Democrats Who Are Showing Up in Rural America

Democrat Sarah Taber (front left) is running for Commissioner of Agriculture in North Carolina. (Photo provided by Sarah Taber)

“Polarization is a by-product of Democrats. They don’t even try to compete in rural America.” Matt Barron should know. The principal at MLB Research Associates specializes in rural Democratic politics—and he sees a party that has quit rural America. The political consequences of this development are as obvious as they are profound.

The rural vote is where MAGA predominates. Donald Trump took 65 percent of the rural vote in 2020, up from 59 percent in 2016. Among rural whites, the Republican took an eye-popping 71 percent of the vote in 2020, a nine-point improvement over 2016. Around one fifth of Americans live in rural environs and small towns, but the GOP’s monopoly automatically puts around two dozen states with significant rural populations out of reach—and Democrats don’t even bother to compete for them.

Blue cities and red countrysides define our hyper-partisan politics. We see this polarization most obviously at the presidential level, where every cycle control of the White House is decided by a handful of states. Meanwhile, the Senate is barely held by Democrats and Republicans hold the House by scant, ever-shrinking margins. Cue political dysfunction and voter despair. If Democrats had performed a mere five points better in rural America, Biden’s 2020 victory could have been close to a landslide—and Trumpism would likely be buried in the rubble. Those are the stakes and the possibilities.

The Democrats’ deep woes in rural America are recent. Historically, the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson was built upon rural America. By the 1930s, FDR successfully brought the urban working class and rural Americans together to make the Democrats into a dominant majority party. As recently as 1980, rural voters helped Democrats control nearly twice as many state legislatures as Republicans. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton took a bit more than half the rural vote. Heck, 43 percent of rural voters cast ballots for Barack Obama in 2008.

Obama never hoped to win the rural vote outright. But by reducing his margin of defeat in rural regions, he won key states and an electoral mandate. The first black major-party candidate performed three points better than John Kerry in 2004 in rural areas and won nine points more than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In retrospect, however, 2008 proved a strange inflection point. A rural Democratic state legislator complained to me, “The Obama people showed-up [in 2008] and then they left—there was no follow-up. Voters felt abandoned.”

Leading the way was Obama himself. In his first year in office, the president traveled to domestic events 43 times. Out of these 43 trips, he went to rural America just once. In conjunction with this was the substance of Obama’s agenda. Multiple analysts complained that Democrats have turned their backs on local issues; all politics became national because Democrats were mostly uninterested in knowing these local issues and campaigning on them. The political fallout was impossible to miss. During the Obama presidency, Democrats lost 13 Senate and 69 House seats, 11 governorships, 913 state legislative seats, and 30 state legislative chambers, according to analysis from The Washington Post. The overwhelmingly majority of these losses came because of the party’s weakness with rural voters.

---

Academics, activists, and journalists had a ready, monocausal rationale for this turnabout: race. Michael Tesler a UC-Irvine political scientist, typified this in arguing “racially resentful whites” had turned against Democrats. Promoting this academic view were publishing houses and legacy media organs as well as social media platforms. Books and news stories depicting rural whites and their racial anxiety transformed this tenuous academic claim into conventional wisdom.

Race did matter. President Obama spurred many long-time Democrats to switch parties. But conversations with scads of strategists and candidates reveal a more complicated story. Sure, race was there. But the hidden answer for Democrats collapse in rural America is that they simply quit showing up.

Unbelievably, Obama’s wins—particularly his 2012 reelection—which were built upon grassroots organizing, spawned a weird arrogance among Democratic elites. Overnight, operatives came to believe that analytics and the so-called “coalition of the ascendant” would magically ensure an emerging Democratic majority. There was no need to organize, canvass, or door knock—to really show up. Demography was destiny.

