U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, Tim Ryan (D) pleads with the white working class to trust Democrats

Here's the lede for today's Washington Post story by Michael Scherer, as candidate Tim Ryan campaigns in Ironton, Ohio, population 11, 129, in the Ohio River Valley:  

Congressman Tim Ryan has been traveling the foothills of western Appalachia with a joke about marriage he hopes will make him Ohio’s next U.S. Senator.

The voters he needs to turn his way — the forgotten, the struggling, in communities with hollow factories, Trump flags and fentanyl epidemics — don’t agree with everything he stands for as a Democrat. But then, he asks his small crowds, who does?

“If my wife and I have 10 conversations in one day and we agree on six or seven of them, we crack a bottle of wine and celebrate how great our marriage is,” he said at a recent stop here along the Ohio River, just a few blocks from an empty brownfield where furnaces once burned. “So why would you think you are going to agree with someone 100 percent of the time?”

Ryan’s bet — and the national Democratic dream — is that a few issues still just might matter more than his party label. He lists three whenever he speaks, after talking up his small-town upbringing and all of his union relatives who once worked at steel plants or auto suppliers: rebuilding the country with major public works spending, new government investing in manufacturing industries and beating China.

“They have a 10-year plan, a 50-year plan, a 100-year plan,” he said of the Asian superpower. “We are living in a 24-hour news cycle talking about really dumb stuff, like Big Bird and Dr. Seuss.”

The pitch has made Ryan one of the most consequential Democratic candidates of the 2022 cycle, a test case on whether his party has any hope of reclaiming its erstwhile White working-class voting base, as former president Donald Trump, who sped their flight, waits in the wings. The struggle is, by any measure, uphill.

* * *  

With less than 10 months to go before the general election, Ryan has already visited 72 of the state’s 88 counties in a full-press effort to try to persuade the hinterlands, a handful at a time, that Democrats like him are human beings who breathe the same air.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Post script:  NPR's All Things Considered is doing a story on Tim Ryan on the afternoon of February 1, 2022.

A young Mainer's thoughts on cultivating the rural vote

Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in an essay for the Washington Post a few days ago (published simultaneously on The Nation's website, for which vanden Heuvel is the director) about Chloe Maxmin, a Maine state legislator who grew up in rural, impoverished Lincoln County, in the state's mid-coast region.  Maxmin and her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, have a book coming out in a few months on the topic.  Here's an excerpt from vanden Heuvel's essay, inspired by Maxmin's work and ideas:  

First, to reach someone, you have to reach out. Rural Democrats consistently lament that the national party hasn’t invested enough money or time in rural organizing. By contrast, during her 2020 campaign, Maxmin says she had 90,000 voter contacts, the most of any state Senate campaign in the state. Her closest opponent had just 35,000. As a result, she connected with persuadable Trump voters who had never spoken with a Democratic candidate.

And Maxmin didn’t just talk to voters; she sought to understand them. As she told me during an interview last year, her canvassing strategy was “to stand there for 10 or 15 minutes and have a conversation — and then go back and follow up.” The progressive advocacy group People’s Action calls this approach “deep canvassing,” and found that it helped decrease Trump’s margins where implemented in key battleground states.

But once you’ve started a conversation with voters, how do you connect your policies to their problems?

Many Democrats respond to any reflexive rural repulsion against “progressivism” by disavowing it and running toward the center. (Just ask any average Joe, be they Lieberman, Manchin or Biden.) But Maxmin has a different strategy. She makes progressive ideals concrete, real and relevant to people’s lives — so conversations can move past talking points and cut straight to what these changes could actually mean.

I was struck, too, by this very poignant vignette, which had me thinking about how folks along the political spectrum judge those they deem "white trash." 

Maxmin and Woodward describe an encounter when Maxmin, canvassing alone, walked down a dirt road leading to a nondescript trailer. She knocked on the door, which cracked open to reveal a man who appeared hesitant to hear from her. Nevertheless, she introduced herself and asked him about the issues he cared about most in the coming election. They chatted for a bit, and then he said something she may not have expected to hear: “You’re the first person to listen to me. Everyone judges what my house looks like. They don’t bother to knock. I’m grateful that you came. I’m going to vote for you.”

I was reminded of the article about Maxmin when this came across my Twitter feed today, from a young Minnesotan associated with the Rural Rising Project:  

Like Maxmin, this organizer is endorsing listening as a critical part of the process, something urban and coastal elites--so assured they know everything--are often not very good at.

Cross Posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Poignant reflection on the working class in central Illinois

The last in a series of essays by Tom Morello (guitarist with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, among others). appeared in the New York Times a few days ago.  It's headlined "Class Struggle in My Family's Hometown."  This one is datelined Marseilles, Illinois, population 5,094, where Morello spent summers during his childhood.  The small city is on the Illinois River, and along with the good (e.g,  community events, Little League, bike riding) Morello highlights some negative aspects of its history (e.g., environmental degradation, high incidence of cancer).

Here's an excerpt about the recent "class warfare" there:  

Lately, Marseilles has seen some more hard times. The factories and the mines are long closed. Norman Rockwell streets once vied to see who could have the tidiest lawn. Recently, on our block, three abandoned houses had gone back to nature, roofs collapsed, trees growing through windows, raccoons taking up residence. There may still be a Little League, but when I spoke a few years ago with some teenagers with teardrop tattoos on their faces, they spoke of their limited prospects: Walmart, the Army, selling meth.

The town was once solidly union, voted Democrat and gave birth to America’s most militant leftist grandma, Mary Morello. Now Confederate flags dot some of the lawns. There’s a lot of good, hard-working people doing their best, but there’s a palpable feeling that they’ve been abandoned by Democratic and Republican administrations. It’s fertile ground for a demagogic grifter who attributes their problems to immigrants and Muslims, deflecting blame from a capitalist order that sees them as marks and cannon fodder. Where poverty meets disinformation, intolerance can bloom.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.