From Congresswoman Gluesenkamp Perez on public media

I've written often on this blog of Congresswoman Gluesenkamp Perez's campaigns and stances; she represents WA-03 in the southwest corner of Washington, a district with a great deal of rural area.  I was struck by fundraising email I got from her today (I get a lot of them!) because it stands up for public broadcasting while invoking the rurality of her district.  Here's what the email says:  

Last week, I voted against a hyperpartisan package that guts federal funding for nonpartisan, independent public broadcasting, a critical resource that rural communities like ours rely on every day.

The House Majority’s plan will force public radio and television stations across the country to close, including 14 here in Washington. We depend on public broadcasting for so much: quality local journalism, educational children’s programming, and even lifesaving emergency alerts.

Lisa, I’m all for tackling waste and making sure our tax dollars are used efficiently, but that doesn’t mean compromising our safety, health, or general well-being.

I’ll continue calling out D.C.’s misplaced priorities and getting things done for Southwest Washington – but to keep this work going, I need your help defending this seat.

I'm glad that the Congresswoman sees public broadcasting as a critical resource for rural communities.  I do, too.  I am guessing many of her constituents see public media as hyper-partisan, and not in ways favorable to their interests. 

In fact, NPR does a great deal of fine reporting--nuanced reporting--on a wide range of rural issues.  I trust NPR to deliver the facts, and I listen to it everyday.  That said, there are times when I think NPR has been  unhelpfully woke in ways I suspect alienate rural voters and those with less formal education.  

On Gluesenkamp Perez's re-election: Times calls her a "red-district conquerer"

Annie Karni writes under the headline "A Red-District Conqueror Wants Fellow Democrats to Look in the Mirror."  An excerpt follows:  

For two years, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from a rural, red district in Washington State, has been criticizing her party for being too dismissive of working-class voters.

That message appears to have helped Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, long considered perhaps the most vulnerable Democrat in the House, defy the odds in this week’s election. Even with President-elect Donald J. Trump at the top of the ticket and winning her district for the third cycle in a row, she appears on track to beat the same candidate she faced two years ago, the far-right Republican and former Green Beret Joe Kent, by a larger margin.

* * * 

Preliminary results showed her outrunning Vice President Kamala Harris by seven percentage points in two of the reddest counties in her district, including the rural timber county of Wahkiakum.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, 36, who owns an auto shop now run by her husband, has angered progressives for sometimes crossing party lines, like when she voted with Republicans to repealPresident Biden’s student loan forgiveness initiative. She argued that it didn’t do much for her district, where most people don’t have college degrees.

What follows are some quotes form Guesenkamp Perez: 

The fundamental mistake people make is condescension. A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they’re disrespecting people.

* * * 

People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists.

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

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's X (formerly Twitter) bio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gluesenkamp Perez invokes rural and working-class folks in relation to stance on a secure border

A. Martinez of NPR's Morning Edition interviewed Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez today regarding "centrist Democrats" stance on border security.  That is, they want the Biden administration to tighten it, partly because of the scourge of fentanyl and its consequences in districts like hers.  Twice during the interview she came across the phrase, "rural and working-class" communities.  In the latter mention she adds, "and the trades."   

This quote provides further context: 

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ:  You know, these policies like Title 42, I mean, I think it's been one of the fundamental mistakes around immigration, is to debate whether or not an immigration policy is, you know, motivated by racial animus. By the way, I think a lot of them are, but a lot of people in rural and working-class communities like mine, we come from communities that have been hollowed out by fentanyl, and so we're watching our cousins, our neighbors, our coworkers overdose and die, and we are demanding operational control of the southern border. That can't wait for a perfect immigration policy to come along.  (emphasis added)

MARTÍNEZ: Did you think that the way Donald Trump's administration used Title 42 was an effective way to stem immigration?

GLUESENKAMP PEREZ: I don't think it's a question of stemming immigration. I mean, immigration itself is not the problem. The problem is that the U.S. does not have operational control of the southern border, and so a lot of Americans, a lot of American politicians have had this real focus on the very visceral images of the humanitarian crisis of the southern border, but what they're not seeing is what it's like to live in a country that is being run by a cartel. And so Biden needs to exercise his existing authority under Remain in Mexico, and Congress needs to give him back the presidential expulsion authority under Title 42.

One of the interesting things about the first long quote is how she suggests that immigration policy is influenced by racial animus--but also that there are other considerations, like the devastation being wrought by fentanyl, which Gluesenkamp Perez suggests is coming across the Southern border.  In other words, we can hold both of these notions--perhaps both of these truths--simultaneously:  some people advocating greater control at the Southern border are acting on racial animus, but they also have legitimate concerns about what is happening at the border, including fentanyl that may be coming through that border.  

This duality is something I suggested in this recent publication regarding why many rural residents support Trump:  they may both experience economic distress and racist impulses.  It does not have to be an "either or."  Also, as I have suggested elsewhere, if we are going to use terms like "racial animus," we should define them--that is, we should develop a shared definition.  That has not happened.  In fact, I have not seen any media outlet--or any academic--take that task seriously.  (The closest would be John McWhorter, who has at least identified the challenge)

Prior posts featuring Congresswoman Gluesenkamp Perez are here, here, here, here, here and here.   More still are here (including those on right-to-repair).  

Meanwhile, here's a report on Americans' broad support for enforcement of the nation's immigration laws. 

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

Who is the rural voter? Book builds on old themes to create new understandings

The following book review by Olivia Weeks was published by the Daily Yonder.

In their new book, The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, Colby College political scientists Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea set out to describe what differentiates the politics of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan places. Drawing on the largest survey ever conducted with the specific aim of understanding rural voters, they seek to explain the recent rightward shift of the American countryside.

