The game plan for a rural revival
The game plan for a rural revival
"The Democratic Party has strong rural leaders in our party and we need to elevate them."
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I’ve long been fascinated and at times borderline obsessed with Andy Kaufman, the visionary entertainer best known for co-starring in Taxi and getting himself voted off of SNL. He blurred the line between performance and reality and to elicit some kind of a deep reaction from an audience; Kaufman had a bottomless commitment to the bit, no matter how perplexed or angry it made people; the more visceral the reaction, the better.
A longtime fan of professional wrestling, Kaufman teamed up with Jerry “The King” Lawler to manufacture a culture war kayfabe, making himself a Hollywood elitist heel who viciously mocked southerners on national TV and at live shows. He’d goad audiences while talking in a drawl somewhere between Louisiana and Neanderthal, and record videos in which he’d explain to the rural peons how to do things like use soap. In an age before Wikipedia and social media, most people thought he was dead serious.
Kaufman tragically died (?) of cancer in 1984, but it sometimes feels as if Republicans turned the entire Democratic Party into the heel that he played. Conservatives blast Democrats for being liberal elites, godless creatures of Hollywood and crime-infested cities, and while it’s clearly a cynical political strategy, the attitude they mock is probably not entirely incorrect. As a New Yorker, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it myself here and there.
Last month proved that American politics are more calcified than ever, with the number of true swing voters dwindling with each cycle. Elections will be won on the margins, and this year, inroads that Democrats made in rural regions turned out to be the difference-maker in several statewide races. It’s not that they won most rural districts so much as they lost less, a term that Matt Hildreth, the executive director of RuralOrganizing.org, uses to describe the first step in winning back majorities in those regions and becoming a national party (more in this series soon).
More important than winning, of course, is taking action to improve people’s lives, though in the best case scenario, those two things go hand-in-hand. It’s not that I think Democrats should focus on or care more about rural Americans more than people in the suburbs or cities — there are plenty of urgent problems to solve and issues to address in my neighborhood in Manhattan alone. But improving vote share rural areas is how Democrats can win a national majority large enough that progressives can push them towards policies that improve people’s lives everywhere.
So, with that in mind, I had a long conversation with Matt Hildreth to learn about the work that RuralOrganizing.org is doing and what he thinks needs to be done to win everywhere. I used some snippets of this conversation for the first part of the national majority series, where he spoke about the need to show working people that Democrats are seriously and vigorously fighting on their behalf.
Progress Report: John Fetterman’s resounding victory in Pennsylvania was made possible in part by his relatively successful performance in the more rural parts of Pennsylvania. They can’t exactly recreate the candidate, so how can Democrats find ways to make further inroads with rural voters?
Hildreth: The number one thing that Democrats have to do is stop perpetuating the idea that Democrats are not in rural communities. And they do this with very subtle language, like saying “we need to show up and listen.” Democrats have been saying that since 2016, and it implies that Democrats are not in rural communities and don't understand rural communities and don't know what to think about rural communities. And the fact is that 20% of rural Americans are base Democratic voters. The Democratic Party has very strong rural leaders in our party and we need to elevate them.
A lot of Democrats, when you hear them talk, it’s this self-hating thing, where it's like “there's something wrong with us and real people don't like us.” These are the people that are saying we need to run Connor Lamb. If you're a rural Democrat, your whole thing is waking up on election day and knowing you're gonna get your teeth kicked in. You’re not a rural Democrat because you want to be popular, right? It's because you believe in something. And every day, you probably have to argue with people about it and you have to roll your eyes at all the people that disagree with you.
There’s a bit of a tenacity that rural Democrats have that I don't see from party leadership, and I think Fetterman had that temperament. I know way more people in rural America that have that spine of steel. They’re no bullshit, I'm just going to tell you what I think and I'm proud of this.
Tim Ryan is the self-hating Democrat. Just look at Sherrod Brown, who comes across as I know what I believe, I'm fighting for what I believe is right. I'm fighting for you, and let the party politics play out how they play out.” That was a very different approach. Tim Ryan tried to make Democrats the bad guy, and he performed exactly the same as Richard Cordray in 2018.
So there’s ways for individual politicians — Fetterman, Brown, John Tester, Gretchen Whitmer, etc. — to neutralize what is maybe a tax on the (D) next to their name. But how can that tax, so to speak, be eliminated? What do Democrats in power do, specific to rural communities, to show that they’re fighting for them?
