Rural Doom
The heartland is on life support
The 2020 Presidential election saw the conclusion of a decades-long realignment in the American political spectrum, and perhaps, tragically, sealed the fate of rural America. Population density was the single most consistent factor in predicting the partisan vote total of every county in the United States, with President Elect Joe Biden winning the presidency with the fewest number of counties ever for the victor, only around 16%.
Even more striking is the speed of the correction and its near totality. The 1976 election of Jimmy Carter, just a generation ago, saw the Democratic party winning not just Arkansas, West Virginia, and Alabama, but also loads of rural districts from Wisconsin to Oklahoma. Now most states are a simple calculation for campaigns to decide to contest or not: is the state more urban or rural and who will capture the suburbs?
Much ink has been spilled over how the Democrats lost rural America, and some on how the GOP picked it up, although that analysis is usually littered with lazy assumptions. Most recently, Bill Hogseth, Democratic party chair in Dunn County, WI wrote in Politico that the Democrats ignore rural areas and fail to put forward real solutions to the problems that face rural America. He isn’t wrong, at least up to that point. It’s only when he follows up with what always seems to come next, namely that if only the Democratic party would pay attention to rural areas and offer real solutions they would win rural landslides, that things fall apart.
First, the uncontested facts: rural America has been suffering a steep decline since the middle of the last century. In the postwar years, technological advances, especially in chemistry, made American agricultural productivity skyrocket. Additionally, small and medium-sized towns with some industry, such as meatpacking, mining, printing, or forestry saw steady gains in productivity, stable labor relationships, and seemingly endless global appetite for American exports as the world rebuilt from WWII. Rural counties were largely homogeneous and their populations stable.
Many factors contributed to the rural decline in the latter half of the 20th Century, some direct, physical, and obvious. Others less so, on all counts. Consolidation and globalization have almost eliminated the small-hold family farm. Every industry has seen wild technology-driven increases in productivity and automation with corresponding reductions in labor demands. Socially, the U.S. is no longer demographically dominated by white protestants, and the loss of faith in civic institutions, beginning in earnest with Vietnam and Watergate, has become near total in the Trump era.
Rural America has seen decades of declining life expectancy, declining population, and a loss of economic and political clout. Small towns consolidate schools when the population gets too low to sustain separate systems. Years later they may close altogether. The devastating effect that a Walmart opening on the edge of town has to small businesses on Main Street is beyond well-documented.
Why the Democrats lost rural counties
Also, not in dispute in fact, but in its cause, is that the Democratic share of the vote in rural counties has declined precipitously since the era of Democratic dominance, 1932–1968.
Now the conjecture. Democratic policies of pursuing civil rights, gender equity, and social liberalism, while admirable, hollowed out support for the Democratic party in rural areas. Legalized abortion and efforts at gun control weakened, but did not break, the generational ties to the Democratic party that many rural Americans held. When the axe finally fell however, the resistance was all but spent.
The axe was the 1990’s. “New” Democrats under the leadership of Bill Clinton, were fans of free trade, modernization, and boldly moving into the future. The Democratic party began to favor deregulation, fundraising on Wall St., and “competent management” of the booming U.S. economy as we took our place as the world’s sole Superpower.
In 1994, the die was cast. Incumbent Democrats lost all over the country, up and down the ballot, but the real Blue Slaughter was in the rural districts. Democrats would make big gains in 2006 and 2018, but mostly in suburban districts on the strength of opposition to wildly unpopular sitting Republican presidents. Those rural districts were gone for good.
Here we see our first real look at the tragedy, however. The GOP did nothing to win those votes. The Republican platform has never included real help for rural America. There are pleas, every two years now for forty years, to vote Republican based almost entirely on scare tactics about what the Democrats will do, in particular focusing on gun control, abortion, immigration, and crime. I don’t want to get into the merits of all of these policy issues here, except to point out that none of those four things are serious contributing factors to the decline of rural America. They just aren’t. Towns are not disappearing in Nebraska because everyone is getting abortions. Unemployment rates in West Virginia don’t reach 40% because there was talk of banning bump stocks after the Las Vegas mass shooting.
But the Democratic party has found a new coalition. Women, professionals, urban and suburban workers, minorities, immigrants, the non-religious and the young all support the Democratic party by overwhelming margins today. Additionally, most of those groups are growing as a share of the electorate. With rare exception, Democrats running for public office today do not need to worry about opioid addiction or unemployment in Appalachia, and it would be political suicide for a Democratic presidential candidate to prioritize Kansas over California.
Yet the Republican party also has no need for a rural policy. The RNC leadership has zero interest in, say, repealing the trillion-dollar corporate tax cuts of 2018 to provide broadband internet to rural America. As long as the GOP can continue to win rural counties by 50–60 point margins by merely talking about scary and irrelevant social horror stories, they will do so. Throw in a little white identity politics and conflate rural, conservative, and American as one value with precisely zero policies in support, and they are finished. The GOP can bank those votes without inconveniencing wealthy America, and rely on corporate donors to fund the real fight in the suburbs.
Thus the forecast for rural America is bleak. Ignored by one party, taken for granted by the other, and every year falling further behind urban and suburban America. Beyond political irrelevance, the economic factors largely to blame for the decline continue unabated, and now the effects of climate change are burgeoning. An American farmer now faces increasing costs, trade wars, declining markets, climate change, a loss of social status, and the almost universal decline in population, mental and economic health in their communities. And what did their overwhelming support of Donald Trump get them in the last two elections? A few dozen miles of a border wall, and a larger conservative majority on the Supreme Court. When either of those help a soybean farmer in Minnesota, I’ll eat my hat.