While rural voters only make up around 15% of the American electorate, their emergence as a reliable conservative voting bloc has redrawn the maps of electoral politics. In 2008, Barack Obama won 43% of the rural vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton claimed just 30%, according to a Daily Yonder analysis. Since then, the politics of the countryside have remained staunchly Republican. In response to that change, The Rural Voter asks two related questions: Why did the swing happen? And about which issues do today’s rural voters care most?

The latter question is easier to answer than the former, especially with the aid of such comprehensive survey data. The first thing the authors make clear about rural voters is that the extent of their conservatism is not explained by their being older, whiter, and less college-educated than the average American. Rural people are more likely to vote for Republicans, even when you control for demographic characteristics.

If you’re from a city and you’ve consumed much media about the countryside, that might not surprise you. You’ve probably seen a lot of images of homemade Trump signs standing high above vast cornfields and heard plenty about the Bible-thumping, gun-toting culture warriors who emerged from their villages to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But, as our reporting here at the Daily Yonder shows, and Jacobs and Shea affirm, those images are dramatic misrepresentations of the politics of the countryside.

On hot-button social issues, partisanship is actually far more powerful than geography. According to The Rural Voter, ideologies of patriotism, evangelicalism, xenophobia, transphobia, anti-intellectualism, and anti-cosmopolitanism are not overrepresented in rural places. And rural Republicans are 10 points less likely than their urban and suburban counterparts to agree with the idea that “abortion should be ILLEGAL under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.”

So, in some ways, rural Republicans are less conservative than their urban and suburban counterparts. But in other ways, they’re more conservative. On most cultural issues, rural Democrats think just like metropolitan Democrats and rural Republicans think just like metropolitan Republicans (the latter of which represent most GOP members, to be clear, since the metropolitan population is 6 to 7 times larger than the rural population). That said, we know from the Rural Voter Survey that the politics of the countryside are unique, even once we’ve controlled for demographic overrepresentation.

So what makes rural voters different? Jacobs and Shea found that four sensibilities separate the rural populace from the rest of the electorate. These are 1) an “overwhelming sense that their ways of life are discounted, mis-portrayed, and dismissed;” 2) an individualistic belief in hard work and its ability to outweigh the “discrimination faced by racial and ethnic minorities;”​​ 3) a deep sense of “economic anxiety, which translates into a collective grievance toward government, experts, and outsiders;” and 4) a “heightened sense of civic pride.”

While the first two features – perceptions of belittlement by outsiders and commitments to a bootstrapping mentality in the face of a highly unequal society – comport with broader media narratives about rural people and places, the latter two are less intuitive.

What could economic anxiety have to do with a rightward shift in rural America? Isn’t there just as much economic precarity in cities as there is in small towns? Wasn’t it a myth that Trump voters were blue collar? And what could it mean for outsized hometown pride to sit alongside such economic distress?

Culture or Class?

There were two main responses to rural America’s outsized support for Donald Trump. Some coverage decried the Clinton campaign’s disinterest in the economic hardships of sparsely populated places. Others in the media claimed that resounding rural support for Donald Trump was more a result of a backward looking cultural politics in the countryside than of material anxieties or Democratic neglect.

As historian Keith Orejel tells it, some journalists stressed culture over economics because of a deep and widespread misunderstanding of heavy industry’s importance to rural economies. Contrary to those who emphasize a static and backward-looking rural politics, he argues that rural voters have always been responsive to economic shifts.

According to Orejel, many political commentators don’t acknowledge that the type of agricultural work urbanites often attribute to small-town Americans had already been hollowed out by 1960. Farm work was being rapidly replaced by factory work as companies fled the higher labor and land costs of rust belt cities. Industry in the countryside was volatile after the mid-1970s but remained a crucial contributor to rural economic vitality through the year 2000.

In the first decade of the 21st century, however, rural industrial employment dropped by over a third. Unlike in cities, workforce participation and unemployment rates in nonmetropolitan areas never recovered to pre-Great Recession levels. So, Orejel’s economic history shows that, in the run up to 2016, there was plenty of reason for economic angst in rural America.

But political scientists like Diana C. Mutz have argued that such angst can’t explain Trump’s performance among white voters who don’t have college degrees. In 2018 she told The New York Times that there were a couple initial reasons to doubt the notion that Trump’s supporters were reacting to being “left behind” by the globalized economy: First, she says, that economy was actually improving for Americans in 2016. And second, according to past research, personal financial hardship rarely inspires shifts in individual voting behavior. Instead, “It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,” Mutz said.

Do these claims apply to rural America? On the first point, we already know that economic recovery was less straightforward in sparsely populated places, even if the overall trends were positive. On the second, it’s worth asking whether individual “pocketbook concerns” are the only valid causes of economic anxiety. What of rural voters whose communities have undergone deep economic transformations in recent decades? Well-documented cases of depopulation and economic decline are not merely “symbolic.”

Other scholars have argued that Mutz’s widely covered study erred in its data analysis to begin with, and that “status threat” and “economic anxiety” are more difficult to untangle than Mutz acknowledged. But for our purposes, we don’t need to disprove all of Mutz’s claims to show that they don’t accurately describe rural Trump voters, who have only ever represented about a fifth of the former President’s total vote share. With the publication of The Rural Voter, proving that is easier than ever.

 
Linked Fates

By asking rural people – in more detail than usual – how they’ve metabolized recent changes in American life, Jacobs and Shea find that even rural voters who are doing just fine financially are politically motivated by a profound sense of economic anxiety, and not irrationally so. This finding rests on the importance in rural places of what the authors call “linked fates.”

