New Niskanen Report: "Faction is the (Only Viable) Option for the Democratic Party"

Political scientists Robert Saldin (University of Montana) and B. Kal Munis (Utah Valley University) authored the report, which focuses on rural and working-class whites, for Niskanen Center.  The executive summary follows:  

The Democratic Party finds itself in a highly precarious electoral position. Although the party performed historically well in 2022, its central weaknesses – those which threaten its ability to govern both nationally and especially at the state level – were still very much in evidence. Even in “good” election cycles, Democrats struggle to translate their typically impressive aggregate vote totals across the country and within states into seats in government. Core to the party’s struggles are its weaknesses with rural and working-class voters. If left unaddressed, the party will not only become irrelevant throughout many states in the country, but it will also continue to face difficulty – and maybe increasing difficulty – in winning the presidency and congressional majorities.

To effectively address these problems, like-minded activists, donors, and others in the broader Democratic ecosystem must come together to form and institutionalize a proper faction within the party that has a platform and brand that differs from that of the big city and college campus-dominated national party establishment. This new faction needs to be capable of recruiting, financing, and otherwise supporting candidates to run on a platform and brand more appealing to the rural and working-class voters that the party has been hemorrhaging in recent decades. While this new faction will emphasize different issues than the national party, it need not alienate most voters within the current Democratic base. From a policy standpoint, the faction should pursue strategic moderation on social issues paired with progressive economic populism and championing, on a district-by-district basis, local issues that are not amenable to politicization in the national discourse. 

The authors explain "faction":  

The term “faction” is commonly used to refer to all sorts of political groupings and subgroupings with varying levels of coherence and organization. But we employ the term to refer to entities that are, essentially, parties within a party. By faction, we mean an institution within one of the major parties that has an affiliated team of politicians, political professionals, activists, interest groups, donors, and intellectuals. A faction is characterized by its formal organization and its grounding in ideas (as opposed to, say, the charisma of a single politician). There’s more structure to factions than a “wing,” or a “bloc” or a “Gang of X.”

(p. 11) 

Regarding working-class Americans, the authors opine that Democrats face three chief problems: 

1. distrust due to widespread perceptions, particularly in current and former manufacturing and natural resource extraction centers, that Democrats turned their backs on workers by advancing free-trade agreements and aligning with environmental groups;

2. umbrage over perceived disdain directed at them by national Democrats;

3. feelings that Democrats are increasingly foreign to and don’t care about working-class cities and towns.

Democrats should turn to Ohio for two excellent models—U.S. Representative and 2022 Senate nominee Tim Ryan and Senator Sherrod Brown—of how to make headway in addressing these difficulties. To address their working-class woes, Democrats need to focus on making incremental progress, not necessarily on winning these communities outright. Indeed, the Democrats have fallen out of favor among wage workers at such a rapid rate that focusing on cutting their loss margins is a necessary and ambitious first step.

* * * 

Race is a topic that many in the working class, regardless of racial and ethnic background, feel alienated from Democrats on, Ryan navigated it well by adhering to the approach that other class focused candidates such as Brown and Bernie Sanders follow by emphasizing the racially crosscutting nature of class. The effectiveness of this approach has been borne out in empirical social science research. Emphasizing class, as opposed to focusing on inequity and privilege through a racial lens, works because it binds larger numbers of people together.  Research into the “race class narrative,” however, has found that it can be most effective to discuss the two in tandem by pointing out that racism is a weapon that the rich use to divide the working class against itself. Appreciating that the racial composition of the working class varies substantially from one community to the next, Democrats should adopt the race-class narrative approach in areas where there are substantial proportions of nonwhites, while emphasizing class (and generally avoiding the topic of race if possible) in communities that are overwhelmingly white. 

To recap, Democrats running in heavily working-class districts can do the following:

• Recruit authentic candidates, ideally those with working-class roots within the district.

• Elevate policies that activate voters’ class identity, such as by focusing on trade policy and supporting tariffs.

• Adopt a populist disposition, both in terms of policy and style. Stylistically, speak directly and avoid political correctness.                                             

Break with the national party where needed. Don’t be afraid to be critical of the party in terms of its treatment of the working class and make clear that you will be a force for change in that regard.

(pp. 18-19)

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism (where the post focuses more on rural issues).  

Another American Family Voices report tells Democrats how to win in 2024, with a focus on blue-collar workers in the Midwest

Katie Glueck reported for the New York Times a few weeks ago under the headline, "Democratic Report Explores Blue-Collar Struggles: ‘Our Brand Is Pretty Damaged.’"  Some excerpts from the story, about an American Family Voices study of how both Democrats and Republicans are seen in factory towns in the Midwest, follow: 

The data found that Democrats struggled with the perception that a Democratic economic plan “doesn’t exist or doesn’t help regular people’s own working families,” a claim that resonated with some base Democratic and independent voters.

