Rural Issues Featured in the Democratic Party Platform.
The platform contains significant attention to rural America, especially focusing on rural health care.
During the 2024 Democratic National Convention held last week, Democrats released their party platform. The 92-page document included many rural-focused themes, with the word “rural” used nine times.
Some rural-relevant passages pasted directly below:
Agriculture—“American farmers are the backbone of our country. They feed America, and help feed the world. But over the years, trickle-down economics has hit rural America hard. Farming costs have gone up and incomes have gone down. Big Agriculture moved in, telling too many small farms that the surest path to success was to get big or get out. As a result, we lost over 400,000 farms in America in the last 40 years, and rural communities have paid a steep price. Too many young people have had to leave their hometowns to find good-paying work and a shot at their dreams.”
Health Care—”Democrats believe that quality, affordable health care should be available in every corner of America. The Administration has invested in new mobile health clinics; and in keeping community and rural health centers, lifelines for tens of millions of people, open, well-staffed, and well-equipped. We want to double those investments now. And the Administration is cracking down on federally funded health care providers that turn away or otherwise discriminate against people on the basis of race, sex, age, national origin, or disability.”
At-Home Energy—”We’ll keep working to expand other programs that reduce home heating, cooling, and water bills as well, especially in rural areas; and to speed the transition to cheaper renewable energy, like solar, that will lower people’s bills long-term.”
Racial Equity—”President Biden signed two Executive Orders to change that, [Racial Equity] . . . by reducing discrimination in the housing market; protecting overburdened communities from environmental harms; addressing historic disinvestment and infrastructure neglect; addressing health and health care disparities; rooting out educational inequities and preserving pathways to equal opportunity; tackling persistent poverty and building economic prosperity in rural communities; promoting equity and fairness in the justice system; combating bias, discrimination and hate-based violence; and bolstering proactive enforcement that protects the civil rights of all Americans.”
Corporate Power—”Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation. And the American people are tired of being played for suckers. The Administration has taken historic steps to boost competition across our economy, in fields from finance and farming to technology and transportation. We’re banning non-compete agreements so that workers have the freedom to pursue a new job or start a new business. We’re protecting consumers from unfair hidden “junk fees” and price gouging, and shoring up our banking system to keep people’s hard-earned savings safe.”
Economic Benefits—“That’s why we’ll keep pushing to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, which proved so effective at reducing poverty before Republicans let them expire. We’ll work to finally raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15-an-hour. We’ll fight for paid leave, better health care, and more investment in public schools and affordable housing.”
Tribal Nations—“Trump’s presidency was a disaster for Native communities. Tribal communities were disproportionately harmed by Trump’s disastrous response to the COVID pandemic, seeing higher hospitalization rates than other demographics. He worked to sabotage the ACA and will repeal it if he gets back to the White House. He tried to cut agencies and programs important to Tribal communities, like job training and business development funding and from Tribal scholarship and education programs.”
The Republicans also released a platform this year, which they failed to do in 2020. Their (very short) document focuses more on principles, such as
“SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION.”
“MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINANT ENERGY PRODUCER IN THE WORLD, BY FAR!”
“END THE WEAPONIZATION OF GOVERNMENT AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.”
“KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS.”
The Cocklebur covers rural policy and politics from a progressive point-of-view. Our work focuses on a tangled rural political reality of dishonest debate, economic and racial disparities, corporate power over our democracy, and disinformation peddled by conservative media outlets. We aim to use facts, data, and science to inform our point-of-view. We wear our complicated love/WTF relationship with rural America on our sleeve.
Thanks Bryce for this brief summary of what’s in the platform. Steve Hanley says it all and I know you are right there with him.
The Agri Biz that is killing the middle of the country is not addressed by either the Republicans or the Democrats other than to simply make it worse. Exploitation of the land and the livestock industry has made livestock prices plummet and packers toclose their doors. While this is going on, corn that used to feed livestock now is being turned into an industrialized replacement for fuel that takes more energy to create than what it returns! The production of gasohol uses precious fresh water we can not waste in this way. While this is happening, the industry makes a point of letting everyone know fermintation creates CO2, and "OH MY GOD!" this is a greenhouse gas! What they aren't saying is give us money so we can compress this gas into a liquid and pump it to the Dakota's to lock it up in the ground and reduce the harm from rising tempertures. They wait for the politicians to put the countries wealth at their disposal by writing grants to help pay to reduce the greenhouse gases, saving gasohol as a fuel and without saying it, meet teh fuel standards that California has established that won't allow a fuel into the state that continues raising temperatures due to its production and release into the atmosphere these greenhouse gases! And wait! There's more! No one spends a whole lot of time discussing why these people want the CO2 in the first place since no one in the Corporate World does anything simply because it needs doing! They are using it to force oil out of the ground to keep the oil boom going! In this lies the rub, if you turn the oil into fuel for cars, you are continuing to add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere! While all the concern over CO2 is getting all the attention, NitrousOxide, a really bad greenhouse gas, that lasts for centuries in teh atmosphere is completely ignored! Where does it come from you may ask, The answer would seem obvious as to why you hear little about it, Fertilizer! With a crop rotation of soybeans to corn and back to corn, the only way you maintain fertility to grow like this is fertilizer! The tax payer also gets the opportunity to subsidize crop insurace for the farmer, and the farmer gets subsides for any losses but has to maintain a "corn base" or in other words a minimum of production or you get no help. The consequence of that simply insures more and more fertilizer use, and in the old addage if a little does a little good, a lot will do a lot of good gets many to over do it! And of course, you alsohave to have a "Conservation Plan" ! One component is tiling to remove excess water from productive land. Because of the use of herbicides like Roundup and the constant crop cycle, one of the most inexpensive way to meet the "Conservation Plan" is to tile. These tile lines docarry of excess water, but theyalso carry tons of Nitrogen straight away from the field and straight away to a stream! There goes the water along with the nitrogen that poisons the Gulf of Mexico! Attempting to "fix" this will find you in the cross hairs of the farm buearu, the Corn Producers, the manufacturers of herbicide, and the list grows very long with serious consequences for politicians that need money to get elected or re-elected! So the fact that a better rotation of crops that include hay crops might introduce at least a bit more organic to the soil and make it more absorbant of water rather than allowing the water to pond up and need the tile to reduce that overage of moisture while taking the nitrogen down the river.