To understand their concept, let’s consider depopulation in rural America. Trump won 90% of counties that lost population in the 2010s. Imagine you’re a small business owner in one of those places, and you’ve benefited from high rates of consumer spending in recent years. You’re flush, but your hometown went from 8,200 residents in 2010 to 7,300 in 2020 (like my own did). A loss of 900 people might not sound like a lot to some, but that’s an 11% drop. Does the fact that you’re still making money invalidate your looming sense of precarity? Jacobs and Shea show that, because rural voters understand that their fates are linked to their neighbors and their towns, they don’t think so.

As the authors write, economic deprivation does not distinguish rural Americans from urban ones. There is unbearable poverty in every American landscape, and if you’re asking whether city or country has it worse, you can make a defensible case on either side. On the other hand, to a greater extent than among other demographic groups, rural Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds experience economic hardship on the communal level, not just the individual. This is because, in small towns and on their outskirts, the poor live among the wealthy. “Unlike city dwellers or those living in suburbia, rural residents are especially attuned to inequality and economic progress in their immediate communities simply because those are more integrated places.” In this way, the precarity of the neighbor, town, and county are transmuted into individual anxieties, even among those with sturdy financial foundations.

But it’s not only socioeconomic integration that makes neighbors in rural communities feel like their fates are linked – on average, those places are also less diverse in racial and industrial makeup. The demographics of rural America are changing, but it’s still disproportionately white. For this reason, the authors write, “the racial and ethnic lines that define other political communities are simply not as visible in rural areas.”

Economic homogeneity, or the extent to which a place’s residents are dependent on one type of employment, is also greater in sparsely populated places, meaning that industrial shocks are felt by entire communities, not just one sector of the economy.

Since 1970, rural places have lost 48% of their jobs in agriculture, forestry, mining, construction, transportation, and production. While urban areas are not so far off, at 44%, the difference is that even 50 years ago there were many more urban Americans working outside these industries. Back then, less than a third of workers in metropolitan areas held these blue-collar jobs. That’s in comparison to roughly half of the rural workforce. At the same time, urban places have been better compensated by a larger and faster-growing knowledge economy.

So, while real rates of decline in industrial work were similar in rural and urban locales, the impacts of those changes on rural places in recent decades were nothing short of transformative. The shape of life in rural America changed, and it changed in towns and small communities nationwide.

When that shift happened, Jacobs and Shea write, fates were linked not only among the rich and poor within small towns, but also between small towns across the country. The political coalescence of rural America – the tendency for less populated counties from the Deep South, Appalachia, the West, or New England to all vote similarly – shows that a distinctive rural political identity has emerged all over the nation, among rural voters of all stripes.

This wasn’t always the case. As the fickle rural voter was rocked by late 20th century booms and busts in the globalizing economy, she bounced back and forth between the Democratic and Republican parties: “Country values, with their emphasis on self-reliance and social conservatism, often worked to the political advantage of Republicans. But that was offset, at least in some rural areas, by a sense of unease with the economic status quo.” In the meantime, as presidents from both parties pursued welfare retrenchment and neoliberal trade agendas, Democrats cast themselves as the party of progress, and GOP operatives wove together the backward looking “myth of real America.”

Jacobs and Shea write that, between the financial shocks of the 1970s and the Great Recession, “rural Americans were told [by Republicans] that the earth below their feet was giving way due to ignorance and the indifference of coastal elites.” That conservative story came to resonate with the many Americans who say their towns were better off in the 1970s than they are today. But Republican-spun narratives about the progressives that sought to replace small-town values with big-city mores didn’t produce a decisive political shift in rural America until Donald Trump’s election.

Conveniently for the Right, the progressive archetypes they’d emphasized for decades were embodied by no Democrat more thoroughly than Hillary Clinton. In the wake of her historic 2016 loss in the countryside, the former Secretary of State cheerily declared her party’s identification with places that are “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” Jacobs and Shea show that, whether rural voters are personally cash-strapped or not, they are not optimistic. Conservatives cultivated the countryside’s swing to the right over many decades. Trump’s rhetorical empathy for those (especially white) Americans who felt left behind by the global economy, paired with Clinton’s unapologetic indifference to them, solidified it.

 
Why Don’t You Leave?

That story is surely incomplete, but it begins to explain why rural voters are likely to channel their uniquely place-based sense of economic precarity into mistrust in government bureaucracy and elites – often represented by the Democratic Party.

When it comes to the media, mainstream pundits earn the ire of rural Americans when they argue that people from struggling towns should be “more responsive to [geographic] differences in labor demand” (read: pick up and move), and express frustration that federal investments haven’t made sparsely populated places self-sufficient yet.

Those perspectives make two key mistakes. First, they frame the countryside as a dependent of the city – when in fact rural and urban economies rely on one another in countless ways – and fail to acknowledge that rural America is also a site of massive urban wealth extraction. Second, they assume that economic angst turns people against their towns.

As The Rural Voter shows, intense feelings of civic pride and place-based economic anxiety can sit side by side. While rural people are more pessimistic than urbanites about the futures of their towns, they’re also more attached to their often struggling communities than are urban and suburban residents, and less likely to want to move. That may be a counterintuitive combination of feelings, but – as it’s one of the key identifiers of rural voters from across the political spectrum – it’s a crucial one for urban politicos to understand.

Frustration with the direction your town is heading could produce a wide variety of secondary feelings – not exclusively a desire to move to a bigger city. To suggest that rural residents should flee their towns in hard times could thoroughly alienate them from mainstream media and politics.
Learning to Listen

As polling conducted in affiliation with the Daily Yonder recently showed, and the Rural Voter Survey affirms, rural people (like the nation as a whole) don’t think the economy is working for them, or for their towns. That’s despite its relatively good marks on traditional indicators like rates of inflation and unemployment. It also runs contradictory to the president’s claim that “Bidenomics is working.” The disconnect has many possible explanations. A simple one is that, despite inflation’s slowed growth, consumers remain keenly aware of recent price jumps for goods and services like fuel, groceries, housing, and childcare.

