How Republicans Bamboozle Rural Whites

It is a theme this blog looks at often: why rural whites continue to vote against their own economic and financial interests by electing Republicans who deliver nothing for them or, worse yet, support policies and positions that actually harm the local population.  Here in Virginia but for the expansion of Medicaid which was championed by former Governor Northam and Democrats a number of rural hospitals would likely have been forced to close leaving local residents without medical care and the loss of one of their largest local employers.  With a few exceptions, Republicans opposed Medicaid expansion and would have allowed their constituents to suffer.  Yet who do the majority of voters in Virginia's rural areas vote for?  Republican even though the very same Republicans push policies harmful to their constituents.  The same phenomenon is replicated in state after state yet much of the media gives undue deference to rural voters and fails to call them out for their short sightedness and gullibility for Republican plays on their bigotries and hatreds with the mantra of "god, guns, and gays" and "critical race theory.]."  Meanwhile propaganda outlets like Fox and its imitators blame Democrats and "liberals" for rural America's problems when, in fact, the Republicans are the true culprits.  A lengthy piece in Salon looks at this exasperating phenomena and the failure of much of the media to hold rural voters accountable for their bad voting decisions.  Here are excerpts:

It's become a tedious trope, the Beltway journalist who goes on a red state safari to ask Donald Trump voters if they still like Trump. It frustrates smart readers because invariably the answer is "yes" yet the rationale is typically incoherent babble. Even that would be fine, if these reporters dug an inch deeper, to get at the various bigotries that are actually driving the MAGA movement. Instead, most of them seem too in awe of redhats sitting in diners, as though they've just encountered a rare species of bird in the wild, to bother interrogating them in a way that reveals anything genuinely valuable. 

If readers see the title "White Rural Rage: The Threat to Democracy," they might think it's more of the same. But this book, by former Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman and University of Maryland, Baltimore professor Thomas Schaller, is a very different animal.

Waldman and Schaller believe that rural white people are functioning adults who have agency and are not the childlike ciphers of Fox News. As such, the book refreshingly holds rural white voters to account for their choices, and for willfully gobbling down right-wing propaganda. It calls on rural Americans to take responsibility for themselves, by asking harder question of what it would actually take to improve their communities. 

Waldman and Schaller spoke to Salon about what rural America actually needs, and why Republican voters stubbornly refuse to admit it. 

In 2016, Kevin Williamson wrote this piece about the white working class in National Review. A very controversial piece. He was asking, don't these people have agency? Aren't they part of the representational system with elected officials? Why don't they ask for more? Are they children? A lot of people took offense to that, and we're not making an argument as aggressive as that. He had a little bit more safe harbor to do that, coming from the right. But we're basically saying is that the problem here isn't the Democrats. They always get blamed for not doing enough or not reaching out or not being respectful.

Two-thirds of rural counties lost population between 2010 and 2020. That's incredible. And a majority of counties in the nation lost population between 2010 and 2020. To our knowledge that had never happened between two consecutive censuses. This is creating this rural ruin, as we call it. We understand the anxiety that that creates. The question is, what are you gonna do about it?

One option is to blame far away cities and liberals and minorities and woke and CRT and antifa and college professors like me for all of your problems. You'll be rewarded if you say that. There's a steady diet of conservative talk hosts, from Fox News and OANN and Newsmax, who will tell you that's where all your problems come from. Read Katherine Cramer's book, "The Politics of Resentment," about Wisconsin. That's where they think all the problems come from Milwaukee and Madison, and that everything that's going wrong in the upper part of Wisconsin is because of liberals in the cities and Blacks and in Milwaukee and the college professors in Madison. That might make you feel good on Election Day, but it's not gonna solve your material problems.

There's an irony in all of those safari articles where reporters go to the diner and find out that the Trump supporters still love Trump. Those are largely coastal, highly educated reporters who, in their own lives, are probably more liberal or at least center left. And yet they have assimilated all these ideas about how Trump country people have a kind of moral superiority to them and deserve this kind of respect.

So you get a reporter who works in Washington and grew up in Massachusetts, and goes to some place in Appalachia or to Ohio, and has assimilated this idea that these are the real Americans. And even if some of their views might be repellent, I have to treat them with respect because they're the true voice. And that I find deeply problematic. It's always worthwhile to understand people. But too much of that reporting is just deferential.

They want to get mad at us at this book and dismiss us as a couple of liberal professors who live in the DC area and went to fancy schools. That's fine. We can deal with it. But when Ted Cruz says, my pronouns are "kiss my ass" or  "you can't limit me to two beers," now he's more insulting. What he is saying is, these voters are so easily won over by performative politics. I can reduce their core urges and reflexes to this. And I don't have to deliver a thing for rural Texas.

Nobody is more insulting to rural voters than the people who are giving them nothing and taking their votes. They claim Democrats are insulting, but Democrats are doing something for them and getting none of their votes. But nothing's more condescending than getting votes and doing nothing in return. J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik and Tom Cotton: All these people were educated at Harvard and Yale. They frankly laugh behind the backs of their own voters to some degree, right? Those are the people who are really insulting.

