Democrats Can Reach Rural and Non-College Degree Voters, Are They Interested?

American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the second year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.

April 1, 2024

An interesting study addressed how voters decided who to vote for in the last two months of a campaign. Here we are in April, so September and October are the big months to reach those wavering voters. Polls now trying to determine if Joe Biden or Donald Trump is leading with the usual “if the election were held day” question are cute but in a close race do not tell us a whole lot. This study stated: 

We compare the consistency between vote intention and vote choice of respondents surveyed at different points before, and then again after, the election, and show that 17% to 29% of voters make up their mind during the final two months of campaigns. 

The 17-29 percent range seemed unusually high but then again this was a study looking at not just American Presidential elections but also elections in Germany, the United Kingdon, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria and a few more countries. What raised the percentage of voters deciding in the final two months to what appears to be a high percentage range is that some countries have multiple political parties while the United States has a two-party system. OK, sometimes a third party pops its head up in our elections, maybe this year Robert Kennedy, Jr. and the No Labels Political Party may have some effect on voting, depending on which states they appear on the ballot: Utah and Montana will not matter where Trump will win easily, but Michigan and Ohio might matter, since they can be states with close votes for either Trump or Biden. 

The two-party system in the United States reduced the swing votes in those last two months before an election but I found one statement in this study interesting. The authors stated: 

We find that vote choice consistency increases substantially for all groups during the last 60 days before the election but that the increase is faster for younger voters and those without a college degree, and slower for those who strongly identify with a party. 

Those without a college degree are often defined as Trump’s base. That part of this study stood out. Are there some significant percentage of non-college degree voters who can be persuaded to do one of two things: 1) Vote for Biden, or 2) Not vote at all. Encouraging potential Trump voters to simply not vote is a good option, why encourage voters to have make a choice: Vote for me or him. 

Sarah Longwell, founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, stated: 

[O]ur politics is defined by partisan tribalism. ... I know that [voters] don’t feel nearly the connection to democracy that they do to their political team, their partisan tribe. In fact, in American most voters don’t think about democracy at all.  

When I was a regular political analyst on TV stations in St. Louis addressing Presidential elections, five in all, I looked at rural counties and tried to determine what I called the “tripwire principle”—the percentage of rural voters who voted Democrat and were needed to help a Democrat win the state. In other words, Democrats did not need to win the rural vote, they just needed to win enough rural votes that they did not need a huge number of votes from urban and suburban areas to offset their loses in rural areas. I had the percentage somewhere around 28-31 percent of rural voters needed for the Democratic candidate to win. Too far below that percentage and it was not possible for the Democratic vote strongholds to offset the rural vote. 

Back to Longwell and what she had to say about voters and their support for a political party. Tribalism was a dominant feature for voters. As Longwell stated: 

Even Republican voters who didn’t like Trump, even they recoiled at direct attacks on him, especially if those attacks were coming from outside the tribe. ...They’re coming from the deep state, the media, Democrats, Never Trumpers like me. 

Longwell’s point from the focus groups she conducted was that Trump voters were willing to listen to others like themselves—those Republicans who might have voted for Trump but now had reservations. 

Longwell stated how her focus groups provided insight into who Trump voters listened to:

[W]e had to figure out how to beat Trump in the general election. And I knew that meant building the necessary permission structures to help disaffected Republicans break from their tribe and vote against Trump. And to do that, I knew we needed trusted messengers, right? Messengers that these folks trusted. …[T]hen we had a little bit of a breakthrough. …[W]e started showing people video testimonials [in our focus groups]. Little videos, just regular people, Republicans, talking about why they couldn’t vote for Trump, again, in 2020. And suddenly, people were listening.

For many years when I was doing TV news, I had a home in a rural county. There are several ways to define and understand what constitutes a rural county. There is a rural county adjacent to a metropolitan area, and there are rural counties more removed from a closeness to a metropolitan area or lack an interstate highway running through them. There are rural counties that have a college or university. In addition, there are rural counties that are heavily union and those that are not. 

I get the feeling from talking with a number of Democratic leaders who hold leadership positions usually at a local level that there is a lack of awareness, or understanding, about how to break down rural voters. I focus on rural voters because they are seen as the backbone of Trump’s base and are more likely to not have a college degree. I remember discussing different rural counties in Florida with a Democratic chair of one of those counties and how Florida’s rural counties voted in the 2016 Presidential election (Trump beat Hillary Clinton, just to remind you). I went through with him the different rural counties in the state and how several of those counties showed a stronger than expected support for Clinton. I had trouble believing that the first time he heard about a breakdown in each rural country’s support for Clinton, was from me. He told me he was going to bring up my findings at the next meeting of the Democratic Party in his county. 

