It’s no secret that white working-class voters have torpedoed Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. A 60 million-strong bloc of voters ran over Clinton’s campaign with a tractor, increasing margins in the heartland that were unprecedented, while Democratic voter turnout in urban areas among Latinos, nonwhites, and college-educated liberals has declined, particularly among African Americans. For all the Republican candidate’s rhetoric about illegal immigrants, Mexicans, and Muslims, there has been no boost in Latino support. Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich wrote about how Clinton the campaign failedhow rural voter outreach could assist offset degenerating urban turnout, and how ironic it was that Senator Hillary Clinton resonated with New York’s rural working class and even gained Republican support in the process:
But many Democrats in farm circles have been seething with frustration over what they see as timid attempts to engage rural voters. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has urged the Clinton campaign to strengthen its rural outreach, multiple sources say, beating the same drum for several cycles as Democrats have watched their rural support steadily erode.
By all accounts, the Clinton campaign didn’t think it really needed rural voters, a shrinking population that is reliably Republican. The campaign never established a rural council, as Obama did in 2012 and 2008. It also didn’t build a solid rural campaign infrastructure. In 2008, Obama had a miniature staff at campaign headquarters devoted to rural messaging and organizing efforts, and state-level rural coordinators in a handful of key states throughout the Midwest and Rust Belt.
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The Clinton campaign did not respond to questions about whether it had a rural strategy. One source said a Brooklyn staffer was dedicated to rural outreach, but that assignment came just weeks before the election.
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There was a belief that Democrats could largely turn out rural voters as rural voters left the party, said Tom Bonier, CEO of Target Smart, a Democratic data and polling firm.
“That calculation didn’t work this time,” he said. “The decline was precipitous. There has to be a strategy to reach these rural and working-class white voters.”
The irony is that Clinton has a long history of engaging rural voters. She was popular in rural New York when she was a senator. She devoted enormous staff resources and time to visiting upstate communities, talking to farmers and working with rural development leaders. In time, she even won over staunch Republicans who were extremely skeptical of a former first lady “raising money” coming to their region.
Evich added that Clinton had a working-class platform before the Iowa primary that has apparently been abandoned, and that Trump’s landslide victory among rural voters should put a number of Rust Belt Democratic senators on alert: Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Jon Tester of Montana. Clinton also reportedly stumbled badly when writing about the deplorables. For those voters who already feel rejected by the Democratic Party and liberal elites, that certainly didn’t assist:
Dee Davis, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Rural Strategies, said he believes Trump’s popularity in the heart of the region has almost nothing to do with politics.
“What Trump did in rural areas was try to appeal to people culturally,” Davis said, contrasting it with Clinton’s comments about “deplorables” and closing coal mines.
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“A lot of us in rural areas have our ears tuned to intonation,” said Davis, who lives in Whitesburg, Ky., a Trump stronghold. “We think people look down on us. As a result, we don’t focus on the politics—we focus on the tones, the references, the culture.”
There has been a lot of commentary from those parts of the country that reinforces the narrative that liberal bubbles don’t know that there are other Americans who work just as tough, don’t live in cities, and are suffering under the yoke of a political establishment of which Clinton is a full-fledged member. But Evich also noted that Democrats already seem to know that rural areas are lost to the GOP, but they can’t let them run up the vote the way they did in 2016. A Democratic insider told her, “Hillary lost rural America 3 to 1. If she had lost rural America 2 to 1, things would have been different.” Indeed, since the electorate is 70 percent nonwhite, miniature changes can mean the difference between victory and defeat. Democrats learned that the tough way. But the dregs were there before Election Day—that the Obama coalition and suburban residents were not thrilled with Clinton’s candidacy. Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle brought up this point on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live. Who would have thought that enthusiasm would drop after a 70-year-old white woman tried to replace a charismatic, teenage black president? Molly Ball from Atlantic he had more and echoed the patronizing tone of the American liberal elite to which Davis referred:
While Clinton’s campaign focused on television advertising aimed at undecided suburban voters, there were plenty of warning signs that African-American and millennial voters weren’t inspired by her candidacy. Polls and focus groups showed that teenage people disliked both candidates; in interviews, black voters were unenthusiastic. But Clinton’s campaign assumed they would show up for her simply because they were afraid of Trump.
Instead, many of them refused to comply. Eight percent of black voters under 30 chose an independent candidate, as did 5 percent of Latinos under 30, according to an analysis of the election results by Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher. Those “protest votes,” he argued, were enough to seal Clinton’s fate, even though this year’s electorate was as diverse as 2012’s, and Trump fared no better than Romney among teenage minority voters.
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Clinton’s sedate pace fueled the sense that she thought she was marching toward an inevitable coronation. Inevitability didn’t work out too well for Clinton in 2008, and it didn’t work out this year either.
Of course, it wasn’t a landslide defeat for Clinton and the Democrats—she won the popular vote, and Trump received a smaller share of the vote than Romney had four years earlier. But it exposed a source of growing discontent in the Democratic ranks—issues that, in retrospect, Obama’s victories and Republican dysfunction had glossed over for years.
I disagree that it wasn’t a crushing Democratic defeat—and Clinton won the popular vote because the reliably liberal state of California increased its lead. In the Electoral College, it was a brutal thrashing: 306-232. Republicans also held on to Congress; they control 69/99 state legislatures, 33 governorships, and the most lieutenant governors elected in history. Next year, the Republican Party will be the dominant political force in the country. Period. From the federal level to the dogcatcher, the representative will most likely be in a Republican majority that was seen as threatened by Trump’s nomination. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ll say again that I was wrong.
As both parties recover, we can expect Democrats to do the hefty lifting of rural outreach in the 2018 midterms. Unless internal struggles prevent them from organizing. For Republicans, this is a high order in terms of accountability. For the first time since George W. Bush, they will have a unified Republican government. They need to act and govern effectively—and without drama. At the same time, it is time for Republicans to reach out to the cities. Maybe not by being socially conservative or by championing tax cuts, but by pushing for an issue that every demographic group agrees on, especially in these urban areas: school choice. This is one of the keys to the city that actually touches other parts of public policy. The opportunity is there. Let’s see if the right seizes it.
