SMELLING A FAKE — To win in rural areas in 2024 and beyond, Democrats need candidates who are, well, authentically rural. That’s one of the key insights from a new survey of over 10,000 rural voters — the largest-ever study of its kind — and hundreds of years of election data on rural voting patterns featured in the book, “The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.” The sharp swing of rural voters toward the Republican Party since the 1980s cannot be explained by simply looking at demographic indicators like race, age and education, say Colby College professors Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea, who published the book in November . Instead, they use their data to argue that a new identity has formed around the “shared fate” of rural communities, that place-based anxiety and grievance play a central role in rural politics and that engaging with rural identity and authenticity are key if Democrats want to compete in those areas again. Nightly called Jacobs and Shea to get more insight into their research, to understand exactly why some voters have sprinted away from Democrats and what the party must do to win them back. This interview has been edited. The two of you dug into hundreds of years of rural voting history and over 10,000 survey responses for this book. What’s the history of the rural vote? And when did the current urban-rural divide appear? Shea: It’s fair to say that a rural-urban divide has existed from the beginning of our experiment. But for nearly 200 years, that urban-rural divide was very regional, state-based and temporary. One thing our data shows is that this extensive national divide is unprecedented in our history. Jacobs: 1980s is this inflection point where the behaviors of rural voters begin to nationalize. That means whether you live in a rural community in Maine, Alabama or the Midwest, you’re starting to behave similarly and react to similar forces. It’s a complex historical narrative. It’s top down and bottom up. There’s real social transformation in rural agricultural and manufacturing communities, but there’s also political narrative construction by Republicans. After crunching the survey data, you identify place-based grievance and anxiety as the strongest indicators of being a rural voter. What is place-based anxiety or grievance, and why is it so important? Jacobs: Demographic indicators do not do that good of a job [of identifying rural voters] compared to values. … When you ask questions about the community: Is your community better off? Will your kids have to leave your community in order to live a productive life? Are politicians listening to the needs of your community? That is a distinguishing feature of ruralness. Rural people are thinking about their rural communities in a different way. Suburbanites and urbanites are not thinking about that. In the book you talk about a few case studies of Democratic lawmakers who over-performed in rural areas, such as Reps. Jared Golden in Maine, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington state and Tim Ryan in Ohio. Why were those candidates successful in beating some of the trends you lay out elsewhere in the book? Jacobs: If rural identity is an identity that has significant values in the mind of rural people, then what you are talking about here is identity politics. And we know that in identity politics, that candidates, especially the background and the persona of the candidate, is especially important in that type of environment. It’s hard, if not impossible, to fake your identity and it’s really easy to screw that up. … So, this comes down to candidate selection. This comes down to identifying good Democrats in that local community that can speak to that community’s history and particularized sense of place. Donald Trump won large majorities among rural voters in 2016 and 2020. What explains a Manhattan billionaire’s strong appeal in rural America? Jacobs: You have to get beyond Trump’s persona. You have to look beyond this idea that Trump is a typical Manhattanite. I think that’s where people try to carve out this disconnection: How could this billionaire living in his Manhattan skyscraper identify with these people? But the truth of the matter is he never pretended to be a rural person. He didn’t go around making a whole to-do about being born in Scranton like Joe Biden or chumming up with coal miners like Hillary Clinton. It made him not authentically rural, but authentic as a non-typical politician. And when he would speak about rural issues, like taking pride in mining coal, it was more empathy than anything. … A politician or a leader like Trump doesn’t necessarily have to pretend to be rural to play into rural identity politics. Just like progressives on the left don’t have to be a certain demographic to speak the language of identity politics. What would be your advice to Democrats who want to start winning again in rural America? Shea: The question is, can Joe Biden make inroads in rural America? He’s got a concerted effort and programs to reach out to rural America, but will it work? Our argument has been that economic programs of this sort are more likely to work if they are particularized, if they’re about that specific industry. … The voters have to believe that Joe Biden, the federal government and the Congress really understands what is happening here. Just sweeping your hand and saying, ‘we’re bringing you broadband,’ is not going to cut it. What are some of the implications of your research for the 2024 presidential election? Shea: I hope Democrats appreciate the size of the rural voting bloc. This is a group of voters that is more important for the Republican Party than either Black voters or young voters are for the Democratic coalition. This is a big important group, and if the Democrats can’t chip away and make some inroads, it is not good on a national level and it’s going to be very bad at the state-level. … One of the reasons it may be hard for Democrats to go into rural areas is that they’ve come to believe these are bastions of crazy Trumpers. … But what we show in this book is that there are genuine concerns that pre-date Donald Trump by decades. Take the anxiety that all Americans feel about the future, double it, and extend it back extra decades. That’s the story of rural America. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com . Or contact tonight’s author at pschaefer@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @p_s_schaefer .
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