The Rural Voter offers another explanation, and it’s worth restating: in sparsely populated places, community-level decline is experienced individually, even in the absence of personal hardship. That type of economic anxiety was routinely minimized by progressives and other elites after the 2016 election. Over the next four years, the national rural vote only swung further to the right.

But that shift isn’t inevitable, and treating it that way undermines democracy. Competitive elections aren’t just good for Democrats. Having a real choice between candidates encourages genuine accountability and representation, two things severely lacking in communities losing local newspapers at a rapid clip.

In the conclusion of the book – with examples like Washington Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Maine Representative Jared Golden – Jacobs and Shea argue persuasively that, when Democrats show up in rural places, they don’t need to abandon their progressive values to be competitive. They do, however, need to understand what actually unites rural people of all colors, classes, and creeds. Reading The Rural Voter is a good place to start.

Maine Democrat Jared Golden doubles down in opposition to student loan forgiveness, with implications for rural folks

 

The Portland Press-Herald (Maine) reported last week on U.S. Congressman Jared Golden's provocative statement opposing student loan forgiveness.  Golden, a Democrat, is a three-term incumbent from the state's second district, which leans Republican and includes vast rural areas.  Golden's career and politically pragmatic stances are discussed in three prior posts, which also provide more information on the demographics and economics of his congressional district.  

Golden's mid-August Tweet responded to a report from the Maine Beacon that Golden, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, had received a donation from Sallie Mae after he was one of two Democrats who joined Republicans in May to oppose Biden's student-loan relief program.  (The other was fellow leader of the "yellow-dog coalition," Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, of southwestern Washington State).  Golden's Tweet led with 

I've always held the opinion that working class Mainers shouldn't foot the bill for someone else's choices. Once again, radical leftist elites prove they don't understand Maine.

It then included this text:   

Sadly, this is what the radical leftist elites are learning about "democracy" these days:  silence and destroy anyone who disagrees with your views or goals.  I stand by my vote and my opposition to forking out $10,000 to people who freely chose to attend college.  They were privileged to have the opportunity, andmany left college well-situted to make six figure salaries for life.  The Twitterati can keep bemoaning their privileged status and demanding handouts all they want, but as far as I’m concerned if they want free money for college, they can join the Marines and serve the country like I, and so many others, have in the past and many more will in the future. If they want a career and hard skills without college debt, they should join a union and enter an apprenticeship. But if they choose to attend college, they can pay back their loans just like working-class people pay back home mortgages, car loans, and many other expenses that people choose to take out loans for.

Golden's statement provoked lots of strong reaction on X, formerly known as Twitter.  One of those responding was Tiffany Bond, an independent who has twice challenged Golden in the past.  Bond broached the matter of the implications of Golden's position for rural Maine, writing:  

What the hell is wrong with you, Jared?  Rural Maine will have no dentists, doctors, lawyers, teachers or anyone requiring a professional education. You don’t understand rural Maine.

The Maine People’s Alliance account responded  “Really? I’m not sure the ‘Twitterati’ are the ones not understanding Maine right now.”

Academics responded, too.  History professor Heather Cox Richardson wrote, 

Heavens!  Did you really write this or have you been hacked?!? You always seemed a centrist voie of reason that represented your Maine district well.  What's with this "radical leftist elitists"?!? 

And University of Maine political science professor Amy Fried posted a few responses:

This language is divisive and nasty.  There is a real debate to be had about helping people go to and graduate college and if there are benefits to be gleaned by the whole society.  You've done nothing to contribute to that.  Just awful.  Don't think of running statewide, ever. 

An account holder called bre kidman's awkward blue check wrote: 

Yikes, bub.

Did you draw the short straw on making the cringe statement to get that Sallie Mae money for the team? You know college educated Mainers aren't making 6 figure salaries.

JS there are classier ways to quit Congress than slamming your constituents when they're down.

Then, from the same account: 

Also, real quick math question: how much money did Maine voters spend getting you elected to a job with a low six-figure salary?

The tone of Golden's statement--though not the substance--is in sharp contrast to the statement of another "rural" politician, former Montana Governor Steve Bullock who wrote in a New York Times op-ed in December, 2021: 

To overcome these obstacles [facing the Democratic party in rural America], Democrats need to show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. Eliminating student loans isn’t a top-of-mind matter for the two-thirds of Americans lacking a college degree. Being told that climate change is the most critical issue our nation faces rings hollow if you’re struggling to make it to the end of the month.

Note that Bullock held himself out as representing what rural voters generally think, which is not necessarily the same as saying he would side with them on either student loan relief or climate change policies.  That is, we do not know what he thinks or what side he would land on faced with policies to ameliorate student debt or climate change.  What is clear is that Bullock's tone is more conciliatory than Golden's, that it leaves room for nuance and discussion.  

I blogged about Bullock's op-ed and the response to it in this post.

In any event, I'm curious to see how Golden's stance on student loan relief plays out when he's up for re-election next year.    

Here's an earlier post about higher education access for rural Mainers.

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law Blog and First Gen Course Blog.  

Bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and Representatives supports rural childcare

Here's much of the press release issued by the offices of Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), along with Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) and a number of female congresspersons from both sides of the aisle:  

Today, U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tina Smith (D-MN) and U.S. Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA-3) Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR-5), Tracey Mann (R-KS-1), and Yadira Caraveo (D-CO-8) introduced the bipartisan, bicameral Expanding Childcare in Rural America (ECRA) Act of 2023 to improve the availability and quality, and lower the cost, of childcare in agricultural and rural communities.