I think a lot of it has to be fighting for something. If you really look at what the Democratic agenda is for rural America, it's just not there. Who in the Biden administration is in charge of delivering for rural America? I don't know. Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, thinks it’s him, but less than 8% of rural Americans are making their money from agriculture, and over 20% of the population lives in rural America.
The economy of scale, for the most part, is not working in these communities. That's why rural America didn't have electricity until 20 years or so after the rest of the country. It's why we don’t have broadband in rural America, it’s why we didn't have cell phone service — there’s not enough people to create the demand, so there’s no supply. This whole free market economy doesn't work when you don't have enough people to create a demand. That’s the reason why we need broadband money at the federal level for rural America, as well as in urban areas to a certain extent, for other reasons. Because there's just not enough customers to make it viable for the corporations.
So, I can't imagine actually being a Republican in rural America because if you're waiting for the trickle down economics to build your road, and you have three people that live on your road, that road is not getting built. I just have really struggled over the last couple of years to really be able to articulate what the Democratic agenda is for rural America. And in the last year, we've really gone all-in on the policy side of things.
What are some of the policies that you’ve emphasized and organized around?
As progressives, we've just turned it over to the Chamber of Commerce and we've completely forfeited any sort of presence in that space. We sort of hear “economic development'' and think “that's some weird conservative thing.” But if you look at what rural voters want, it's increasing their wages and good paying jobs, decreasing daily expenses and improving their quality of life.
So much of the federal dollars that are being earmarked in Congress for those types of things are not making it into the communities. Aside from the state and local fiscal recovery funds from the American Rescue Plan, most of this money for the Build Back Better agenda and infrastructure bill will never make it to rural America. The people who have lobbyists and the people who have really sophisticated grant writers are going to get that money.
We've really gone in on a couple bills, like the Recompete Act, which was in the CHIP bill, and this bill called the Rebuild Rural America Act that's focusing more on targeted ten-year block grants that are specifically focused on rebuilding these economically distressed communities. And to me, it feels a lot more like what FDR was doing with his Agricultural department.
That’s important, because it seems as if Republican governors are putting a lot of infrastructure money and other federal dollars are going into things like building new prisons.
That’s exactly right. The issue is with the state and local fiscal recovery funds, we're actually finding — and I swear, most Democrats in Congress do not understand this, Mitch Landrieu and a few others do — is that Democratic allocated money for a huge chunk of America is going through a Republican governor, or at least in rural America, Republican county commissioners. What we've tried doing — and we did it in two communities in Ohio — is organizing at the county commission level to spend those Rescue Plan dollars more effectively. It’s a huge thing we've been working on.
We just did a big analysis in two communities in Ohio, where we did on the ground surveys asking people what they wanted to happen in their community. They don't say “economic development,” but the results of economic development. It's jobs, and it's decreased expenses, more choice and things like that. And then we asked how the money is being spent in these counties? And there's no correlation between what the people want at the local level and what the county commission is spending it on.
How do you fix that if Republicans control an entire state?
So with these block grants, were able to get those a little bit more tailored to specific economically distressed communities experiencing energy transition, and allow through the implementation process, for it to be more sophisticated than just “hey, we're going to just get a bunch of people in our jail because that counts towards our rural population counts and creates jail jobs.”
For 10 years, the Democratic strategy for rural America was ethanol, and that was absurd. It came because of the Iowa Caucuses, but a tiny fraction of rural America makes its money from corn and soybeans. Trump had his $16 billion slush fund, which he gave to “farmers.” Well, a huge chunk of that went to overseas corporations because of how few rural Americans are farming, and how much that's all been consolidated by corporations.
I think this is a huge missing piece to becoming a national party: They actually need to have a national agenda. Democrats have an agenda on guns and on abortion rights and on immigration and on all these things, but when it comes to rural communities, they haven’t had that — I’m hopeful, based on conversations, that they’re starting to build one.
One thing I think a lot about, as we continue to battle Trumpism, we see through the far-right’s bluster and false populism, but if we want to win some people back, it doesn’t really work to say “Hey, you were a moron and got fooled by Republicans.” So I’m wondering, what would be your advice to a candidate running in rural America who needs to somehow address it?
If I were a candidate, the way I would do it is to say, “I understand why you voted in the past. You didn't have a better option, and now I'm presenting a better option.” I was in northwest Iowa during Steve King's final years, and a lot of the organizing that ultimately led to the creation of this organization was based on getting him out of office. You can’t say to people that have been voting for Steve King for 15 years that “you're the problem.” But what you have to be able to do is say “Hey, we tried it that way, here's a new way.”