You see it in your home state of Texas almost more than anywhere else. Republicans have carefully gerrymandered the state legislative districts, using rural areas as a kind of a leverage to make sure they stay in power. Yet there are huge problems in rural Texas that the legislature never addresses. They've got terrible infrastructure problems. They've got problem with the water systems and the electrical systems. Because they refused to accept the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid, rural hospitals are closing all over. There are people in Texas who have to drive 200 miles to get to prenatal care.

There was an an interesting study that we cite in the book that found that there were three things that really determined whether a rural area was going to be able to prosper economically: Do you have strong schools? Do you have good broadband so that businesses that rely on so they can prosper and flourish? Do you have access to contraception so women don't have to have babies before they're ready? If you have those three things in place, then your area can prosper. And those, of course, are three things that Republicans are undermining.

It's decimating. Rural America is older on average than any other part of the country. In the suburbs and the city, 40% of people tell their children they should consider leaving. But 60% of rural people tell their children they should leave. The best and brightest students are encouraged by their parents and their teachers to leave and get an education. Some of them may have come back to become a doctor or a lawyer locally. Most of them graduate school and, maybe they had loans, and they needed to move the city to make an income to pay it back.

Everywhere we went, people said weren't enough economic opportunities. The kids who were smart and ambitious, they decided to leave. So Mila Besich, just a good example. She's the mayor of Superior, Arizona, which is this dusty little town in the desert. When she was getting ready to graduate high school, her guidance counselor told her, you have to get out there. . . . . we heard the same thing from people in West Virginia: There just aren't really good jobs here. You can get a job at the Dollar Store, but what is that going to do for you?

The brain drain is also affecting the personality of rural and urban Americans. . . . . it's not just that red America and blue America have different economies and there are different attitudes. You can now predict on where people score on the basic big five personality characteristics. People who score high on "openness to experience" are more likely to leave rural America. People who score low are more likely to stay. It's creating a personality blue/red divide.

49% of rural youth said that their communities are unaccepting of gays and lesbians. That's about twice the rate in the suburbs and in the cities. That's another reason young people don't want to come back. In addition to few economic opportunities at home, they feel some hostility, especially if they're liberal.

Conservatives are constantly being told that not only that cities are hellholes and places that are alien to your values, but also if you send your kids to college, which is the path to more economic opportunity for most people, that they are going to reject you and your values. That they're going to hear all these alien ideas and that's going to break up your family. . . . A lot of kids do come home from college and say, "You know, Mom, Dad, I don't think you're right about this anymore." People don't like that. 

This is also a media story. News media in rural areas has really been decimated. The newspaper industry is in crisis everywhere, but especially in rural areas. Local papers have shut down. The ones that remain got bought out by some private equity firm and they don't really report on local issues anymore. And they used to cover issues that can bind people together, stuff that that doesn't have to do with partisanship. . . . . If that source of information is not there, not only are people disconnected from what's going on in their community, but the only messages that they get, especially from Fox News and conservative talk radio, is all about how they are besieged. That they're surrounded by enemies who want to literally destroy them and their way of life.

We went to Llano, Texas, where they have one of these library controversies over whether there are going to be certain books allowed in the public library. The conservatives that we talked to, they all said, oh, we are the reasonable ones. . . . we also heard from a lot of people there who said that things have just gotten meaner since this thing with the library started. It's just all nasty, and we used to all like each other.

[Y]ou could argue that the rural whites who have been electing Republicans ought to elect Democrats. But at the very least, they ought to get themselves better Republicans. They need to start demanding more. There's many politically barren places where the Democrats don't go because they're never going to win and Republicans barely go because they know that they're always going to win. That population is not demanding anything of Republicans. Republicans come in at the end of the campaign and say, "Don't you hate liberals? Yeah, me too."  And then they vote those people back into office. They need to start saying to their Republican representatives, "What are you actually doing for us?

You have people in rural areas saying socialism is destroying their economies. But if you look at why the mom-and-pop shop closed and got replaced by a Dollar General? That's late stage capitalism. That ain't socialism. Right? If you look at why hospital and treatment facilities are closing, it's because rural hospitals don't turn a profit. That's capitalism, pure and simple. The same people who are complaining that socialism and communism are taking over America are watching their communities being decimated by late stage capitalism. And they're pointing fingers at cultural elites in faraway cities.

Somebody needs to go in there and say, pay attention to what's destroying your communities. Pay attention to who did it and who voted for those people because it's not the people that you think it is. . . . . Which is not us saying that rural people are stupid. We actually think they're quite smart. As I told you, nobody insults them more than the people who take their votes and give 'em nothing in return. They're picking their pockets, electorally and politically and frankly they're picking their pockets of their future.

Very sad and extremely frustrating.