Democrats are announcing a new investment to win over voters in rural areas — where the party has suffered deep losses in recent elections — in their effort to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year.
This is the first time, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says, that it's had a program specifically dedicated to engaging rural voters.
Suzan DelBene, who chairs the DCCC and represents Washington's 1st Congressional District, said Democrats see an opportunity to engage rural voters as President Trump's economic agenda, particularly tariffs, becomes less popular.
She said rural voters see the "damage" being done by GOP policies that have led to "costs going up, health care being gutted," and Democrats can provide an alternative.
"I think Republicans are turning their back," DelBene told NPR. "They've been actively hurting rural communities with the policies they've put in place. Democrats are fighting to improve the lives of rural Americans and farmers."
Trump has defended his economic agenda and plans to bring the message out into the country soon, an administration official recently told NPR.
Democrats' spending in rural communities is part of an "eight-figure investment," according to a DCCC press release first shared with NPR. DelBene said the DCCC has a full-time staffer who will be focused on "strategic rural engagement across the country" for the midterms. She said the party has begun working with rural community groups and leaders in key competitive districts — including in newly redrawn districts in South Texas.
"When we look at the swing districts across the country, the districts that are going to determine the majority in the House of Representatives, we know that rural voters are key in those districts," DelBene said.
Anthony Flaccavento, co-founder and executive director of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, said economic frustration among most voters could provide an opening for Democrats, and that rural voters tend to align with economically populist policies.
"It's very clear to us that a progressive, populist economic stance is what is needed," he said. "It's what is needed in substance. Like we need the anti-monopolies, antitrust, pro-union-and-investment-in-infrastructure-type things that go with that."
But it is an open question whether an economic message will help Democrats win back parts of a voting bloc that has been abandoning the party in droves.
Winning back rural voters could be "hard as hell"
According to the Pew Research Center, in last year's presidential election Trump won 69% of voters who describe their communities as rural, compared with just 29% for Kamala Harris.
Flaccavento said winning back at least a slice of those rural voters is likely to be "hard as hell" for Democrats. But, he said, it's a problem the party needs to confront head on.
"We focus on rural, but because there's so much overlap in why people have left the Democrats and why they have so much disillusionment, it's a lot of commonality between working-class folks in small towns and cities and rural people," Flaccavento said. "When you put those two together, rural voters and blue-collar, working-class voters, then you have the biggest voting bloc in the country."
Flaccavento, a small farmer in southwestern Virginia who's a self-described liberal Democrat, ran twice to represent Virginia's 9th Congressional District. He said he had high hopes for his run in 2018.
"We held over 100 in-person town hall meetings with close to 7,000 people attending. We had great social media. We raised a million bucks. We did everything right," he said. "And I still got annihilated at the voting box 2 to 1."
Flaccavento said the negative perception of Democrats in the countryside has long been hard to overcome as the party dismisses concerns that working folks and rural people have had.
"Primarily economic concerns," he said. "They've been downplayed."
Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College in Maine, said Democrats haven't just dismissed the concerns of rural voters, he said the party has "actively push[ed] them away."
Jacobs said the party began clawing back campaign investments in rural America when Democrats abandoned their 50-state strategy. Instead, he said, the party focused on mobilizing their base voters in big cities, and persuading independent-leaning voters in the suburbs.
"Ultimately, what you get is a complete buy-in to the approach articulated no better than Chuck Schumer himself did, that 'for every rural working-class person we lose, we'll pick up two more in the suburbs,'" he said, paraphrasing the Senate Democratic leader. "And as 2016 showed, it was a foolish approach, but it didn't seem to change anything for the next eight years."
Flaccavento agreed it's been "a losing strategy" for the party.
But he said it will take more than targeted investments in a few swing districts to really shore up some of the support that has been lost in rural America.
"My hope would be that it's a serious commitment, not a token commitment, and that it's a commitment that goes beyond a handful of targeted races," he said. "We have to start long-term investment and long-term work across every rural congressional district. It might be five or 10 years or more before some of them become competitive, but we've got to start that work now."
Jacobs said he hopes Democrats have started to "wake up" to the fact that rural areas cannot be neglected.
"If you are going to build a national party and compete at a national level, you need to represent the entire nation and all of its wonderful and complex messiness," he said. "And that includes how rural Americans fit into your idea of the nation."
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