Why Democrats Lost in Rural America. Again.

A message from rural America to Democratic Party elites.

Hey Cocklebur friends and family. This is a rapid response to the election results that Jake Davis and I wrote up yesterday. There’s a lot more to say, of course. And a lot more to think through. Barn Raiser published it yesterday afternoon. Thank you for clicking through to read on their website. That helps all of us on independent media. Click HERE.

And we’ll be back soon for some additional election analysis, right or wrong, happy or sad.

—Bryce, The Cocklebur

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There will be many stories about the 2024 election. Still, at its core, Donald Trump’s victory was built on expanding his margins and vote totals even further in rural counties across the country, particularly the swing states where campaigns invest hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly by Democrats.

We humbly admit that we didn’t predict Trump’s margins to increase from 2020 in these counties, but there were warning signs, particularly in the early voting numbers that Vice President Harris was not gaining ground, with rural voters in deep-red counties from Georgia to Nebraska breaking early voting records. At this point, none of us know what to expect over the next few years. But we can take some immediate lessons about what didn’t work for Democrats with rural voters.

Autumn Liska carries her son Grayson, age 3, as she arrives at the 146-year-old Buck Creek school to cast her ballot on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, in rural Perry, Kan. (Charlie Riedel, AP Photo)

A major lesson is that Democrats must do more than select a vice-presidential candidate who grew up in a small town and is the governor of a state with a significant rural population. For the most part, Donald Trump’s two successful campaigns for the White House have taught us that, at least in the presidential race, you don’t have to be from rural places to build a rural following. You simply need to understand what motivates rural people. Why a supposed billionaire from New York City fits that bill alludes us, but apparently many country people have decided to go along with it.

These results confirm more than ever that in a presidential year, the election is nationalized. What the two major party nominees say and do will set the tone of the election. In the last few weeks, Kamala Harris tried the strategy of begging Republicans in all communities just to hold their nose and vote for a Democrat this one time because Donald Trump is a fascist. She had a lot of help from former Trump associates and staffers. That they were wrong about the voting public says a lot. When your former staff members call you a fascist, that seems like a big deal to us as rural progressives who follow politics closely. But to too many Americans, it sounded like empty rhetoric.

Harris crisscrossed battleground states with old-guard Republicans like Liz Chaney and pandered to the pro-business crowd by trotting out billionaire and Ayn Rand devotee Mark Cuban to sell her economic plan. That seems to have failed miserably as the big business war hawk Republican party of George W. Bush is as unpopular as Democrats in rural places. People in the media regularly say, “we’re more divided than ever.” And while we are divided for sure, did you live through the early 2000s? Those were awful, divided times.

It is also clear that a Democratic presidential campaign should bring on a rural vote director sooner than 60 days before election day—not to mention provide that director with a real rural team and rural-focused budget. On that note, a Democratic presidential campaign should have a policy plan for rural Americans prior to the start of early voting (the Harris-Walz campaign released theirs on October 15). Finally, the Democratic presidential nominee should use some of their time campaigning to talk to rural people about rural-specific issues rather than passing that task to the veep candidate or surrogates.

Donald Trump also teaches us that James Carville’s adage from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign “It’s the economy stupid” is true, particularly in rural places that still often feel left behind. How you talk about the economy also is incredibly important. Couching corporate greed as “price gouging” or addressing the housing crisis with another tax credit is wonky inside-the-Beltway speak that just doesn’t resonate.

Instead, how about telling working people they deserve a raise? It wins. Need proof? Look at the minimum wage results from deep-red Missouri, which won in rural counties and passed statewide with nearly 60%. Why is raising the minimum wage, and getting rid of the tipped wage, not at the top of the Democratic Party agenda? Popular is popular, no matter what party you’re in.

In all fairness, Vice President Kamala Harris was dealt a bad hand. She had barely a hundred days to introduce herself as the presidential nominee and was handed a campaign from Biden that lacked the infrastructure needed to move voters in rural areas.

That leads to the most essential lesson Democrats should learn from this election. Primaries are a good thing, particularly primaries that run through early rural states. If, for example, your party’s path to an Electoral College victory is through states with significant rural populations—Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, for example—why not use the early primary process to help candidates learn to “speak” rural. Letting rural voters in those places kick the tires on a candidate could improve Democrats’ chances.

The most certain thing is Democrats can no longer claim they have a path to victory through suburban and urban communities. It is becoming impossible to squeeze enough Democratic votes from those precincts to make up for the Republican dominance in rural places. So rather than pointing fingers at rural people for backing President-elect Trump, Democratic Party elites need to spend some time walking down the boarded-up main street or sitting on a tailgate listening to rural people’s problems.

If members of the Democratic National Committee or the New York Times editorial board need help finding rural people willing to share, our door is always open. We can introduce them to friends and family who probably voted for Trump. But this would require more than lip service. It requires a real reckoning that the Democratic Party intelligentsia don’t want to have. It would require hearing about how the meatpackers JBS and Smithfield are polluting our water. Or how Big Agriculture is colluding in a sham government-funded carbon pipeline scheme through the Midwest. Or how big pharma created an opioid crisis that still plagues many small towns.

That would be taking on corporate power and billionaire donors, which, up until this point, has seemed to be a bridge too far for most Democrats.

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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.