The press release then includes quotes from a number of the sponsors, leading with Senator Brown (Ohio): 

Child care is far too expensive and too hard to find for Ohio families, and parents in rural Ohio face unique challenges. Farm communities often lack enough transportation infrastructure and don’t have enough high-quality child care providers, and rural parents are more likely to work non-traditional hours.  These are commonsense, bipartisan steps to make child care more affordable and accessible in rural communities, so that more Ohio parents can support their families.

Senator Marshall (Kansas) is next:  

Access to childcare is a top priority for both families and employers in every corner of Kansas.  With a few changes to the USDA’s Rural Development programs, which benefit our rural communities, we can build the necessary childcare infrastructure that puts our children on the right educational path and provides them with a strong foundation for the future.

Then comes this from Senator Smith (Minnesota), a member of the Senate Education Committee:  

Access to childcare is essential, but for too many families living in rural places, it is out of reach.  I’ve heard from Minnesotans who have to drive 50 miles to take their kids to childcare and from providers who are struggling to find and keep staff. This bill will help improve the quality, availability and affordability of childcare in rural communities to help ensure that parents have the ability to pursue their careers.

Representative Gluesenkamp Perez, one of few parents of young children in the House, states: 

Child care in rural communities like mine is next to impossible to find and afford. Before coming to Congress, my husband and I brought our son to our auto repair shop most days because there were no other child care options available.  Our bipartisan bill will make child care more accessible and affordable in rural communities so families can get the support they need no matter where they live.

Representative Caraveo invokes her profession: 

As a pediatrician, I’ve seen the toll it takes on families when they don’t have affordable, reliable childcare. That burden is even more present in rural communities, where there are fewer providers, and families may have to travel a great distance for childcare. I’m proud to join this bipartisan effort to ensure rural families have access to the low-cost, high-quality childcare they need and deserve.

The press release continues:  

The Expanding Childcare in Rural America Act would direct U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development to authorize and prioritize projects that address the availability, quality, and cost of childcare in agricultural and rural communities through the following programs:

• The Community Facilities Program offers direct loans, loan guarantees and grants to develop or improve essential public services and facilities in communities across rural America.
• Community Facilities Technical Assistance and Training Grant offers grants to eligible public bodies and private, nonprofit organizations (such as states, counties, cities, townships, incorporated towns, villages, boroughs, authorities, districts, and Tribes located on Federal or state reservations) to provide technical assistance and/or training in support of the essential community facilities program.
• The Business & Industry Loan Guarantee Program provides loan guarantees to commercial lenders for loans to eligible rural businesses.The Rural Business Development Grant Program is a competitive grant designed to support targeted technical assistance, training, and other activities leading to the development or expansion of small and emerging private businesses in rural areas that have fewer than 50 employees and less than $1 million in gross revenues.
• The Rural Innovation Strong Economy Grant Program offers grant assistance to create and augment high-wage jobs, accelerate the formation of new businesses, support industry clusters and maximize the use of local productive assets in eligible low-income rural areas.
• The Rural Microentrepreneur Assistance Program provides loans and grants to Microenterprise Development Organizations (MDOs) to provide microloans for microenterprise startups and growth through a Rural Microloan Revolving Fund; and provide training and technical assistance to microloan borrowers and micro entrepreneurs.

The bill would also allow USDA to make awards through intermediaries such as, childcare resource and referral organizations, staffed family childcare networks, and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) with demonstrated expertise in the childcare sector.

The press release also lists a number of organizations supporting the bill and quotes representatives of several of them: 

“If it was feasible to make a living providing quality childcare in rural communities, there would not be a supply problem. The Expanding Childcare in Rural America Act addresses barriers to entry and offers support and resources to potential micropreneurs - thereby enabling America’s workforce to go to work. The Corporation for Ohio Appalachian Development appreciates this effort to expand childcare access for working families and commends Senator Brown for making this issue a priority,” said Megan Riddlebarger COAD Executive Director.

* * * 

“The Expanding Childcare in Rural America Act paves the way for high-quality child care to exist in rural and agricultural communities that have long struggled with severe gaps in supply. This bill opens up existing funding streams to localities that identify child care as a barrier to attracting and retaining a robust and qualified workforce. The Early Care and Education Consortium is proud to endorse this bill, and our members are excited to work with rural and agricultural communities across America to develop scalable solutions that support the needs of working families,” said Sage Schaftel, Acting Executive Director, Early Care and Education Consortium (ECEC).

“Rural communities face unique challenges in increasing access to quality child care for families,” said Linda Smith, Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Early Childhood Initiative. “Not only does limited access to care have long-term impacts on child development, but it also has an immediate impact on economic loss in rural communities. The Expanding Childcare in Rural America Act of 2023 establishes a pathway for rural communities to access capital, increase access to care, and connect families to critical child care resources. We applaud the Senators’ bipartisan work championing this issue and look forward to working with members of both parties on continued efforts.”

Postscript:  On June 11, 2023, Senator Tina Smith had this to say about Senator Roger Marshall, with whom she is co-sponsored this legislation, in relation to an entirely different topic:  Pride month and how it is appropriately commemorated: 

Smith wrote: "I won't be lectured on patriotism by someone who voted to overturn an election.  Pride is patriotic."

Smith was responding to Marshall's tweet, accompanied by a photo of the Pride Flag flying amidst U.S. Flags on the White House:  "This is a disgrace.  Not only is this a breach of the U.S. Flag Code, but it's a glaring example of the White Houses' [sic] incompetence and their insistence on putting a social agenda ahead of patriotism."   

Colorado passes nation's first right-to-repair law

Lucas Brady Woods of KUNC reported for NPR a few days ago from Peetz, Colorado, population 213.  An excerpt follows: 

Farmers and ranchers across the country can't fix their equipment because manufacturers don't give them access to the specialized tools and technical manuals to do so. Even simple repairs can't be done. But Colorado's new law guarantees the right to repair one's own agricultural equipment. It requires manufacturers to hand over parts, software instructions and other necessary tools. State Representative Brianna Titone helped write Colorado's law.

