A boring and obvious way to get more rural votes

A boring and obvious way to get more rural votes

By Matthew Yglesias

Describe generic progressive economics as closing urban/rural disparities

Black and Latin Americans are significantly poorer, on average, than white Anglo Americans.

This is true pretty much any way you look at it. Median incomes are lower, poverty rates are higher. If you look at lists of the very richest people in the country, you see very few Black or Hispanic billionaires, and the few you do see are nowhere near the top of the ranking.

Because of this, essentially any policy that broadly redistributes material resources from the top to the bottom will tend to reduce racial inequality. Suppose you levy a wealth tax on fortunes of over $1 billion and use the money to cut flat checks to every citizen. Well, that reduces racial inequality because the class of billionaires is significantly whiter than the general population. But what if you enact a totally different kind of policy and levy a broad tax on consumption in order to finance a poverty-reducing child allowance? That also reduces racial inequality because the poverty and deep poverty populations are significantly less white than the general population. I can’t promise that it’s literally impossible to construct an exotic redistributive policy that doesn’t reduce racial inequality, but you’d need to try pretty hard.

Here’s a bunch of stuff that reduces racial inequality:

But guess what’s also true? There’s a higher low-income population share in rural areas than in metro areas,

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and America’s billionaires have a marked tendency to cluster in a handful of big metro areas.

As a result, for roughly the same reason that all kinds of banal progressive economic policies would reduce white/Black racial disparities, they would also reduce urban/rural disparities. And while there’s a great deal that could be said about why Democrats’ share of the rural vote has declined in recent years, I think a very boring thing that could help at least a little with that problem would be for progressives to make this point explicitly. Not in a mean-spirited, bitter way where you complain about people voting against their interests, but in a forward-thinking way. Like, “man, the urban/rural economic disparity in America is a huge national scandal, but look at all these policy ideas I support to narrow it. We should make that an important priority in our decisions — it’s time to stop leaving rural communities behind.”

Is it true that the urban/rural economic disparity in America is a huge national scandal? Your mileage may vary on that. But America’s high poverty rate sure is. So is lack of health insurance. So is sky-high inequality. If you can talk yourself into supporting all these policies that would reduce urban/rural economic disparities, surely you can talk yourself into saying that you want to reduce the disparities.

More pandering could be constructive here

We have argued in the past here at Slow Boring that the progressive tic of framing race-neutral economic policy as racial equity initiatives is a mistake.

So why would framing race-neutral economic policy as pro-rural initiatives be a good idea?

Two big reasons.

One is that while African Americans are a relatively small minority of the national population whose electoral clout is even lower because of American electoral geography, rural Americans are the reverse. Counties located outside of metropolitan areas contain 15% of the country’s population, which is obviously a minority but a larger minority. It’s also an undercount of the true rural population. The OMB considers Bandera County, Texas to be part of the San Antonio metro area based on commuting patterns, but if you visit the county, most of it has the character of small towns and rural areas. It just happens to be on the fringes of a sprawling agglomeration with commuter interconnections.

But beyond the numbers, rural Americans are massively overrepresented in the operation of American political institutions.

This is not a good feature of our political system, and the very fact that rural Americans are overrepresented in our institutions is bound to make some people resentful about the idea that we should pander to their tender sensibilities. But that’s exactly why you have to do it! Rural Americans don’t want to hear “oh, your disproportionate electoral clout is so unfair, you should just suck it up and accept that our policies are beneficial even though we don’t even care about you.” They want to hear “look at all these amazing policies we have designed to level the playing field between your communities and the big, rich metro areas full of snobs who are screwing you over.” And it’s the same policy either way!

The other reason, though, is that racism is very real.

If you want to show Black people that you care about racial discrimination, you don’t need to pretend that Medicaid is a reparations program. You can talk about enforcing civil rights laws or acting on issues like D.C. statehood that would address Black structural underrepresentation in the political system.

By contrast, precisely because there isn’t strong evidence of “anti-rural discrimination” or structural disempowerment of rural people in the political system, there isn’t a ton to work with on this topic except inflecting your general policy pitch with some vibes. So why not give it a try? As long as you have a policy agenda that reduces the gap between rich and poor, and as long as reducing the gap between rich and poor mechanically tends to reduce the urban/rural disparity, why not talk about this and say it’s important?

Do things that work on the margin and have low costs

This is a more constructive framework for thinking about the country than the debate actually playing out in the punditocracy.

There we have Thomas Edsall writing “The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs” and rounding up a bunch of political science research on the origins of rural discontent with a nice role for Katherine Cramer and her book “The Politics of Resentment.” Then Paul Krugman penned a response titled “Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?” arguing that these resentments are fundamentally irrational, so the whole thing is just doomed. But then Ken Klippenstein from the internet steps up to argue that “the idea that rural communities aren’t getting screwed is laughable,” while antitrust monomaniac Matt Stoller says that airline deregulation has made life in rural America worse.

