MyDD: It's rural America, stupid!

[skids]

...most Democrats in DC couldn't read the outcome correctly from Oh 2nd. In particular, I noticed the pdf memo sent to all Democratic House Members about what Democrats should learn from the Hackett race from the DCCC. Whomever wrote the memo needs a better demographic map.

<...>

Adams, Brown, and Pike are rural counties, not suburban or exurban. They are no where close to urban areas. Adams is 90% rural, Brown and Pike are 80% rural. Gains were made in Clermont and Warren, but no where near the level that was made in the rural areas of the CD. It's in rural America, not the suburbs or exurbs, where the opening is there for Democrats to make gains, as Hackett proved.

http://mydd.com/story/2005/8/6/11319/28513#comment_top

[QC]

1. Lots of people on our side are firmly wedded to the notion that rural and

working-class voters are all freepers. It's very hard to get them to consider anything other than that safe, comfortable prejudice.

Here's a thread where I tried to start a discussion of how it was the white, middle-class suburbanites who supported Schmidt and rural working-class voters who supported Hackett. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1987788

It dropped like a rock, as is typical for threads around here that deal in any way with class issues.

You raise a very important issue, but it's not one that many DUers are ready to hear.

[havocmom]

3. Hear hear! I get SO furious at generalized 'red state' bashing threads

on DU. Talk about a circular firing squad and shoot ourselves in the foot!

The neocons/junta are NOT playing well in my rural county and I don't think that is really uncommon.

Dems need to get the message out about what they really stand for and stop letting the likes of Rush and Rove define them for the masses. We need to get hard facts out and our concrete suggestions for how to improve America. The rural people will be more supportive than the DLC would ever imagine.

Howard Dean knows. He plays well in many heartland communities. He speaks specifics and truth and they appreciate it.

The people who bash red states without really looking into what people there think are part of the problem, not part of the solution. And they are every bit as guilty of the sort of bigotry they make fun of Red Staters about!

QC, anytime you get a thread going or comment on one with this as an underlying theme, please PM me with the link that I may jump into the fray with you! I truly believe the Democratic party will succeed only when we return to our populist roots.

The GOP has made gains lately by pretending to be the party of the common folk. But the 'common folk' are seeing their hypocrisy of it and looking for real voices for real people. We win by doing what we did best, speak for AMERICANS and offering win/win solutions, not by being Republican-lite and stabbing the working people who built this nation in the back while lying to their faces.

The problems facing America and Americans need more that focus group guided rhetoric and campaign platitudes. We need to get solid messages out and we need to stop bashing and writing off red states.

[QC]

6. Thanks! Feel free to join me in that thread I linked to.

There's some interesting discussion there, if not much of it.

[MuseRider]

2. Absolutely true but

getting anyone in the party to listen is unlikely. Unfortunately when they do they approach the rural areas with an attitude that is less than understanding and every small gain that we who live here make is blown with one simple, stupid statement. We have a LOT of work to do to reach these people and they are reachable.

[Gormy Cuss]

4. There is a disconnect on class both here and in the party IMHO

I suspect it's because the demographics here are skewed toward people with a middle class or upper class income, suburban point of reference and while good liberals they just don't see the way the blue collar block used to be a powerhouse for the Dems and by all rights should still be. The Dems were perceived as protecting the little people against corporate greed. We're not anymore. Rural areas used to have viable small scale agriculture or manufacturing operations, now it's rare because of favorable treatment of agribusiness and offshoring.

I think this administration has turned on its head the notion that Dems are the ones promoting a nanny state and government interference. That doesn't play well in rural areas either. The strong performance by a political unknown like Hackett is a very strong indication that Dems have lots of room to recapture seats in 2006. I hope we can come up with a strong clear message that modernizes but does not deviate from the strategy of the Democratic Party in the second half of the 20th century. WE are the party open to change in the hopes it makes things better for everyone. WE are the party that tolerates the minority rather than clamors for the tyranny of the majority. WE are the party that works with business, not for business. The major difference between the two parties used to be disagreement over the methods to achieve a great society and who would be included in that society. The current Repubs in charge seem to live by Gordon Gecko's creed, "greed is good."

[QC]

7. Unfortunately, it's not just skewed demographics.

There's a surprising amount of genuine snobbery at work in all this. I mean, do we really want those backwoods tackies in our party? They've never even heard of soymilk or Noam Chomsky! What would people say?

If you want a great example of the utter bone-stupid obliviousness about class at DU, check out this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1989915&mesg_id=1989915

It's a prime example of the attitude that makes me despair of our party every amounting to anything again.

[Gormy Cuss]

8. Well, snobs are just snobs regardless of their political leanings

And I agree, there are plenty of examples of bone-stupid obliviousness in threads related to blue collar values, poverty, and rural living.

My #1 pet peeve on the class snobbery is over trailers, now known as manufactured housing. Putting in a foundation and shipping in a complete house is much cheaper than building on site in many rural areas and newer trailers are comfortable and economical homes. They aren't much in terms of style, but neither are those matchstick townhouse condos with the paper thin walls in the suburbs.

I also have little tolerance for people who claim they understand what it's like to be low income because of their "poor grad student" days. Nope, if that's all you have, you haven't a clue. Until you see no end to the grind of toiling day in and day out just to keep from drowning under the weight of poverty, you do not appreciate how different it is for the chronically low income.

[QC]

9. If housing prices continue to rise, a lot of smug trailer-trash-bashers

will someday consider themselves very fortunate to have anything at all to live in.

[BiggJawn]

5. Damn right!

The tide's not going to turn in the Cities, because they're already Blue,

It's out here in "Gawd Bless Murka-land" that these inroads are going to be made.