BRIANNA TITONE: This puts them in that category of being able to have the latest, greatest equipment and be able to stay on top of their repairs and keep moving and keep the production going and producing more stuff to grow and feed our communities. That's a good thing.

[Journalist] WOODS: Other states have tried and failed to pass similar legislation. The head of the National Farmers Union, Rob Larew says that's mostly because lawmakers don't understand the problem. To him, it's an individual rights issue.

ROB LAREW: If we think about it as our car or our phone or something like that, we have this idea that, you know, this is our property, right? Farmers are very independent. They feel the exact same way about their equipment that they've made an incredible investment in.

WOODS: Manufacturing trade groups have fought bills that allow user repairs. Joani Woelfel is the president of the Far West Equipment Dealers Association, which represents agricultural equipment dealers across the western U.S. She says the industry has put a lot of time and money into training technicians.

JOANI WOELFEL: They want to take everything that the industry has done, all the investment that they've made in their employees, and they want you to hand it over to them. And that's what that law tries to do.

WOODS: Woelfel says farmers and ranchers often have to wait days for a technician to show up because there aren't enough to go around. Danny Wood, back in northeast Colorado, says the new state law will help take some pressure off the technicians.

[Farmer Danny] WOOD: They're going to have plenty of service. And when it takes five days for him to come look at your combine and three days for him to come back and look at your tractor, they're overbooked anyway, so they need some other help.

WOODS: He just wants farmers, like himself, to be able to fix what they can when they need to so they can successfully plant and harvest their crops.

Prior posts mentioning the right-to-repair issue (mostly in relation to advocates like Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Senate Jon Tester) and its import in rural places are here. 

Some farmers (and other folks) opting for old, small, cheap Japanese trucks

The Economist reports here.  An excerpt follows:  

A couple of years ago Jake Morgan, a farmer who lives just outside Raleigh, in North Carolina, realised he needed a new vehicle to get around his property. At first he was looking at “side-by-sides”—a sort of off-road utility vehicle. But watching a review on YouTube of one that costs around $30,000 made by John Deere, he saw a comment that said something like “Why don’t you just get a minitruck instead?” That is, a tiny four-wheel drive pickup truck, sometimes known as a “Kei” truck, mostly made in Japan to take advantage of laws there which tax smaller vehicles less.

Intrigued, Mr Morgan started researching. Within a few months, he drove to Newport, Virginia to pick up a 1997 Honda Acty, having spent a total of just $2,000 on importing it. He was delighted. ... The Acty is less than five feet wide, and so can get into tight spaces a normal pickup cannot, like Mr Morgan’s barn.  And unlike a side-by-side, it can also be driven legally on local roads. 

The story quotes Todd Gatto, an owner of hvny Imports of Goshen, New York, which has sold more than 300 of these to local businesses in the recent past.  

We bought five of them to start, and we sold them all within seven days.

Another benefit of the Kei trucks:  They don't have onboard computers and proprietary parts that make repairs more expensive and complicated, an issue that has attracted attention recently from lawmakers like Senator Jon Tester of Montana and Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez of southwest Washington state.  

I like how this flies in the face of the image of the farmer as loving gas-guzzling, massive pick up trucks. 

Counting the number of times "rural" got used in the State of the Union address, and other rural and working -class concerns

That's one of the takeaways from this latest profile of Marie Gleusenkamp Perez, the 34-year-old newly elected congresswoman for Washington's 3d congressional district.  David Firestone of the New York Times editorial board writes: 

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez chose her guest for last month’s State of the Union address in order to make one of her favorite points. She invited Cory Torppa, who teaches construction and manufacturing at Kalama High School in her district in southwest Washington State, and also directs the school district’s career and technical education program. President Biden did briefly mention career training that night in his very long list of plans; still, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez wasn’t thrilled with the speech.

“I went back and looked at the transcript,” she said, “and he only said the word ‘rural’ once.”

It’s safe to say that Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez was one of very few Democrats in the room listening for that word, but then she didn’t win her nail-biter of a race in a conservative district with a typical Democratic appeal. To court rural and working-class voters who had supported a Republican in the district since 2011, she had to speak to them in a way that her party’s left wing usually does not — to acknowledge their economic fears, their sense of being left out of the political conversation, their disdain for ideological posturing from both sides of the spectrum.

Prior posts about Gluesenkamp Perez are here.   A recent NPR story about vocational education is here.

I've occasionally also tracked politicians' use of the word "rural," like here, from one of the 2020 Presidential debates (this one actually occurring in 2019).  

Another American Family Voices report tells Democrats how to win in 2024, with a focus on blue-collar workers in the Midwest

Katie Glueck reported for the New York Times a few weeks ago under the headline, "Democratic Report Explores Blue-Collar Struggles: ‘Our Brand Is Pretty Damaged.’"  Some excerpts from the story, about an American Family Voices study of how both Democrats and Republicans are seen in "factory towns" in the Midwest, follow: 

The data found that Democrats struggled with the perception that a Democratic economic plan “doesn’t exist or doesn’t help regular people’s own working families,” a claim that resonated with some base Democratic and independent voters.

Many voters studied in these “Factory Towns” are “deeply, profoundly cynical” about both political parties, the report found, with swing voters holding the impression that both Democrats and Republicans are “too extreme.”

The sharpest argument against Republicans, the polling found, was that “they are on the side of corporations and C.E.O.s and they work for the wealthy.”

Here is  a quote from the report's executive summary: 

1. The presidential horse race numbers are very competitive in these counties, but Republicans are stronger in terms of the economic frame.