Many voters studied in these “Factory Towns” are “deeply, profoundly cynical” about both political parties, the report found, with swing voters holding the impression that both Democrats and Republicans are “too extreme.”

The sharpest argument against Republicans, the polling found, was that “they are on the side of corporations and C.E.O.s and they work for the wealthy.”

Here is a quote from the report's executive summary: 

1. The presidential horse race numbers are very competitive in these counties, but Republicans are stronger in terms of the economic frame.

2. Voters have negative opinions of both parties: this presents both challenges and opportunities for Democrats. Voters in these counties tend to think Democrats lack an economic plan, but they see the GOP as the party of wealthy corporations and CEOs.

3. Populist economics and the Democratic economic policy agenda play very well in these counties. These voters respond best to an agenda focused on kitchen-table economic issues.

4. Contrary to conventional wisdom, populist economic messaging works much better than cultural war messaging. Our strongest Democratic message on the economy beats the Republican culture war message easily. The Republican economic message is a bigger threat to us.

5. Community building needs to be at the heart of our organizing strategy.

6. I recommend that Democrats and progressives make major investments in local field organizing and door-to-door, special events that build community, online community building, existing local media and progressive media targeted to these counties, and progressive organizations that make sure voters know how to benefit directly from the Biden policy initiatives of the last two years.

Back to the NYTimes coverage, Glueck queries whether laws like the Inflation Reduction Act and  investments in U.S. chip-making efforts.  The piece also helpfully addresses the issue of whether it's feasible to expect folks to know about such laws: 

“Most voters are not following national news or the details of the legislation, and many haven’t yet seen the impact on their lives,” the report said. “Working-class voters outside of the big metro areas are still leading pretty tough lives, so we have to balance the story of our success on policy with the recognition of those hard times.”

This reminds me of a favorite, revealing quote from one of the best stories ever written about the 2016 election cycle.  Alec MacGillis quotes Tracie St. Martin, an Ohio heavy equipment operator and blue-collar worker in his post-election story titled "Revenge of the Forgotten Class."  

[St. Martin] regretted that she did not have a deeper grasp of public affairs. “No one that’s voting knows all the facts,” she said. “It’s a shame. They keep us so fucking busy and poor that we don’t have the time.”

 Here's more from Glueck's story that touches on the importance of small businesses and rhetoric around them: 

The report also urged Democrats to combine traditional economic populist messaging and policies with strong emphasis on support for small businesses, as well as unions.

“Most working-class folks very much think of small-business owners as part of the working class,” the report said. It added, “Democrats and progressive issue advocates should always talk about how much they care about small businesses doing well, and should be specific about the ways they want to help the small-business community.”

A prior post on small business and regulation is here and this recent story about Congressperson Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Washington) notes it is one of her priorities.  Prior posts about American Family Voices research are here and here. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Blue-collar workers in the news, especially following Biden's State of the Union address

The New York Times ran two stories by Jonathan Weissman in quick succession last week.  The first was headlined, "Biden Aims to Win Back White Working-Class Voters Through Their Wallets," ran on February 8.  Interestingly, the print headline was a bit more direct about the class issue, "Biden Aims Pitch at White Voters without Degrees."  The subheads are "A Vow to Lift Wages" and "Speech Outlined a Path to Increase and Improve Blue-Collar Jobs."  Here are some key excerpts: 

With his call for a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America,” President Biden on Tuesday night acknowledged rhetorically what Democrats have been preparing for two years: a fierce campaign to win back white working-class voters through the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.

Mr. Biden’s economically focused State of the Union address may have avoided the cultural appeals to the white working class that former President Donald J. Trump harnessed so effectively, the grievances encapsulated by fears of immigration, racial and gender diversity, and the sloganeering of the intellectual left. But at the speech’s heart was an appeal to Congress to “finish the job” and a simple challenge. “Let’s offer every American the path to a good career whether they go to college or not,” he said.

In truth, much of that path was already laid by the last Congress with the signing of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for low-emission energy to combat climate change.

The second story by Weissman ran two days later under the headline, "As Federal Cash Flows to Unions, Democrats Hope to Reap the Rewards."  The dateline is Bridgeport, West Virginia, population 9,325, part of the Clarksburg, W.V. micropolitan area, and it leads with the story of Mark Raddish, the grandson of a coal miner who has recently gone to work in the green energy sector.  Raddish followed his grandfather's advice not to become a coal miner.  Instead, he got "an eduction and land[ed] a pipe fitters' union job" that then went overseas.   

