Democrats once ruled Koochiching County in the blue-collar Iron Range of northern Minnesota. But in this month’s presidential election, President Donald Trump won it with 60% of the vote.
That’s not because voters are suddenly shifting to the right, said Tom Bakk, who represents the area in the state Senate. It’s because, he said, Democrats have consistently moved too far to the left for many rural voters.
“We have to see if we can get the Democratic Party to moderate and accept the fact that rural Minnesota is not getting more conservative,” said Bakk, who announced last week that he would become an independent after serving 25 years as democrat. . “You are leaving them behind.”
As Democrats marched through cities and suburbs to reclaim the White House, the party lagged further behind in the vast rural strips of northern battlefields. The party lost seats in the House of Representatives in the Midwest, and Democratic rivals in the Senate elections of Iowa, Kansas, Montana and North Carolina, all once considered serious threats to Republican rulers, fell, some of them with force.
Although the Democrats’ rural troubles are not new, they are now putting pressure on Biden to start reversing the trend. Failure to do so jeopardizes goals such as curbing climate change and winning a Senate majority, especially with Republican Senate seats in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2022.
“The pressure on Democrats has to be on getting an economic message across to rural America,” said Iowa Democrat John Norris, a former gubernatorial candidate. “We have a very good one to broadcast, but we haven’t put enough emphasis on it.”
It has become a defining dynamic in nearly every state where Democrats dominate urban areas and, for at least two elections, have clear momentum in the suburbs.
As Trump sought to get more out of his mostly white working-class base, he made little ground in places he barely gained or lost in 2016, and slipped into the industrial and agricultural northern suburbs. Instead, he outgrown his focus on the places where he won big the last few times.
Trump lost Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, after winning all three in 2016. But he won at least 60% of the vote in 126 counties in all three, 14 more than in 2016, according to the Associated Press and state election data. All those counties are sparsely populated.
Perhaps more telling, Trump increased his winning percentages in 90% of the counties where he hit the 60% mark in those three states four years ago. That includes the 24 counties where he won at least 70% of the vote last time, even as Biden was spending far more than Trump on advertising.
Rural leakage was even greater in Iowa and Ohio, where polls in late October gave Biden’s campaign hopes of a close race or narrow victory, only to see him lose them by the same margins as Clinton.
Trump’s increased dominance in rural Ohio surprised even Republican strategists. In Ohio’s sixth congressional district, 18 counties that hug the Pennsylvania border and the Ohio River, Trump improved from 64% of the vote to more than 66%.
“I’ll be the first to say that I doubted President Trump could top what he did in 2016,” said Ryan Steubenrauch, senior adviser to Republican Representative for the 6th District, Bill Johnson.
While Biden met the Democrats’ long-sought goal of bringing Georgia and Arizona, albeit narrowly, it wasn’t because he focused on reaching beyond their metropolitan centers, said Steve Jarding, a veteran Democratic strategist who has long advocated for increased party participation in rural areas. America.
“The Democrats have found a way to win in the country, at least they believe this is the case, by not concentrating much in much of the center of the country,” he said. “That is a terrifying proposition.”
Jarding worries that by winning Arizona, Georgia and the northern swing states without addressing the rural economy, Democrats may believe that states are now trending as a result of favorable demographic and population changes.
“We didn’t win Georgia because we had a great message for rural Georgians,” said Jarding, who helped Mark Warner win Virginia governor in 2001 by advising him to aggressively campaign away from the burgeoning suburbs of Washington. , DC. “If the Democrats say, look, we went into Georgia and we won it without having to talk about rural issues, they are completely wrong. It will turn around. “
By clinging to their majority, House Democrats lost rural seats, particularly the one held for 30 years by Rep. Collin Peterson in western Minnesota. The setbacks sparked accusations by the moderates that prominent party liberals, such as New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, had become representatives of a party outside of America’s small agricultural and manufacturing towns.
“I would say that everyone talks about the big top. It’s not as big as it used to be, ”said Minnesota’s Bakk.
Biden campaigned little in person, even less in rural areas. Trump, on the other hand, sparked excitement at rallies in places like Wausau, Wisconsin, in the rural north of the state where he dominated, as well as Saginaw in Mid Michigan and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, surrounded by counties that led by more than 70%, including 80%.
Democrats also spent little time and money fighting Trump’s attacks.
Unanswered, Trump’s claims that Biden and other Democrats are advocates of socialism and the elimination of police departments, however unfounded, resonated in small towns, according to VoteCast, an Associated Press poll of the U.S. electorate conducted. by NORC at the University of Chicago.
“We have to approach this in a really more aggressive way,” said veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, especially Trump’s claims that Democrats are against the police. “There was some kind of headwind.”
Democrats must not only defend themselves against attacks, but also recruit more candidates from rural Americans and argue that progressive politics benefits them.
“Obviously, we have a branding problem in rural America,” said former North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat who was defeated in 2018. “But if you want to be an alternative, you can’t go there with your hands. empty “.
Heitkamp credits Biden for including specifically rural provisions in his policy plans, as a transportation component in his healthcare proposal, considering that many people in sparsely populated areas must travel a certain distance to see a doctor.
For now, the future of Democrats in rural America largely depends on how Biden is viewed there, Heitkamp said.
“A good way to start would be to make sure that in his inaugural address and in the state of the union, he talks about rural America,” he said.
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