South Dakotas vote to expand Medicaid under Affordable Care Act

Here's the Politico story, and here's a story from the New York Times a few days before the election.  

An excerpt from the Politico story by Megan Messerly is here:

South Dakota voters on Tuesday approved a measure to expand the state’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act.

The program, which takes effect in July and is expected to cover more than 40,000 people, passed with about 56 percent support.

The Republican-controlled state, where lawmakers have long resisted Medicaid expansion, is the seventh in the last five years to do so at the ballot box — and likely the last to do so for some time.

“We are thrilled by this victory, which took years of work, coalition building, and organizing to achieve,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, which helped pass the ballot measure. “Citizens took matters into their own hands to pass Medicaid expansion via ballot measure — showing us once again that if politicians won’t do their job, their constituents will step up and do it for them.”

Opponents of Medicaid expansion tried to make passage of the ballot measure more difficult through a June initiative, Amendment C, that would have raised the voter approval threshold to 60 percent. That measure was overwhelmingly defeated.

Under the American Rescue Plan, the federal government encouraged states to expand Medicaid by covering an extra 5 percent of the costs of the program, in addition to the 90 percent it covers for newly eligible individuals under Obamacare.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates those incentives will send $110 million to South Dakota.

Opponents of Medicaid expansion, including Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, argued the measure would cost the state in the long run, force lawmakers to raise taxes, and discourage able-bodied adults from getting jobs.

And here's the NYT overview from a few days before the election.  It is written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and provides ample context:

Progressives have helped bring health coverage to tens of thousands of uninsured Americans with an exercise in direct democracy: They have persuaded voters to pass ballot measures expanding Medicaid in six states where Republican elected officials had long been standing in the way.

Now comes the latest test of this ballot box strategy: South Dakota.

An unlikely coalition of farmers, business leaders, hospital executives and clergy members has coalesced around Amendment D, a ballot measure that would enshrine Medicaid expansion in the South Dakota Constitution, over the objections of Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican. It is widely expected to pass next week on Election Day.

It has been 10 years since the Supreme Court ruled that states did not have to expand Medicaid — the government health insurance program for low-income people — under the Affordable Care Act, and the politics around the issue have shifted. Philosophical objections to large government programs are giving way to economic considerations, particularly in rural states like South Dakota, where struggling hospitals and nursing homes are eager for federal reimbursement dollars that come from Medicaid.

If Medicaid expansion is adopted in South Dakota — a state where Donald J. Trump won more than 60 percent of the vote both times he ran — advocates say it will send a strong signal to other Medicaid expansion holdouts, like Texas and Florida. South Dakota is one of 12 remaining states that have not expanded, down from 19 in 2016.

“It is harder and harder for conservative politicians to stand behind the idea that the A.C.A. is just one lawsuit away from being repealed or overturned,” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, a national nonprofit that is behind the “Yes on D” campaign.

“Our work,” she said, “is about how do we build odd-bedfellows coalitions delivering the message that Medicaid expansion is good for the economy, brings back tax dollars to the states, is helpful for small businesses and is not just ‘Do you support Obamacare?’”

In the tiny farming town of Conde, where a road sign puts the population at 140, that is exactly the argument that Doug Sombke, the president of the South Dakota Farmers Union, is making.

How the election went down in Shasta County, California, site of recent political turmoil

 Hailey Branson-Potts reports for the Los Angeles Times from Redding, California on Election Day under the headline, "In red California, election deniers rant about fraud and promise they won’t go away."  Here's an excerpt: 

The midterm elections came to this bitterly divided country with a storm of conspiracy theories, bolstered by former President Trump and fanned by allies who support his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

In this mostly rural Northern California county — where Trump beat President Biden by 33 percentage points — local election officials and poll workers have felt threatened and under siege. The split is not so much red versus blue but traditional conservative versus far right.

“We’re tired. Down-to-the bones tired,” said Cathy Darling Allen, the Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, who has been harassed and vilified by election deniers.