In 2016, for example, in Florida while Bradford County with less than 30,000 people went overwhelmingly for Trump (73.3 percent to 24.1%) there was Hamilton County with less than 15,000 people where while Trump won with 62.7 percent of the vote, Clinton received 34.7 percent. Or there was Holmes County with approximately 20,000 people where Trump received 87.5 percent of the vote to Clinton getting just 10 percent. But then there was Putnam County with approximately 75,000 people (about the seating capacity of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum) where Trump won with 66.5 percent of the vote, but Clinton received 30.3 percent. The county Democratic chairman I spoke with, had no clue why it was that Hamilton and Putnam counties could each have vote totals that were more than 30 percent for Clinton. 

In the case of Florida, as in the case of Missouri, I was interested in the tripwire principle. I suspect the percentage range is not the same in every state, since that depends on the state’s metropolitan population to its rural population. If the Democrats can increase their reach in rural areas, imagine how much less dependent they need to be on overwhelmingly large turnouts in metropolitan areas to offset their vote totals in rural areas.  

In the 2008 Presidential election, Barack Obama, while he won the election, he lost Missouri to John McCain-and it was a nail-biter: 3,903 votes separated the two candidates. In Missouri, Obama won three rural counties and it is interesting to look at each. Ste. Genevieve County has a population of around 19,000. The county borders a metropolitan area and has a strong union presence and Obama won the county with 56.4 percent of the vote. In 2012, 2016, and 2020, the county went Republican. While Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger to Obama in 2012 received 50.2 percent of the vote, in both 2016 and 2020 Trump received more than 60 percent of the vote. Iron County is somewhat more rural than Ste. Genevieve with a population of less than 10,000 people (about the seating capacity of Cameron Basketball Stadium at Duke University). In 2008, the county voted for Obama with 50.1 percent, as with Ste. Genevieve in 2012, 2016, and 2020, the county voted Republican with Trump receiving more than 70 percent of the votes in both 2016 and 2020. While Republicans may see Iron County as a typical rural county that is described as a Trump County, local elections (assessor, circuit clerk, county commissioners, prosecuting attorney, and several others) show a divided county with offices held by both Republicans and Democrats. Something appeals at the local level for voters that Democrats still matter. Buchanan County, located two counties north of Kansas City, has a population bigger than either Ste. Genevieve or Iron counties with 85,000 people (about the seating capacity of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum). In 2008, it voted for Obama with 48.8 percent of the vote (McCain received 48.7 percent). As with the other two counties, it went Republican in 2012, 2016, and 2020. Trump received 59.3 percent of the vote in 2016 and 61.2 percent in 2020, not the overwhelming percentages that Iron County gave Trump. At the local level, most of the local elections are held by Republicans with a few Democrats scattered in there. This is an interesting contrast where Iron County with more than 70 percent of the vote going for Trump in 2016 and 2020 has local elections split between Democrats and Republicans, while Buchanan County shows more Republican depth from the national down to the local election levels, while supporting Trump, does so less overwhelmingly than Iron County. 

The point of this is that Democrats need to look closely at these and many other rural counties and learn how to break them down into different groupings. 

Trump is doing his part to cut off his nose to spite his face as he tells voters that early voting and mail-in ballots are a bad thing. I addressed this in an earlier article noting that a lot of these voters are Trump supporters (“Television News Does Its Part to Add to Conspiracy Thinking About the 2020 Presidential Election Which Will Carry Over for this Year’s Election”). Since rural areas are often seen as Trump country, his supporters in these parts of America like early voting. One study noted that almost half of rural Americans who voted in 2020 did so by early voting. As this study stated: 

In the 2020 general election, roughly 47% of voters living in rural areas voted before Election Day, either by in-person early voting (25%) or mail-in voting (22%). Overall, Election Day voting declined by 30% in rural counties from 2016 to 2020. 

In the case of rural America, reaching much of these parts of the country is through radio, not necessarily television or social media. In 2020, the Biden campaign tried to reach many of these rural voters by targeting ads through radio in eight battleground states. In one ad Biden says, “My plan is to restore — restore the promise of the middle class, for rural America, in rural America.” All well and good but using the points raised by Longwell, Trump supporters need to be doing those ads, not Biden, who, unfortunately, will not be listened to. Let a Trump supporter tell radio listeners of the $1.2 billion in economic development loans and grants aimed at 112 projects provided through the Department of Agriculture that are part of a broader Investing in Rural America program within the Biden administration. Biden or a member of his cabinet talking about them will probably not be heard, but a Trump supporter might be.  