I think Stoller’s idea is kind of absurd on its face, and the fact that Klippenstein doesn’t actually name a specific way in which rural communities are getting screwed is telling.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. All the participants in this debate agree that inequality has risen a lot in the United States of America since the 1970s, and all of them support policies that would help reverse that trend. And it turns out that a generalized increase in inequality leads to a growing gap between rural and urban areas, and that policies to reverse the generalized inegalitarian trend would tend to close the urban/rural gap.

I also think that even if you agree with Krugman that it’s hard to tell a specific story about anti-rural bias motivating any of these big changes, we should all have the empathetic capacity to see how it might look that way to someone living in rural areas. After all, where is the national capital? A big city. Where is the national news media? Secondarily, the same big city and primarily, a different big city. Where are the financial markets that do so much to determine our fate? Mostly the same big city as the media, with important secondary roles for Chicago and foreign capitals like London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo. Where does entertainment come from? More big cities. Growth and big tech? San Francisco and Seattle.

If all these decisions are made in the big cities, and the people in those metro areas don’t seem to share your values on key issues, and the economic policy decisions seem to have generated a gap in the spatial distribution of material resources… well, you’re going to be suspicious, right? And responding with a complicated lecture about how the progressive-minded people who live in the big cities and mostly control big city politics are actually a different group of people from the CEOs and billionaires who also live in the big cities and it’s actually all very nuanced is not productive.

Just say you have a policy agenda to lower urban/rural disparities. After all, you do in fact have a policy agenda that does that.

Inequality of concern

Here’s the place where I do give rural resentments some credence.

Most voters have limited information about public policy, and even really well-informed people have limited ability to assess people’s policy ideas on the merits. It’s much easier to tell which kinds of people politicians and political actors say they care about. And I think progressives have been very clearly articulating in recent years that they care a lot about people likely to be victimized by rising average global temperatures; a lot about victims of racism, homophobia, and transphobia; a lot about the plight of people burdened by heavy student loan debt; and a lot about the problems faced by ambitious professional women dealing with barriers to upward mobility.

It is nonetheless factually true that most of the economic policy agenda items that Joe Biden has signed into law narrow metro/non-metro disparities.

And the same is broadly true of the Build Back Better items left on the cutting room floor. Indeed, while the chattering classes tended to talk about the BBB child care agenda primarily in terms of work-life balance issues plaguing upscale professional couples, the proposal was actually structured to be strongly progressive in its distributional impact, which would have meant disproportionate benefit to rural communities.

I not only think that framing policies that would close urban/rural gaps as policies to close urban/rural gaps might help get some votes at the margin, but I also think reluctance to adopt this framing does indicate an inequality of concern in the progressive imagination. But this is a fixable problem. People have trained themselves over time to do certain kinds of reflexive privilege-checking and to discuss certain kinds of disparities in particular ways. Everyone complains about “identity politics” when it involves elevating groups they don’t belong to, but everyone also practices identity politics all the time to appeal to voters they want to appeal to. There’s nothing wrong with bothering to try, you just have to decide it’s important.

Identity politics for people who can read maps

I never want to exaggerate the power of pure rhetoric.

As I wrote in “Obama won downscale white people’s votes by pandering to their views,” I think it’s easy to underrate the extent to which Obama’s electoral success in places like Iowa, Ohio, and rural Maine related to a level of ruthlessness in catering to the actual cultural values of non-religious, low-income, non-college white people. Joe Biden has shown it’s possible to win an electoral college majority without winning back many of those voters, but you can’t get a Senate majority that way, and candidates in rural areas are just going to have to adopt positions on issues that their constituents agree with.

But margins also matter, and just doing slightly better in all kinds of rural counties would be a huge lift for national Democratic tickets. Framing around the urban/rural divide is also clearly important for statewide races in all kinds of states that aren’t necessarily hyper-rural overall.

And that’s where I do think small-time rhetorical shifts really do matter. What kinds of disparities do you talk about? What kinds of representation matter when you’re talking about building diverse teams? Do we have any Supreme Court justices who grew up in rural areas? Should Kamala Harris go on a rural poverty tour? The media landscape is pretty unpredictable and it’s hard to know exactly what would ever break through. But I do think it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between when you’re trying to appeal to a given bloc of people and when you aren’t, and I think progressives have gotten pretty half-assed in terms of thinking of the problems of economically struggling rural people as an identity group they care about. So rather than sitting around and debating why exactly people are mad or how justified they are, I think the best thing to do is just control what you can control — the things you say and do — and make some pretty simple adjustments. Do a top-to-bottom inventory of all the stuff you’re already pushing, analyze which items on the list will narrow urban/rural disparities (I think it’s the vast majority of them), and frontload that analysis while encouraging your allies to do the same.

Keep putting it out there until people hear the message — we’re taxing the rich and expanding Medicaid while increasing support for parents and young kids in order to help close the divide in economic resources and opportunities between big metro areas and America’s rural communities. Is that so hard?

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Recalling, as ever, that the vast majority of the metropolitan population lives in suburbs and that most American central cities are pretty suburban in character.