And so, it was considered a relief — a victory, to some — that election night here came and went peacefully, without violence or intimidation.

But the conspiracy theories about the validity of voting, and the targeting of the elections office, won’t stop any time soon, according to both Allen and local election deniers themselves.

Prior stories about Shasta County voting and politics are here, here and here.

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.  

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.

A measly fine for ranchers who diverted water from a Klamath River tributary

Cal Matters reports this morning on a $4000 fine that's been proposed for ranchers in far northern California who diverted the water.  Rachel Becker writes:  

California’s water officials plan to impose a $4,000 fine on Siskiyou County ranchers for violating orders to cut back their water use during a weeklong standoff last summer.

State officials and the ranchers agree: A $4,000 fine isn’t much of a deterrent to prevent illegal water diversions during California’s droughts. The proposed fine would amount to about $50 per rancher.

A rural water association serving about 80 ranchers and farmers — facing mounting costs from hauling water and purchasing hay to replace dried out pasture — turned on their pumps for eight days in August to divert water from the Shasta River. State and federal officials said the pumping, which violated an emergency state order, threatened the river’s water quality and its salmon and other rare species.

Rick Lemos, a fifth generation rancher and board member of the Shasta River Water Association, said violating the drought order “was the cheapest way I could have got by … When you’re to a point where you have no other choice, you do what you have to do.” He said the alternatives “would have cost us, collectively, a lot more.”

No deterrent, indeed.  Disappointing.  

In California's central valley, congressional race pits a farmworker's son against a dairy farmer

Here's an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times story by Alejandra Reyes-Valarde, out of California's 22d congressional district, covering parts of Kern and Kings counties: 

As a teenager, David Valadao had a long list of chores to do before school every day. He’d jump on his tractor, buck hay and feed the family’s dairy cows on their Hanford farm. After school, it was more of the same.

When Rudy Salas was a child, he woke before dawn to join his father in the Central Valley fields. He worked piecemeal, boxing up grapes and fixing machinery. When he injured his fingers doing repairs, his father would tell him, “put some duct tape on it and tell me about it later.”

Valadao and Salas represent, at least symbolically, two of the largest forces fueling the Central Valley — the farmers who drive the area’s agricultural industry and the workers who harvest the food that feeds the nation.

The men, both 45, are leaning into their homegrown roots and experiences as they try to gather votes from farmers and field workers in one of the closest congressional races in the nation. Incumbent Rep. Valadao (R-Hanford) and Salas (D-Bakersfield), who represents much of the area in the state Assembly, are battling in the midterm election for a seat in the 22nd Congressional District.

On the importance of Texas's two million rural voters

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

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

* * *  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Wisconsin's rural vote: Multiple reports suggest bad news for Democrats, who've gone unsupported by national party

This Politico story out of Wisconsin's 3d district is a sobering one for Democrats, suggesting that the open seat, previously held by Democrat will flip.  Here's an excerpt from Elena Schneider's story:  

Democrat Brad Pfaff is battling to hold onto a rural House seat in western Wisconsin that his party has represented for a quarter-century. But it’s feeling like a one-man fight.

The "one-man fight" echoes the theme I've written about throughout this election cycle:  Democratic candidates in rural places don't feel supported by the party's national infrastructure--and sometimes its state infrastructure, too. 

The Schneider story continues in that vein: 

National Democratic groups pumped little money into the district, leaving Pfaff largely on his own in territory that Democratic Rep. Ron Kind has held for years and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers carried as recently as 2018. Pfaff has been outspent by $1.1 million on TV, as Republican Derrick Van Orden is buoyed by a wave of GOP outside spending on his behalf.

The ramifications of Pfaff’s solo campaign reach far beyond a single House seat. The margins Republicans can rack up in rural America can balance out or overcome the edge Democrats build in suburban and urban areas.