[Raddish then] took a leap of faith late last year and signed on as West Virginia Employee No. 2 for Sparkz, a California-based electric vehicle battery start-up. The company was enticed here, in the wooded hills outside Bridgeport, W.Va., in part by generous federal tax subsidies and in part by the United Mine Workers of America, which is recruiting out-of-work coal miners for the company’s new plant in a faded industrial park.

It is no accident that this plant, rising in place of a shuttered plate-glass factory, is bringing yet another alternative-energy company to rural West Virginia. Federal money is pouring into the growing industry, with thick strings attached to reward companies that pay union wages, employ union apprentices and buy American steel, iron and components.

President Biden and the Democrats who pushed those provisions are hoping that more union members will bring more political strength for unions after decades of decline. White working-class voters, even union members, have sided with Republicans on social issues, and still tend to see the G.O.P. as their economic ally, as well.

On a working-class Democrat who won in one of the mid-term's biggest surprises

I've written a lot about Marie Glausenkamp Perez over at Legal Ruralism, like here and here.  She's the 34-year-old who beat a Trump-y Republican in Washington's 3d congressional district this fall.  She and her husband own an auto repair shop.  A few days ago, The Nation ran an interview Nick Bowlin conducted with her, and some of the quotes regarding class screamed out for attention here on the working-class whites blog:  

NB: It’s my understanding that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee [the party’s arm for House races] didn’t spend on your behalf, is that right? How did you pull off the win with minimal party support?

MGP: The DCCC never put in any money. Near the very end, I believe the House Majority PAC did come in [The House Democratic caucus’s main Super PAC spent $300,000 on her behalf in the final week]. I listen to my friends at home. I found allies. I found neighbors. I built a coalition. And I really got to stay focused on what matters to my district.

It was very frustrating to never be taken seriously by many in the party establishment. But it’s also not surprising, because people like me who work in the trades are used to being treated like we’re dumb.

NB: Do you think that perception explains why it took so long for them to even consider you as a viable candidate?

MGP: Yes, I do. I don’t think they think that, but when I went to a meeting with the DCCC after I won, I asked, “How many of your candidates don’t have graduate degrees? How many didn’t go to college? How many work in the trades?” And they said, “I don’t know.” Well, maybe you should know. Maybe that should be important to you, because it’s important to many, many Americans.

They really need to reassess what they think makes a qualified candidate. I’m not special. There are a lot of people like me, who really can serve our districts who understand them deeply. We have got to do a better job of recruiting those folks to run if we want to be relevant in rural places.

NB: I’m glad you brought up health care monopolies in rural areas. When we talk about corporate consolidation and power in the US, these conversations can leave out the specific ways these issues impact rural economies. On the campaign trail, you talked a lot about right-to-repair and other monopoly issues. Can you say more about this?

MGP: Right-to-repair is honestly one of the biggest reasons that I ran for Congress. Democrats love to talk about how they support the trades or being pro-labor. I think this is this is a crisis for the middle class, and it’s a crisis for the trades. Supporting the trades means ensuring that there are things to fix. That’s also part of being an environmentalist, ensuring that we have things to fix, that things are made to last and we don’t dispose of them. And it’s about cars and tractors, but also electronic waste. This is about home medical equipment. It’s this creeping, metastasizing problem, and it’s taking away a fundamentally American part of our identity. DIY is in our DNA. And I really believe that we’re being turned into a permanent class of renters who don’t really own their stuff.

Interestingly, there is no mention in this article of the fact that Gluesenkamp Perez has a degree from uber-lefty Reed College in Portland.   

On working-class white voters in the 2022 midterms

The rural and working-class white voter demographics have garnered considerable attention since the November 9 election.  I'll highlight just a few recent essays and tweets in this post, with a focus on the rural.  

First, there is Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect writing under the headline, "The Rural Turnaround," which begins with some data:   

For decades, Democrats have been losing rural America by ever-worsening margins. If they could perform even 5 percent better in rural counties, the political landscape would be transformed. In the 2022 midterm, Democrats did increase their share of the rural vote in several states, and it’s worth exploring where and why.

After going over the "appalling" recent history, Kuttner gets to what I believe is the most interesting part of the piece: 

My doctoral student at Brandeis, Rachel Steele, has just completed a dissertation on Democrats and rural voters, which will be published as a book. With her permission, I’ll quote a couple of her important insights.