Another thing I think and write about is how politics has become like team sports and how people love to be part of a winning team. Donald Trump, for his endless faults as a person and president, made his supporters feel like winners, that they were part of something and some conservative owning the libs was a win for them. He basically made it fun for them. How important do you think that was, and how key is that for Democrats?
That’s a big part of it. I call it the cycle of invisibility. If you're a rural person who is Democratic-leaning, what incentive do you have to be vocal in today's politics? Who's gonna come in and back you up? You’re gonna put a sign out in your yard and have it stolen five times during the election cycle, and the candidate probably won't even come into your county. So what incentive is there?
People think we're crazy sometimes because in our logo, we say “boldly progressive, proudly rural.” There’s this whole thing about how “oh, progressive is such a bad word in rural America, Democrats, that's a bad word in rural America, too,” so we should be more sneaky with what we're doing with our language and stuff. And I actually think that no, we need people that are encouraged to be vocal in very strategic ways, being vocal about progressives fighting for rural revitalization and fighting for jobs and decreasing daily expenses in rural communities.
Until people see Democrats and progressives working in their communities, we're just going to keep running into this thing of “well, culturally, we are Republicans here, this is Republican country.”
Another part of this, in addition to messaging and policy, is political infrastructure. What needs to be done to create that year-round organizing presence that goes beyond canvassing a few months before an election?
Somebody needs to go in and revitalize what it means to be Democratic Party county chair. In many states, the top three county chairs tend to run the Democratic Party. I don't know what it's like in New York, but in Ohio, the Franklin County and Cuyahoga County chairs are picking candidates more than anybody else. When I was in Iowa, we lived in a very rural, very Republican 75/25 type district, and our county chairs didn't even host meetings, they just sort of checked a couple boxes on some pieces of paper and then turned it in. I think that that's a very overlooked piece.
A lot of times candidates roll their eyes like, I don't want to deal with the county parties, they’re such a mess or whatever. But at some point, we're going to have to localize this. And in rural counties, it's very hard to get any sort of attention from the state parties to the county parties. I think that that has to be addressed. And then the issue we see with organizing right now is that you have a lot of really good organizing happening in communities, but the candidates don't take advantage of it.
For example, Conor Lamb wouldn't have known how to leverage the year-round issue based organizing that's happening in small towns and rural communities across Pennsylvania. John Fetterman is somebody that knows how to say, “OK, that's what you guys are talking about, that’s what you're caring about, let me incorporate that into our party platform.”
K-Street is really good at positioning themselves between politicians and rural voters, because most politicians don't actually know rural communities. So groups like the Farm Bureau and others have really defined “moderate” as pro-corporate and rural voters as moderate. If you look at the polling, that couldn't be further from the truth. And frankly, the reason why I think rural people are so anti-corporate is because they feel it. They're often used for their power in the electoral system, but it's not like they're saying, “We’re gonna vote for the candidate that's most supportive of Walmart.” That's the opposite of what they want.
That goes back to my point about Democrats actually needing an agenda. Because running on “we're not going to hold Wall Street accountable, we're not going to do anything to shake up the status quo with Amazon and we're not going to do anything about corporations taking jobs out of these communities,” it doesn’t work.
So what comes next for the agenda? Without full control of Congress, what do you think can and should be done?
The Farm Bill is up next year, and we're really working to get a few more economic development-focused items specifically to distressed rural communities into the bill. Obviously, we're going to be working with all of our friends that are actually agricultural focused, like folks over at the Farmers Union and the groups that support small farms and ethical agriculture, but our primary focus is going to be getting rural development dollars that actually rebuild rural economies. It's a tiny fraction of the overall USDA budget. We're trying to get at least a billion dollars or so.
How tough is that to do?
When rural communities have to compete for federal funds, they always lose. Because the metrics are built on scale, and creating 20,000 jobs in a major metro area is not nearly as hard as creating 20,000 jobs in rural America which takes a long time. So, not only do rural communities not have the grant writers and the economic developers that larger cities have, but the metrics are kind of skewed against them. So that's the kind of stuff that we've addressed with the Rebuild Rural America program.
We want to keep organizing around this agenda in the off years, with the hopes that we can use that to build out the base, but also build some momentum amongst candidates and elected officials to really shift the paradigm from this perception that like rural means white guy farmer to rural actually means tribal communities, immigrant farm working communities, Black communities across the Black belt, and manufacturing communities. And delivering for rural Americans is not just about agriculture, but about economic opportunities, and addressing places where supply and demand are just screwing over people.
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