2. Voters have negative opinions of both parties: this presents both challenges and opportunities for Democrats. Voters in these counties tend to think Democrats lack an economic plan, but they see the GOP as the party of wealthy corporations and CEOs.

3. Populist economics and the Democratic economic policy agenda play very well in these counties. These voters respond best to an agenda focused on kitchen-table economic issues.

4. Contrary to conventional wisdom, populist economic messaging works much better than cultural war messaging. Our strongest Democratic message on the economy beats the Republican culture war message easily. The Republican economic message is a bigger threat to us.

5. Community building needs to be at the heart of our organizing strategy.

6. I recommend that Democrats and progressives make major investments in local field organizing and door-to-door, special events that build community, online community building, existing local media and progressive media targeted to these counties, and progressive organizations that make sure voters know how to benefit directly from the Biden policy initiatives of the last two years.

Back to the NYTimes coverage, Glueck queries whether laws like the Inflation Reduction Act and  investments in U.S. chip-making efforts.  The piece also helpfully addresses the issue of whether it's feasible to expect folks to know about such laws: 

“Most voters are not following national news or the details of the legislation, and many haven’t yet seen the impact on their lives,” the report said. “Working-class voters outside of the big metro areas are still leading pretty tough lives, so we have to balance the story of our success on policy with the recognition of those hard times.”

This reminds me of a favorite, revealing quote from one of the best stories ever written about the 2016 election cycle.  Alec MacGillis quotes Tracie St. Martin, an Ohio heavy equipment operator and blue-collar worker in his post-election story titled "Revenge of the Forgotten Class."  

[St. Martin] regretted that she did not have a deeper grasp of public affairs. “No one that’s voting knows all the facts,” she said. “It’s a shame. They keep us so fucking busy and poor that we don’t have the time.”

 Here's more from Glueck's story that touches on the importance of small businesses and rhetoric around them: 

The report also urged Democrats to combine traditional economic populist messaging and policies with strong emphasis on support for small businesses, as well as unions.

“Most working-class folks very much think of small-business owners as part of the working class,” the report said. It added, “Democrats and progressive issue advocates should always talk about how much they care about small businesses doing well, and should be specific about the ways they want to help the small-business community.”

A prior post on small business and regulation is here, and this recent story about Congressperson Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Washington) notes that it is one of her priorities.  Prior posts about American Family Voices research are here and here. 

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

The ongoing "right to repair" battle in rural America

In agricultural communities, farming equipment owners have long been battling companies such as John Deere for their “right to repair”- essentially, the right for farmers to make necessary repairs to equipment they own, instead of all repairs being handled by the company itself. This would allow farmers to avoid the hassle and expense of professional repairs, as these services are often unnecessarily costly and time-consuming.

While people unfamiliar with agriculture may assume that repairing a tractor is just a matter of fixing a tire or tinkering with an engine, the reality is far more complicated. Modern tractors run software owned by the companies that build them, and without privileged access to this software, farmers are left to wait for a company-authorized technician to reach their often remote location in order to make repairs.

Over the course of this conflict, agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere has been at the forefront of public scrutiny involving the right to repair. In 2017, eight states introduced right to repair legislation, with John Deere and other companies citing the potential dangers associated with a lack of professional expertise as justification to keep the status quo intact. More information on those proposed bills can be found in this blog post here.

Small amounts of progress have been made since then. On July 9th, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order aimed at helping the FTC create rules to crack down on companies that have completely integrated their product repairs, thus thwarting the right to repair. The FTC responded by declaring it would commit more resources into the matter, but it remains to be seen whether this commitment will have any large effects. 

During the same year, 25 states introduced right-to-repair bills. Many were spurred on by the diminishing availability of repair services due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These pieces of legislation have encountered massive amounts of pushback and lobbying from companies that prefer all repairs to their products be done through their own services instead of through third party shops. Although many bills addressing this issue are being considered, only one has been successful- New York's Digital Fair Repair Act, which will only impact electronic products made or sold in-state after July 1, 2023. 

Since 2017, the right to repair has become an increasingly hot topic. While the agricultural industry is a main target, these bills would also give consumers and hospitals the ability to make third-party repairs on a variety of electronic equipment ranging from phones to medical devices. As a result, right-to-repair legislation is overwhelmingly supported by a bipartisan majority. A study conducted of California residents in 2022 found that 75% of those surveyed were in favor of the right to repair- 76% of Democrats, 61% of Republicans, and 81% of independents. More reading on right to repair advocacy done by legislators such as Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jon Tester can be found here.

Faced with the widespread popularity of the right-to-repair movement, some large agricultural companies are reconsidering their stances on the topic. In January of 2023, the American Farm Bureau Federation entered into a memorandum of understanding with John Deere to recognize a right for farmers to repair all John Deere farming equipment. The memorandum represents a commitment by John Deere to give farmers access to the tools and software of their purchased equipment. It also encourages the growth of third party repair services in the process. On its face, this memorandum appears to represent a huge shift in the agricultural industry, empowering owners to better deal with their own equipment in a way that best suits their individual situation. 

However, skepticism of John Deere's earnestness in this process remains. An article posted by NPR shortly after the memorandum was announced underscores concerns from those in the agricultural field who worry the agreement didn't ensure actual follow-through from John Deere. In fact, detractors claim the memorandum may simply be an attempt to further delay the passage of right-to-repair laws currently under consideration. Ultimately, the agreement is only between the AFBF and John Deere, raising concerns that the memorandum merely represents an empty promise. The article offers this quote from Walter Schweitzer, President of the Montana Farmers Union:

If they truly, honestly wanted to give farmers and ranchers and independent repair shops the right to repair equipment, why are they so afraid of legislation that authorizes that?

