Washington — The first caller I talked to on November 6th, the morning after the election, asked an unexpected question: "Do you feel vindicated now?"
No, I replied, my feelings were simply deep apprehension about the future. The caller persisted: Democrats obviously lost because they performed so badly in rural areas, as I had been predicting and warning about for several years. I was among the few who predicted Hillary Clinton would lose in 2016 because of Democrats' neglect of rural America, and I felt largely the same about Kamala Harris's campaign, although she made a few commendable attempts to make inroads.
It's not that Democrats don't potentially have policies and messages that would resonate in non-metro areas that are dominated by the culturally rural. But how often do we see Democrats going purposefully into these areas to seek out voters' concerns, with empathy and answers for rural America's very real woes? The Democratic National Committee would be aghast at such a strategy. Instead, it pushes axe-grinding identity politics, a sure and proven loser.
Are there, however, plausible answers for rural America's failing health care systems, inadequate infrastructures, loss of family farms to corporate monopolies, market and supply-chain failures, top-soil loss, poor nutrition, youth out-migration, and disproportionate deaths of despair? Yes, there are answers! Many of these issues are addressed in Congress's periodic Farm Bill, which is up for reauthorization this very year. But when was the last time you heard Democrats making it a priority, let alone even mentioning it as a strategy to win rural votes?*
Instead, too many Democrats view rural denizens —especially those of the working class — as cardboard cutouts, clinging to their guns and religion, to the exclusion of seeing their actual problems and their humanity. To these Democrats, it has never occurred to them that guns and religion are symbols of rural resistance to their dehumanization, and that the most destructive aspects of these symbols would lose their power were Democrats to address rural issues with real solutions.
I don't care about vindication, but please add my voice to the many who are calling for a complete revamping of the Democratic Party, to address the number one cause (by far) of its election defeats: a failure to compete effectively in rural America. No, Democrats are not necessarily going to win in non-metro areas with a sensible rural strategy, but cutting the current huge losses is the obvious answer to winning more elections overall.
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*Also, when was the last time you heard Democrats rightfully point our that many of rural America's problems were created by Republican policies under Nixon (get-big-or-get-out), Reagan (huge numbers of farm bankruptcies), and Trump (market-killing tariffs)? And when was the last time you heard Democrats say that an aggressive rural strategy is particularly important because it is linked to overcoming the party's electoral college disadvantage? Ever?