In Wisconsin, that’s a worrying sign for Evers and Senate candidate Mandela Barnes — and for President Joe Biden or any other Democrats eyeing the 2024 presidential race. The trickle-down effects of Democrats’ struggles in rural Wisconsin — Biden lost Kind’s district by a slightly wider margin in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, even though he did better overall statewide and nationally — could also hurt party hopefuls running in the state races beneath Pfaff, as the GOP pushes for supermajorities in the state legislature.

“Especially on a statewide level or on a national level, every vote counts and every vote counts in every county,” Evers said in a phone interview with POLITICO during his school bus tour along the Mississippi River. “These folks care about basic Wisconsin values, and as long as you talk to them about [those values], they’re going to respond. Obviously, you’re not going to get every vote, but every vote you do get is an important vote.”

Here's a quote from Pfaff talking to the statewide implications of what is happening in the third district:

If I get washed away, it’s going to be very, very difficult for Tony Evers or Mandela Barnes to win this state. There are not enough Democratic votes in Milwaukee or in Dane County, which is Madison, for either one of them to get across the finish line. But that’s a decision that individuals higher than me have to make … but I know the Democratic Party needs rural voices.

Many of the Wisconsin details of the Politico story are reflected in another story, from a few weeks ago, by Wisconsin Public Radio.  It features a photo of Brad Pfaff walking through a milking barn.  Here's the lede for that story, which features a lot of farm flavor:

With just a few weeks left before the November election, Democratic congressional candidate Brad Pfaff stopped by Mahogany Dairy in rural Monroe County. As he walked the barns with the farm’s owner, Gary Weber, Pfaff asked about Weber’s milk rotation, what he uses in his feed mix and where he sells his cull cows.

Pfaff, who holds the state Senate seat covering all or parts of La Crosse, Monroe, Vernon and Crawford counties in southwestern Wisconsin, said he's gotten to meet a lot of farmers throughout his career. He was state executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency office in Wisconsin during the Obama administration and later was appointed secretary of the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection by Gov. Tony Evers.

The story features these quotes from Pfaff:  

This is how I got involved in politics, quite frankly, is (with) people like Gary — just farmers, just my uncles and people in my community," he said. "I would go to different events with my parents, with my dad in particular. And I'd learn and ask questions, and people would say, "You should think about getting involved." 

You cannot use a broad brush when it comes to rural people, because rural people have all different thoughts and ideas and that's what makes it so neat.  But there's something that ... binds us all together, and that is our love for rural Wisconsin, and for our heritage and for our culture.

Electric school buses on their way to rural America

I've been contemplating this post for several months and was finally prompted to start writing it when I saw a tweet linking to this press release today from Senator Jon Tester's office.   The headline is "Tester Secures Nearly $4 million for New School Buses for Montana School Districts."  The subhead is "Funding will come from Senator's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act."  The text--though not the headlines--make clear that these are zero-emission, electric busses: 

Tester today announced that he secured $3,950,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean School Bus Program for Montana School Districts. This funding, which came from Tester’s bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), will go toward supplying brand new zero-emissions electric school buses for the Bigfork, Clinton, and Fairfield County School Districts.

Tester worked across the aisle for months to negotiate his bipartisan package with a group of five Republicans, four Democrats, and the White House, and he was the only member of Montana’s congressional delegation to vote for it.

“Students and families in smaller communities like the one I call home need access to reliable transportation options,” Tester said. “I am proud to have worked with Republicans and Democrats to invest in Montana’s public education infrastructure. This will benefit working Montana families while also strengthening our American manufacturing sector.”

A breakdown of the funding can be found below:

Bigfork: Bigfork Elementary School – $2,765,000 (7 buses) 

Clinton: Clinton Elementary School – $790,000 (2 buses)

Fairfield: Fairfield Elementary School – $395,000 (1 bus)

After that, the press release includes characteristic boilerplate about what Tester is doing for Montana--especially its schools, and especially the rural ones. All three of these schools are in rural areas, two in quite small towns and the third, Big Fork, a town of about 4000 in Flathead County.  