I'm seeing and hearing it. Rural Murka may not like the idea of 2 guys getting married, but they're starting to like the idea of their sons being killed for bullshit even less.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. There's nothing inherently *politically* conservative about farmers

In the early to mid twentieth century, farmers were among some of the most politically radical people in the country. They are *behaviorally* conservative, but very open to populist economic and political appeals.

George McGovern was from South Dakoka. Minnesota once had a Socialist governor, elected by an alliance of farmers and union activists. Tom Harkin keeps getting reelected. So does Russ Feingold. Paul Wellstone was popular among rural people in Minnesota. Even Oklahoma produced Senator Fred Harris in the 1960s-70s.

The Dems lost the farmers in three stages:

1) High interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve during the Carter Administration, combined with low crop prices, forced farmers into bankruptcy. (For you city slickers, farmers borrow against the coming year's production to finance the purchase of seed, equipment, animal feed, etc.) This was not Carter's fault, since the president has no direct control over the Federal Reserve, but it provided an opening for the Republicanites in their campaign of blaming Carter for everything.

2) Farm foreclosures accelerated during the early years of the Reagan administration, and it would have been smart for the Dems, who had a majority in Congress at the time, to propose debt relief for rural folk who were squeezed by high interest rates and low crop prices. The loss of family farms also hastened the decline of small towns.

The farmers wanted to pay their debts and were desperate to hold on to land that had been in their families for a hundred years or more. If the Dems had come forward with a low-interest loan refinancing program, they would have had the undying loyalty of that generation of farmers.

3) Instead, the right wingers smelled blood and stepped in. Knowing that they had nothing to say to the farmers' economic woes, they instead played to and encouraged their more conservative behavioral views, as well as fomenting anti-Semitic, anti-UN conspiracy theories. Since the Dems of that era had mostly given up on economic populism (with a few shining exceptions) and seemed to be concentrating on liberal behavioral issues that were offensive to rural populations, this was a wily move on the part of the Republicanites.

In my alternative history of that era, the Democrats step forward with debt relief and economic development programs for rural areas. The right-wing demagogues make their pitch, but the farmers are too grateful, besides which they know that city people have different behavioral standards. So they stick with the Dems, Reagan's attempt to transform the country fails, because Congress refuses to enable it (unlike the traitors in the DLC), and a team of a Midwestern and a Southern populist (No, I don't know who) is elected in 1988.

[QC]

12. Excellent post--one of the best I've seen here.

For most of our history, the radicals were out in the sticks, not in seminar rooms and coffeeshops. The Wobblies and Mother Jones, the tenant farmer organizers and the United Mine Workers--these were poor country people and they came by their radicalism through hard experience.

The Left in this country died when it became almost exclusively white, urban/suburban, and middle-class.

[Redneck Socialist]

14. Well said

If the Democratic Party were to genuinely focus on rural issues many of those so called "red" states would be much closer to purple.

[Ellipsis]

11. Yup

[wli]

13. well, that's one way to get a Senate majority

Factoring out Diebold and neocons assassinating the Dem candidates, anyway.

[kenny blankenship]

15. The Party has succumbed to the idea

and this is the siren call of the DLC, that the money and the votes are in the uppermiddle class. That's where the large individual donations come from (uppermiddle class and above people in their later middle age) and these are also the demographic most likely to vote. You can't woo the uppermiddle class by preaching economic populism, or what is called "class warfare".

With a strategy of getting a good share among the soccer mom demographic in the better off suburbs with economic "centrism, ie: Republican laissez-faire" paired with (relatively) socially liberal positions, while taking for granted the votes of traditional urban/minority constituencies (who still have interests to protect and nowhere else to go), the Democratic Party has hoped to compete against the Republican juggernaut of NASCAR/Office Park Dads and corporate money. It's been a shambles.

But to extricate itself from this failure, the Party would need to execute an about face on its economic "theory" and risk alienating uppermiddle class donors and voters in exchange (hopefully) for the larger base traditionally claimed by the Republicans of down and out rural voters.

I think regardless of the risks inherent in ideological shift the Democratic Party should be championing the average earner and the less fortunate wherever they live, because IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO, bringing up the standard of living from the bottom-up instead of the official DLC-GOP "centrist" position of trickle down. But if I may be allowed to express myself in the spirit of the proposal, I ain't holding my breath waiting to see it transpire.

[Tsiyu]

16. Lots of luck selling that idea here

While I've met a good many DUers (online) who live the rural life as I do, I've read even more posts bashing country dwellers as ignorant, inbred, blah, blah, blah.

Personally, I don't really care about anyone else's lifestyle but my own - as long as you aren't hurting anyone to maintain that lifestyle. But we each do a little damage, just driving our cars and cooling our homes and trying to outfit our kids for school.

Now, I have made the choice to go back to simpler living - cutting out the crap I used to "have to" have. I must be very conscious of everything I do on my small income, but I have learned how to make the most with the least.

I don't feel "better" than anyone, nor am I jealous of those who have more than they can stand. I used to be one of those people, so I know the allure of new stuff. It just never made me happy.

But you would think to some Democrats that my lifestyle is the dregs of the earth. That my socio-economic status is in direct proportion to my intellect. That I must not know shit if I don't have all the luxuries of life. That I cannot be successful even if I feel my life is happier than theirs.

But I'm only going to say this: I don't have cable or a satellite dish, but I have over a thousand books in my small home.

And I am representative of many rural dwellers. But you'll never convince the Dem snob factor of that fact. They like the illusion of being superior. It's a very sad reality here, like a mental disorder you can never cure.

We rural folks simply have to ignore the snobs and work with the party we've got, but some days you really hate to call these types "progressives." I can't see any of them fighting for the rights of the rural poor or working to help small farmers or doing much more than putting down the 'have nots.'