Democrats Can Win Back Rural Voters-- And They Need To

Thursday, I listed 50 House seats that the Democrats should be working towards flipping in 2020. I listed them in order, based on how badly the Republican winner had done. So, for example, #1 is KS-02 (where Steve Watkins won with 48.1%); #2 is TX-23 (where William Hurd won with 49.2%); #3 is NY-27 (where Chris Collins won with 49.4%). Do you know what those 3 districts have in common, aside from very vulnerable Republican incumbents? They are all primarily rural districts. And Democrats came close to winning all three. Fully half of the 50 targets are predominantly rural in nature... and all are flippable. But how? Iowa progressive Austin Frerick made the case last month that "at the root of rural America’s angst are small towns whose economies have been taken over by a handful of predatory multinationals." To win in rural America again, Democrats need to understand what happened and how to fix it.

Frerick warns that poor performance by Democrats in rural areas will prevent them from retaking the Senate "for years to come," and certainly not in 2020. He pointed to losses by Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO), where he got just 33% of the rural vote and she just 27%, as examples of how the Democratic Party-disconnect with rural communities manifests itself at the polls. But he, and co-author Sarah Miller, wrote, "Rather than writing off rural America, Democrats have an opportunity to present a vision and policy agenda that have a real shot at reversing rural and small-town America’s declining living conditions. But this requires appreciating how and why those conditions plummeted in the first place, with few signs of improvement. Rural communities have not recovered the jobs they lost in the recession. Suicide rates are higher in rural America than in urban America, and the gap is growing. Medicaid now pays for more than half of all births at rural hospitals, and the opioid epidemic continues to thrive off desperation and hopelessness. The troubling statistics go on and on."

At the root of rural America’s angst is a fairly simple story that many rural voters recognize. Over the course of a generation, major sectors of the rural economy have been rolled up and are now controlled by a handful of predatory, extractive multinational corporations. As a result, manufacturing and farming jobs have left the area, and opportunities-- to change jobs, start your own business, fund good schools, and build communities where your kids can thrive and start their own families-- are the exception, not the rule. It is no surprise that many of those who remain in these communities have lost any sense of respect, dignity, and self-determination.

Instead of fighting this concentrated corporate power, many leading Democrats embraced and continue to embrace an economic ideology centered on efficiency that paved the way for the merger mania and manufacturing exodus that have been at the root of rural America’s economic undoing. Former secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack, for example, recently called out Democrats for lacking a vision for rural America, and although Vilsack put forward a laundry list of ideas, none of them address the root of the problem-- perhaps because Vilsack now lobbies for a dairy export organization whose members admitted to driving down milk prices for thousands of farmers.

To regain trust, Democrats will have to do far more than boost ethanol production, job training, and broadband. They need to show they are willing to take on the faraway monopoly bosses who are carving up rural communities, shutting down competition, and gaming international trade to get even farther ahead, while corrupting the political process with lobbyists and dark money all along the way.

The House could start by investigating America’s poultry industry, which has turned family farmers into something akin to impoverished sharecroppers through powerful, exploitative monopolies. Big poultry slaughterers like Tyson and Brazilian-owned JBS require farmers to use their chicks and feed, dictate the price once the birds are ready to be processed, and engage in anti-competitive and punitive behavior if farmers speak out or step out of line. More than 7 out of 10 poultry farmers live below the poverty line, while the CEO of Tyson brought in nearly $9 million last year.

That’s far from the only example of corporate power directly harming rural communities. Airline consolidation and deregulation have cut off the heartland from affordable air travel; not only do children from rural America move to big cities to pursue better opportunities, but they can’t even afford to fly home anymore for the holidays (we speak from experience). Drug store monopolies like CVS and Walgreens have put community pharmacies out of business and hiked the prices of commonly prescribed drugs to more than nine times higher than their independent counterparts. The pharmaceutical monopolies at the heart of the opioid crisis have quite literally gotten away with mass murder in pursuit of profits.

And overall, big-box stores-- and now Amazon-- have laid waste to Main Street commerce, littering communities with empty storefronts, broken up by the occasional dollar store. A new Open Markets Institute report sheds light on the extent of this problem for the first time in decades. Two companies now account for 47% of all pet-store sales, and three companies account for 75% of all craft-store sales. And Amazon’s e-commerce market share is 42 points higher than its closest competitor, with the gap growing every year.