That Tester tweet reminded me of a headline I saw a few months ago in my hometown newspaper, the Newton County Times, about federal funding flowing in to help a small school district purchase an electric school bus.  That headline, from August of this year, was "Japer applies for electric school bus grant," with Jeff Dezort reporting.  Below is an excerpt with a surprising amount of detail, including a long quote from the transportation manager for the Jasper School district, Brent Edgmon.  Edgmon happens to be the younger brother of one of my good friends from my twelve years at Jasper School in the 1970s and into the 1980s.  Their mom, Dorothy Joe Edgmon, was paid by the school to drive kids (including her own) in her station wagon up and down Cave Mountain Road, where the school bus did not go.  In other words, she was part of the school's transportation infrastructure decades ago.  

Here's part of the Newton County Times story:

Don't be shocked if you see electric school buses in the Jasper School District in the not too distant future.

The school district has applied to the Environmental Protection Agency for a $1.5 million grant to purchase four electric school buses costing up to $375,000 each.

Transportation manager Brent Edgmon told the board of eduction at its regular meeting Monday night, Aug. 15, that he submitted the application on behalf of the school district at the deadline that fell prior to the meeting. He said if the grant is awarded the district can refuse to accept it. But he encouraged the board to consider the idea of acquiring electric buses sooner rather than later and doing so with little cost to the district. He pointed out that other school districts will probably go to electric buses and when they arrive at Jasper's campuses for sporting events or other academic activities, they will need to connect to a charging station.

Edgmon told the board EPA is giving out $500 million for electric school buses nationally.

There aren't many options. They come in three sizes. Along with a small van, there is the commonly used 54-passenger bus and a 72-passenger bus.

Concerning the mechanics of the vehicles Edgmon said they don't have a diesel engine nor a transmission. They have an electric motor under the hood and a driveshaft to the rear end. It will have air brakes and a liquid used to cool and heat the battery. There aren't any other fluids, like oil or fuel, no air cleaner ... which is a big savings. You will still have to replace tires and grease them. They weigh 3,000 pounds more than the weight of a diesel engine.

Edgmon said his main concern was that across the whole district every bus, including spares, are equipped with exhaust breaks (Jake brake) to assist braking down steep hills. He didn't want to give up the exhaust breaks. He said he since learned that the electric buses have a three stage motor. When you come over the mountain you turn on the charge mode one, two, or three, and it acts like an exhaust brake. It holds the vehicle back.

It's supposed to run 300 miles on a charge. Edgmon doubted that, but he was told the vehicle is charging as much as it is being driven. It's the perfect situation for an electric vehicle. Starting and stopping and going over hills is what keeps the battery charged.

These motors put out 342 horse power. Diesel engines now put out 250 horse power and they perform very well. Edgmon said he has been told electricity compared to fuel would cost less than $1 a gallon.

Charging stations are another thing, he said. They cost between $30,000 and $40,000 for a quick charger.

Here are more quotes from Edgmon: 

We would be ahead of the game if we could get this money. We're going to see schools coming here and needing to charge their bus. It wouldn't hurt to have a charging station just outside the gym or other convenient place

If we don't get selected in the first round the application stays in the hat or if another school declines Jasper advances on the list.

This is by far the most positive thing I've read about electric vehicles in rural places.  I suppose it helps that they're coming free of charge--even from the big, bad federal government.  It'll be interesting to see how many rural school districts like Jasper--and the Montana schools--seek these grants and how many receive them.  

Meanwhile, I'm guessing that Jasper School District did not get one of the buses because this Oct. 29 story in the Newton County Times lists other schools in Arkansas that did get them, at least in the first round.  The headline is "EPA announces $4,000,000 in Clean School Bus funding for school districts in Arkansas," and it appears to merely quote a government press release.  Here's the lede: 

The Biden-Harris Administration announced the Fiscal Year 2022 recipients of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Program rebate competition, awarding $4,255,000 from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to Arkansas school districts. The grants will help the school districts of Wonderview, Blytheville, The Alpena and Danville purchase 11 clean school buses that will accelerate the transition to zero emissions vehicles and produce cleaner air in and around schools and communities.

