Tioga County counts as much as one in Pittsburgh or Philly,” he declared at a stop in the nonmetro county of 41,000. It’s a line Fetterman rolled out frequently on the campaign trail, a fill-in-the-rural-county _____ schtick that delighted audiences in the hinterlands. “Right. Yes,” the crowds cheered in response.

It was almost as if Fetterman was taking urban dwellers for granted—leaving them to play second fiddle, for a change, to their rural compatriots.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette analysis of Fetterman’s trajectory between his first state-wide race in 2016 (his first run for the U.S. Senate) and the recent 2022 primary shows, at the county level, how his popularity grew. Part of that growth was due to rising name recognition associated with being Lt. Governor. (A generally obscure office, being Lt. Governor in Pennsylvania means Fetterman’s photo, like that of the Governor, hangs framed in every rest stop, a not insignificant visual exposure). Fetterman’s rising popularity is also surely attributable to his leave-no-county-behind tack. Indeed, over those six years, his rise in support was steepest in the Republican stronghold of the “T.”

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.”

The Democrats’ Rural Problem

Fetterman’s extraordinary investment in the rural vote came amidst a national crisis for Democrats. A February survey showed that two out of three rural voters view the Democratic Party unfavorably.

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.

Meanwhile, progressives have wrung their hands over what to do—if anything—to attract rural voters. The New York Times ran an essay in December by former Montana Governor Steve Bullock advising how to cultivate the rural vote, and Dirt Road Revival, a recent book by Maine State Senator Chloe Maxmin and her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, was all the rage for a few weeks this spring. It was held out as a how-to manual for Democrats willing to vie actively for rural voters, but also critiqued as the work of a silver-spoon candidate in a district experiencing rural gentrification.

But not many candidates have recently done what Fetterman did in Pennsylvania. Few have actually pulled a Johnny Cash and “gone everywhere, man.” Fewer still have done what Fetterman did this spring, proving he wasn’t a flash in the rural pan by showing up a second time. (For the record, Beto O’Rourke deployed a similar strategy in 2018 when he visited all 254 Texas counties in his narrow loss to Ted Cruz for a U.S. Senate seat, and he’s recently announced he’s doing it again in his bid for Governor. Meanwhile, Chris Jones, a political newcomer who is the Democratic nominee for Governor of Arkansas, is “walking a mile in your shoes” in each of the state’s 75 counties as he takes on Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
A Good Fit for Rural Pennsylvania?

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.

But Fetterman may have a not-so-secret weapon for appealing to rural voters, apparent policy mismatches notwithstanding: He’s a “dude” with an unconventional, anti-elite vibe. The Democratic establishment did not initially embrace him, endorsing other candidates in the primary, though they’ve since rallied around Fetterman.

More visibly, Fetterman has attracted national attention for his wardrobe choices, most recently hoodie and gym shorts on the campaign trail. (In his official Lt. Governor portrait—the one in the rest stops—Fetterman is wearing a gray button-up work shirt, no tie, and his trademark serious face, which borders on a scowl). He owns a single suit and, as of the primary debate, it didn’t fit well. Fetterman’s arms are tattooed, the Braddock zip code on one and the dates of shooting deaths in Braddock on the other. It was a spate of shooting deaths there—with victims including two of social worker Fetterman’s GED students—that led him to get involved in politics two decades ago.

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.

The Fetterman campaign engaged Snooki from the reality TV show “Jersey Shore” to chide Oz for leaving Jersey to “look for a new job,” and Stevie Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band to implore Oz to “come back to New Jersey where you belong.” Among Fetterman’s popular campaign merch is a bumper sticker that says, “Dr. Oz for NJ” and, in smaller print, “Fetterman for Pennsylvania.”

Fetterman is also attacking Oz’s wealth—noting he owns nine homes and is worth a reported $104 million. In contrast, Fetterman appears to live a modest life with his wife and three children in Braddock, in a building that used to be a car dealership. (After he was elected Lt. Governor, he forewent the mansion in Harrisburg, instead opening its swimming pool to locals). Fetterman’s tweets about inflation and corporate greed reference the cost of filling up his Dodge RAM pickup and buying groceries at Giant Eagle, a Pennsylvania grocery chain. He’s been tweeting a lot in recent weeks about “making sh*t in America” again. He’s also been writing guest editorials about inflation in small city newspapers like those in Johnstown and Erie.

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.

The bigger wild card now is Fetterman’s health.

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.

Cross-posted to Daily Yonder.