With the prevalence of diabetes almost 20% higher in rural America than in urban areas, insulin cartels also warrant investigation, and taking them on would be meaningful to many people who suffer from this disease. The three largest firms-- Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi-- have raised insulin prices in near lockstep for years by shadowing each other’s prices. Eli Lilly, for one, launched its insulin two decades ago with a sticker price of $21 a vial and now sells it for $255.

Democracy is built on checks and balances of power, as Nancy Pelosi recently reminded us in her victory speech. We used to apply this same line of thinking to corporate power, but that thinking largely went out the window. Democrats need to bring it back. If they want a shot to compete against Republicans in rural America, they can start by standing up for the right of rural Americans to compete against the corporate monopolies that have been left free to loot and plunder our communities.

This past cycle, Democrats picked up some bell-weather rural districts-- CA-21 in the Central Valley, ME-02, the biggest rural district east of the Mississippi, NM-02, NY-19, NY-22, VA-06 and two major agricultural districts in Iowa. J.D. Scholten came close to beating Steve King in the most rural district in Iowa, holding King down to just 50.4% of the votes cast. Now Iowa Democrats are urging J.D. to take on Republican Senator Joni Ernst in 2020. I asked him what he thinks about the Democratic Party approach to rural districts and he wasn't terribly sanguine. "What I have seen from the Democrats the last few years is that we are becoming increasingly the Whole Foods Party, very urban and suburban. I’m fighting to make sure Democrats are more and compete in Dollar General districts like mine." I like that hint of still fighting in there. I'll be meeting with him in a few weeks and hope to have more information about his plans then.

TX-10 is high up on anyone's list of 2020 congressional targets. That's because, completely on his own-- with his own local teams and no one from DC-- progressive Democrat Mike Siegel came came closer to beating entrenched Republican Michael McCaul than anyone had ever done. Siegel won overwhelmingly in the Travis County part of the district and made tremendous inroads in some of the rural areas as well, particularly Bastrop and Waller counties. "As Democrats," he told me this week, "we must show up in our rural communities, express our willingness to fight against the rigged economy, and work to win concrete victories. Universal High Speed Internet is one project that is achievable and would make a tremendous impact on rural economies. And the proposed Green New Deal will bring countless quality jobs to build renewable energy infrastructure, support energy efficiency, and promote local agriculture. Here in Texas, we have a tradition of economic populism going back a hundred years, and we can tap into that with a program that seeks both short-term and long-term change."

Audrey Denney outperformed what anyone at the DCCC expected her to do in her election contest this year with entrenched Republican extremist Doug LaMalfa. Hopefully, now that her name recognition with voters is high, she'll beat him in 2020. Denney, who grew up on a family farm and earned a a master's degree in Agricultural Education at Cal State Chico, is eager to be seen as the poster child for how Democrats cast a vision for rural America and talk to rural voters. "The small rural communities that make up my beautiful part of the world are dying," she told me yesterday. "People don’t have access to healthcare services-- in two of our 11 counties women can’t deliver babies in hospitals. Schools are closing. People are struggling to live paycheck to paycheck.  We have a housing crisis and devasting fires like the Camp and Carr Fires continue to ravage my district. Our 2018 campaign cast a vision that our economy shouldn’t just work for the rich-- and every single person should be able to earn a living wage. We talked about bold progressive policies like single-payer healthcare in terms that resonated with rural voters. We cast a vision for how restoring our ecosystems to health could help mitigate climate change and protect us from the devastation of wildfires. We made real strides communicating a unifying message to voters in our vast, rural California district. In 2014, Rep. LaMalfa won by 22 points, in 2016 by 18, and we narrowed that gap to 9 points after only 10 months of campaigning. Another indicator that our message resonated with voters that normally vote conservative is that I earned about 15,000 more votes than governor-elect Newsom in the CA-01. We’ve created a strong base of support and have a roadmap for success in a traditionally conservative district.



NE-02 is mostly Omaha and its suburbs but it's prosperity is interlocked with Nebraska's agricultural economy. Kara Eastman, who nearly beat Republican incumbent Don Bacon last month, has all but announced that she, like Audrey Denney and Mike Siegel, will be running for Congress again in 2020. Yesterday, she told me that "While the 2nd Congressional district of Nebraska is 98% urban, our agricultural infrastructure has a significant impact on our economy. The current tariffs are directly taking a toll on Nebraska's farming community which ultimately hurts all of us. On the campaign trail, I heard from constituents who had seen their grocery bills rise because of the tariffs. Democrats need to reach out to rural voters to show them that the Republican party has abandoned them and that we have a plan, not to bail out farmers and ranchers, but to create good policies to empower them to succeed."