Furthermore, there is the issue of unionization in rural America. I pointed out that Ste. Genevieve County in Missouri is a heavy union county. These rural union counties exist but are vanishing. One study stated regarding rural unions: 

[U]nionization was very common in rural counties during the 1970s. Although most elections happen in urban places, the per capita numbers tell a different story. We are surprised to find that there were around 4 times more elections per 10,000 workers in rural counties than in urban counties. Yet, there was also a much steeper decline in rural places. With such a high concentration and impact in rural counties, these findings suggest that labor union decline was much more rural in nature than previously supposed.    

Having a Trump supporter address the role unions played in rural America and Trump’s policies while he was President which were aimed against unions, as well as his opposition to them in his business activity may be heard coming from union member who voted for Trump. Again, Biden should not be heard in any of these ads. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has information on each state and the percentage of the state labor force that are union members, I do not see it broken down by counties to determine which rural counties are heavily unionized. But, Ohio, for example, will be a swing state in this year’s election and 12.8 percent of the workforce are union members, enough voters to swing the state for Biden if these workers hear the message of Trump’s hostility to unions. Hopefully, the Secretary of Labor will not deliver the message of Trump’s anti-union sentiment. Pennsylvania has 12.7 percent of its workforce unionized and it will be another swing state.

Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post pointed out that after Biden’s State of the Union speech, Cabinet secretaries were “fanning out aggressively” across the country. Maybe someone will listen to them, but I doubt it. The Biden administration needs to think about who its messengers are and what is being heard.  

I wonder what rural voters must think when they hear a television host ask more than just a foolish question, indicating not just a lack of knowledge about rural America, but a sense that this host and rural America are not even in the same country. Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC asked a question of two authors about their book White Rural Rage, one of the authors responded, “[We laid] out the fourfold interconnected threat that white rural voters pose to the country. They are the most anti-gay, xenophobic in the country. QAnon support and subscribers, COVID denialism, Obama birtherism." I am trying to figure out the dividing line where suddenly I cross into the rural America described by this author. I guess I went from light to dark somewhere on a local road in a county without an interstate highway. I am sure these “four interconnected threats” exist in parts of rural America, as they do in metropolitan areas, but this statement seems too difficult to completely take at face value. Hopefully, this silly and very superficial thinking does not permeate through Democratic Party ranks. 

There are ways to reach rural America. I pointed out in an earlier article (“Look More Closely at Rural America and What is Usually Thought of as the Core of Donald Trump’s Supporters-There is More There than Meets the Eye”) that rural America is not a monolithic entity. As I stress in this article, Democrats—and Biden campaign people in particular—need to learn, and quickly I might add, how to reach an audience they feel uncomfortable reaching. Rural America is part of their America too. Donald Trump may have decided that many Americans do not concern him and, if elected, he will do his best to make them feel unwanted and use the power of the Presidency to express his hostility to them and make sure they feel it. Democrats show you are better than him. 

Notes 

David Catanese, “Seeking to cut into Trump’s margins, Biden launches rural radio ad blitz,” McClatchy DC (September 22, 2020): https:// www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article245908610.html 

“Funding Advances President' Biden’s Investing in America Agenda,” USDA Press (November 9, 2023): https://www.rd.usda.gov/newsroom/news-release/biden-harris-administration-invests-more-12-billion-rural-cooperatives-increase-economic-opportunity

Natalie Korach, “’Morning Joe’ Guests Demonize White Rural Voters as a ‘Threat to Democracy’/Video,” TheWrap (March 8, 2024): https:// www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/morning-joe-guests-demonize-white-rural-voters-as-a-threat-to-democracy-video/ar-BB1iVKKK 

Caroline Le Pennec Vincent Pons, “HOW DO CAMPAIGNS SHAPE VOTE CHOICE? MULTI-COUNTRY EVIDENCE FROM 62 ELECTIONS AND 56 TV DEBATES,” NBER Working Paper Series, Working Paper 26572 (December 2019, revised December 2022): https:// www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26572/w26572.pdf 

Sarah Longwell, “What makes someone vote against their political party?” TED: https:// www.ted.com/talks/sarah_longwell_what_makes_someone_vote_against_their_political_party 

“New Report Shows Rural Voters Rely on Vote By Mail and Early Voting,” Secure Democracy USA (June 23, 2022): https:// www.securedemocracyusa.org/new-report-rural-voters 

“Union affiliation of employes wage and salary workers by state, 2022-2023 annual averages,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Economic News Release: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t05.htm

Cindy Vo, Ellery Osborne, and Zachary Schaller, “The Surprising Disappearance of Labor Unions in Rural America,” REDI@CSU, REDI Report (June 2023): https:// csuredi.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/REDI-Report-Jun23-Rural-Deunionization.pdf