If John Deere's memorandum fails to make any meaningful headway into resolving the right to repair issue, the best way to enact instant, sweeping fixes to the system would be through legislation passed by the federal government. While many states are considering bills on an individual basis, change is coming too slowly to offer meaningful relief to farmworkers on a short-term basis. 

Just last month, legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives to both increase access to third party repairs and change copyright law to avoid legal issues for consumer repairs. While these bills are likely far away from becoming reality, they represent perhaps the best chance farmers have in receiving the change necessary for agricultural workers to retain more control over the products they own. 

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.  

On Marie Gluesenkamp Perez's rurality, and how that helped her win Washington's 3d congressional district

Michelle Goldberg wrote for the New York Times about the race for Washington's 3d congressional district in late September (and I wrote about that column here).  

Now, in the wake of Gluesenkamp Perez's win, Goldberg follows up with her four takeaways from this campaign, including this first one, which touches on rurality:

1. Democrats need to recruit more working-class and rural candidates.

Gluesenkamp Perez is a young mother who owns an auto repair shop with her husband. They live in rural Skamania County, in a hillside house they built themselves when they couldn’t get a mortgage to buy one. On the trail she spoke frequently of bringing her young son to work because they couldn’t find child care. She shares both the cultural signifiers and economic struggles of many of the voters she needed to win over.

“I hope that people see this as a model,” she told me on Monday. “We need to recruit different kinds of candidates. We need to be listening more closely to the districts — people want a Congress that looks like America.”

For the record, Skamania County's population is just 12,000, but it is exurban Portland.   That said, Gluesenkamp Perez's campaign ads did a great job of playing up the rural parts of her background, showing her on an all-terrain, off-road vehicle on the property she owns with her husband.

Oh, and I don't hold it against her at all, but Gluesenkamp Perez does have a degree from uber liberal and uber urban Reed College in Portland.  

Postscript:  I love this Nov. 19, 2022 tweet from Gluesenkamp: 

It reminds us of her working-class life (the auto repair shop) and her rural life, too (the trees).  It reads:  "First trip to D.C. since 9th grade.  Not enough trees in this town.  There wasn't time to sightsee, just learn the ropes, but I did manage to pick something up for the fridge at the shop."  

Photos from her twitter feed this week also showed her meeting another woman who inspires me enormously:  Mary Peltola, who is now a certainty to retain the seat as Alaska's at-large member of Congress.  

Postscript:  In the Nov. 28 episode of the NPR Politics podcast, Ximena Bustillo awkwardly refers to Glusenkamp Perez's entire district as rural, though it includes the city of Vancouver, Washington, part of the Portland, Oregon metro area.  

Tight races in congressional districts in the rural West

Two very tight congressional races in the American Southwest include large swaths of rural territory.  

The first of these races, New Mexico's 2d, has been called for the Democrat Gabe Vasquez.  It stretches from the Albuquerque suburbs west to Arizona, including a bit of Indian Country, then south to the Mexican border and West Texas/El Paso.  Here are the results, showing Vasquez won by about 1,300 votes:  

His support was strongest in Indian Country but also good in Las Cruces and the surrounding area, Las Cruces being the state's third largest city. 

Here's a New York Times story from several weeks ago mentioning Vasquez and his race in relation to "American dream" rhetoric.  Though that story suggested that it is primarily Republicans who invoke the American dream, the story observed that Vasquez also does so.  Here's the salient bit: 

Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat who is facing Ms. Herrell in New Mexico in the fall, has also embraced the phrase. He tells supporters that his late grandfather — Javier Bañuelos, who taught himself to fix broken televisions with an old manual and eventually opened his own repair shop — made it possible for him to run for Congress. The American dream is not about buying a house, but ensuring that the economic ladder “is there for everybody and that everyone can climb with you,” he said.

Another close race is Colorado's 3d.  Here's how that one is looking right now, with Boebert leading by 1,100 votes:

NPR did a segment this morning suggesting an automatic recount in the Boebert-Frisch race because the initial results are expected to put the candidates within half a percentage of each other, as they are now.  Here is the Colorado Sun's coverage.  

Another close race with swaths of rural territory is Washington's 3rd, in the southwest corner of the state, part of it exurban Portland, Oregon-Vancouver, Washington.  Here's the current state of play there now, where Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is leading by about 6,000 votes.  That seat was previously held by a moderate Republican, Jamie Herrera-Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump, setting up the battle between Gluesenkamp Perez and Joe Kent.  That race was featured in a New York Times story by Michelle Goldberg in late September.  

Another exurban district with an exceedingly tight races was Colorado's 8th, which lies along the front range and stretches from Greeley south to Thornton and east of Colorado's 2d, which includes Fort Collins and Boulder.  The Democrat, Yadira Caraveo won there, defeating Barbara Kirkmeyer by about 1,600 votes.  

Kirkmeyer also used American dream rhetoric in her campaign, albeit with a different connotation than Vasquez's: 

Kirkmeyer ...embraces the American dream as the theme of her personal story. Ms. Kirkmeyer grew up on a dairy farm, the sixth of seven children in a family that often struggled. She paid her way through college by raising and selling a herd of eight milk cows, yearlings and heifer calves.

The American dream, Ms. Kirkmeyer said, was not only about economic opportunity but freedom, connecting the words with Republican opposition to Covid-related mask mandates. “I don’t see the mandates as part of the American dream,” she said. “People felt that was an infringement on their rights and personal dreams.”

Caraveo is a Latina pediatrician, and the district she will now serve is 39% Latino/a.  Caraveo carried Adams County (where she lives in Thornton)the part of the district closest to Denver, while Kirkmeyer carried Weld County, which includes Greeley and environs (and was also a center in the movement for northern Colorado's succession about a decade ago). 

Postscript:  Here's Politico's coverage of the Gluesenkamp Perez win over Joe Kent in Washington's 3d.