On the pick-up truck as rural relic

The Washington Post published a piece yesterday by Paul Waldman, headlined, "The evolving political symbolism of the pick-up truck."  Here's the excerpt most salient to rurality: 

That idea of the pickup as a tool for work — especially agricultural work — goes back to its beginnings. The first production pickup truck, the Ford Model TT, debuted in 1917 as a vehicle that would allow farmers who were already using their Model T’s for farm work to haul bigger loads. Its roots in rural American work remain central to its marketing, even if rural people are no longer the target customers. That imagery is meant to evoke a kind of manhood that embodies self-reliance, competence, mastery over the environment and a physicality most men have no need for in their day-to-day lives.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the symbolic place of pickups in the rural ethos. There are so many country songs about pickups — from “Truck Yeah” to “If My Truck Could Talk” — they constitute their own subgenre. Of course, like pickups, country music may be rooted in rural America and popular there, but it is consumed by people everywhere.

More recent truck marketing uses rural imagery to evoke masculine virtues that you can capture no matter who you are, where you live or what you do for a living. As Sawin told me, once the auto companies realized the rural market for pickups was saturated, “they still needed to sell more trucks. So they really start[ed] to turn to targeting the suburban White man.” Those may be primarily conservatives, but liberals could constitute a fruitful market as well. In one television ad, a diverse cast of people, including a young Black woman riding a subway, sings “Thank God I’m a country boy.”

All of this reminded me of Paul Harvey's "God Made a Farmer," which has been used by Dodge to advertise its pick-ups.  That is the subject of two prior blog posts.  

Post script:  These Washington Post stories about modern-day cowboys are at least marginally related, this one from September and this one from Nov. 6.  Both are by Jose Del Real and both are out of Wyoming. 

On mending the rural-urban rift, from Minnesota

Starting about two weeks ago, MinnPost, a non-profit news website in Minnesota, published a series of essays/op-eds on the rural-urban divide.  I was author of the first one here, titled, "With plenty of urban folks bashing rural folks and vice versa, what’s the goal?"

The second essay was "How to Shift the Rural-Urban Discussion toward an Appreciation for Interdependence."  Ellen Wolter, an Extension educator with the University of Minnesota Extension, wrote it.  Like my piece, Wolter was heavy on the interdependence theme: 

As someone who grew up in rural areas, lived in urban communities for 20 years, and recently moved back to Greater Minnesota, I see firsthand the similarities of — and interdependence between — rural and urban. Focusing on ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ as separate and divided entities, however, limits our ability to create solutions that move us forward.

Rural and urban communities depend on each other to grow their economies, establish commerce, exchange information, goods, materials, and services, to educate our students and build a thriving workforce, and to provide recreation and culture.

The third essay was "Urban-rural misunderstandings in Minnesota abound, but we're all neighbors," by Julie Tesch. Here's an excerpt: 

Yes, there are differences between rural and urban populations. But rural is not the opposite of urban.

In fact, both places have more in common than most people realize. The differences come in the details. As the CEO of the Center for Rural Policy & Development, my job is to help show that policies made for the Twin Cities suburb of Robbinsdale might not work in western Minnesota’s Redwood Falls and vice versa, and that’s because they’re different. Different demographics, population density, incomes, tax base, industries, the list goes on.

* * *

There is an urban-rural misunderstanding. Rural residents can’t possibly know how policies will truly affect residents in Minneapolis when they have never lived there, just like Minneapolis residents can’t understand how policy will affect the people in my town of 200.

What Tesch is talking about there sounds like rural proofing, which I've written about in the past.

Meanwhile, the talk I gave as part of the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis on Tuesday, Oct. 25, can be viewed here.  It will be broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio in early December.  

I was especially grateful for this endorsement (after the fact) of my talk by Anthony Pipa of the Brookings Institute: