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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Democrats once ruled Koochiching County in the blue-collar railroad of northern Minnesota. But in this month’s presidential election, President Donald Trump won it with 60 percent of the vote.
It’s not because voters are suddenly moving to the right, said Tom Bakk, who represents the region in the state Senate. This is 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 that rural Minnesota is not becoming more conservative,” said Bakk, who announced last week that he would become independent after 25 years of Democratic service. . “It’s because you leave them behind.”
As Democrats moved through cities and suburbs to reclaim the White House, the party slipped further behind in huge rural swathes of the northern battlefields. The party lost House seats in the Midwest, and Democratic challengers in senate races from Iowa, Kansas, Montana and North Carolina, all once seen as serious threats to Republican incumbents. , have fallen, some of them hard.
While the Democrats’ rural issues are not new, they are now putting pressure on Biden to start turning the tide. Failure to do so jeopardizes goals such as tackling climate change and securing a Senate majority, especially with GOP Senate seats in Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and the United States. Wisconsin in 2022.
“The pressure for Democrats must be to send an economic message to rural America,” said Iowa Democrat John Norris, former candidate for governor. “We have a great one to pass on, but we haven’t pushed it enough.”
It has become a defining dynamic in almost every state where Democrats dominate urban areas and, for at least two elections, have a clear dynamic in the suburbs.
As Trump sought to make more of his working-class, predominantly white base, he gained little ground in places he barely gained or lost in 2016 and slipped into the suburbs of the industrial north and agricultural. Instead, he’s supercharged his focus on the places he won last time around.
Trump lost to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, after winning all three in 2016. But he won at least 60% of the vote in 126 of the three counties – 14 more than in 2016, according to the Associated Press and state electoral data. All of these counties are sparsely populated.
Perhaps more revealing, Trump has 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 around, even though Biden was spending Trump heavily on advertising.
The rural runaway was even greater in Iowa and Ohio, where polls in late October gave Biden hope of a close race or narrow victory, only to see him lose them to the same margins as Clinton.
Trump’s greater dominance in rural Ohio surprised even Republican strategists. In Ohio’s 6th Congressional District, 18 counties that border the Pennsylvania border and the Ohio River, Trump rose from 64 percent of the vote to over 66 percent.
“I’ll be the first to say that I doubt President Trump can get past what he did in 2016,” said Ryan Steubenrauch, senior adviser to 6th District Republican Bill Johnson.
While Biden fulfilled the Democrats’ long-sought goal of transporting Georgia and Arizona, albeit in a narrow fashion, not because he focused on overtaking their subway hubs, said Steve Jarding, a seasoned Democratic strategist who has long advocated for greater party engagement in rural areas. America.
“Democrats have found a way to win in the country, at least they think it does, by not focusing much in large parts of the center of the country,” he said. “It’s a scary proposition.”
Jarding is concerned that by winning Arizona, Georgia and the North Swing States without tackling the rural economy, Democrats might believe the states are now on their way due to favorable demographic and demographic shifts.
“We didn’t win Georgia because we had a great message to rural Georgians,” said Jarding, who helped Mark Warner win the governorship of Virginia in 2001 by advising him to campaign aggressively away. of the booming 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. He will come back. “
Clinging to their majority, House Democrats lost rural seats, including the one held for 30 years by Representative Collin Peterson in western Minnesota. The setbacks prompted moderates to accuse the party’s most prominent liberals, like New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, of becoming representative of a party foreign to American farmers and small-town manufacturing.
“I would say everyone is talking about the big tent. It’s not as big as it used to be, ”said Bakk of Minnesota.
Biden campaigned little in person, let alone in rural areas. Trump, on the other hand, generated 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, Pa., Surrounded by counties it carried by more than 70%, even 80%.
Democrats have also spent little time and money fighting Trump’s attacks.
Unanswered, Trump’s claims that Biden and other Democrats are supporters of socialism and the elimination of police services, however unfounded, have resonated in small towns, according to VoteCast, an investigation by the ‘Associated Press with the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.
“We need to approach this in a really more aggressive way,” veteran Democratic strategist James Carville said, especially Trump’s claims that Democrats are anti-police. “There were some serious headwinds there.”
Democrats must not only defend themselves against attacks, but recruit more candidates from rural Americans and argue that progressive politics are to their advantage.
“We obviously have a branding problem in rural America,” said former North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat defeated in 2018. “But if you want to be an alternative, you can’t go there them. empty hands. ”
Heitkamp thanks Biden for including specifically rural provisions in his policy plans, as an element of transportation in his healthcare proposal, given that many people living in sparsely populated areas have to travel some 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, in her inaugural address and on the state of the union, that he talks about rural America,” she said.
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