Democrats have driven the party into a ditch with rural voters. Polarization and Trump are the result. Destiny Wells, an Indiana Democrat running for state attorney general, observes that “the Democratic Party has hollowed out” in her state. A military vet reared in a Republican farm family, Wells knows rural Indiana and can relate to small town Hoosiers. But she also understands “the more Democrats lose, the more the GOP builds an institutional wall to protect it against accountability and Democrats.”

The results are as clear as they are brutal. At the start of 2004, Indiana Democrats could boast a United States Senator (Evan Bayh), a governor (Joe Kernan), and control of the state house. Today, the Hoosier state has no elected statewide Democrat while the GOP possesses supermajorities in both legislative chambers. Realignment, here and elsewhere, has been asymmetric and bullet fast.

But the solution is not only inexpensive, it is well-known. Multiple strategists, pollsters, and candidates offer the same solution: grassroots politicking that rebuilds the party. Or in other words, showing up. Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democrats state chair told me, “If we were smart as Democrats, we would save so much money if we just invested in year-round organizing and then the national committee could be plugged into the existing infrastructure.” Eva Posner, a Democratic strategist, put it more bluntly, “If the Democratic Party gave a shit, they would fund parties and campaigns from the bottom up.”

Rather than wait for party elites to take note, numerous local Democrats are practicing their prefigurative politics: they are building the political world they imagine. Their grassroots campaigns are aimed at more than one election. They are literally re-building the party from ground-up. In this way, they believe their campaigns will live beyond 2024.  

Sarah Taber understands North Carolina’s rural vote. A military brat who grew-up working on farms, she’s running for state agriculture commissioner. Of rural North Carolinians, she says, “These are my people.” This PhD crop scientist believes “the way to get people to turnout is to give them someone to vote for.” And as a longtime agriculture consultant, she has a formula for that: “When I talk to farmers, I tell them your problems are real. I have real solutions.” Rural North Carolina is much more than farmers and agriculture, but Taber is quick to note, “Rural success flows through farmers. They are still the economic engine.”

Advising farmers on crop profitability and workforce management, Taber understands, “You don’t tell farmers what to do. But you can share what works.” And self-deprecating humor also helps. During conversations on ag-business analytics, she will quip to her Republican farm friends, “You can say you don’t know me later.” In rural North Carolina, she admits, “It helps to know your place as a Democrat.” Taber hopes that place is state agriculture commissioner.

Joining Taber in putting their faith (and shoe leather) in the unseen is Mississippi’s Ty Pinkins. The Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Mississippi exudes a quiet confidence that comes with constructing something more than a campaign. Slim and youthful, the 50-year-old is an army vet who has three combat tours and a Bronze Star to go along with his Georgetown law degree. Since June 2023, he has put 70,000 miles on his Black Chevy Tahoe canvassing 67 of the state’s 82 counties.

But this is door knocking that goes beyond one election. He is building a get-out-the-vote infrastructure. He aims to have a campaign honcho in every county and a team leader in all 1,748 state precincts. This machine will live beyond one campaign.

Door-to-door, grassroots politicking is time-intensive. But Pinkins knows it is essential for an era in which candidate and voter no longer listen to one another. Black and white, rural and urban, Pinkins reports that when he asks for votes, “[Y]ou see the look in their eyes. They are eager to tell you what is important to them.” And in a state with a well-earned reputation for racial polarization, the Democrat reports that the voters he meets “want a candidate they can believe. So many people have written Mississippi off, people are ready for something hopeful. They are ready.”

Destiny Wells, Jane Kleeb, Sarah Taber, and Ty Pinkins are not alone. Across rural America, Democrats like Sarah Klee Hood in New York are forging a similar path. State party chairs like Anderson Clayton (North Carolina) and Blue Missouri director Jess Piper (Missouri)—along with political action committees such as the 134 PAC in Texas—all recognize the issue the national party wholly ignores.

There is a path out of the Trumpist doom loop. And it begins with Democrats showing up in rural America.

---

Sarah Taber and team start the day pulling carrots and spinach with Anne and Aaron Grier at Gaining Ground in North Carolina. (Photo: Sarah Taber)