The most important is that Democrats have been losing the white working class, but place acts as an intensifier. If white working-class voters feel abandoned by the economy and disdained by liberal political elites, that is doubly true for working-class rural voters. Their communities as well as their livelihoods have been squandered, and they have had little evidence that Democrats cared. “Place itself has become political,” Steele writes. (emphasis mine)

As late as 2008, according to Steele’s tabulations, 139 rural white working-class counties voted Democratic. By 2016, that fell to six. In 2016, rural white working-class counties favored Trump by a margin of over 51 points. Much of the loss came in the Upper Midwest—Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota—where national elections and control of Congress are determined.

Steele’s extensive interviews with rural working-class voters also reveal a bitter paradox for Democrats. As good jobs have disappeared, people in communities that once took pride in their self-sufficiency express a broad sense that the work ethic has deteriorated along with the job loss. Instead of crediting Democrats for safety-net programs that save people from destitution, many rural working-class voters, who see their neighbors and their children on the dole, blame Democrats for eroding the work ethic.

IN 2022, THE BEST OF THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES resolved to reverse this syndrome. Just showing up turns out to be hugely important, as a sign of respect and commitment.

John Fetterman’s successful slogan and strategy was “Every County, Every Vote.” Fetterman improved upon Biden’s 2020 rural support by 2.4 percent. According to tabulations by the Daily Yonder, this swing, combined with higher rural turnout for Fetterman, resulted in a net rural gain over Biden of more than 110,000 votes.

The column also talks details of Michigan, Wisconsin and Kansas.  Kuttner cites to his own September piece about the role of rural organizers, a topic I've also taken up on this blog and in my own writing about the Democrats' lackluster effort to win back the rural vote.  

Among the most creative approaches I’ve seen to recruit activists and voters on the ground, especially in rural areas, is a group called Movement Labs, founded in 2017. Movement Labs provides data, technology, and strategy to help grassroots voter mobilization, especially in red and purple states and rural counties that Democrats tend to write off. One of their marquee projects is called Rural Power Lab.

* * *  

Another key insight is that affinity for the Democratic Party may be depressed in many rural areas, but it is far from extinct, and can be rebuilt.

The Nation also published a piece this week on the rural vote.  It's titled "Democrats Must Do Better in Rural America."  Here's an excerpt from the piece by Anthony Flaccavento, Erica Etelson and Cody Lonning:  

Rural races are different from urban and suburban races; running competitively in them requires a different approach in both style and substance. Two-thirds of rural voters hold Democrats in low esteem and are profoundly antagonized by liberal elites who scorn the “rubes of flyover country.” Though Democrats’ rural deficit runs deep, it’s important to remember that as recently as 2008, Barack Obama garnered 43 percent of rural votes. And this cycle, John Fetterman’s consistent presence in rural places produced a two-and-a-half-point improvement over the 2020 presidential race—enough for him to win statewide in Pennsylvania.

“Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America?” describes more than a dozen strategies used by rural candidates and office holders, four of which we highlight here.

First, candidates must have local credibility. Whether through generational ties to the area or long-standing community involvement and problem solving, Democrats fare better when they have local roots and are fluent in the concerns and values of the people living there.

Second, candidates put local concerns and issues first, rather than trying to mobilize people around their own—or their party’s—policy agenda. ...[I]t means respecting voters enough to put their priorities at the center of the campaign. In so doing, candidates sometimes find meaningful ways to tackle state and national issues by drawing upon local experience, as when a candidate in rural Appalachia stood up for local businesses by fighting the outrageous subsidies used to recruit big box competitors.

Third, candidates and campaigns seek people where they are, rather than strictly following the advice to “go where the votes are.” Canvassing and phone-banking strategies typically focus on people who vote regularly and lean Democrat. By contrast, many of our study’s successful candidates reached out to people usually overlooked by campaigns.

Fourth, successful candidates listen more and talk less.

Another major piece, this one focusing on John Fetterman, appeared in the Washington Post's Plumline.  Here's the heart of Greg Sargent's column:

Fetterman’s victory might be uniquely instructive. He defeated a candidate, Mehmet Oz, who was conventionally stronger than those other Democrats’ opponents. 

* * *  

How this happened is illustrated by the [American Communities Project] data. Fetterman significantly reduced his opponent’s margins of victory — relative to Biden’s 2020 performance against Trump — in three types of counties where Trump has done extraordinarily well.

In the ACP’s taxonomy, those three county types are known as the Middle Suburbs, Working Class Country, and Rural Middle America.

The Middle Suburbs.  These types of suburban counties are Whiter and more working class than your typical inner-ring suburb, which tends to be more diverse, cosmopolitan and professional.

We often think of the suburbs as anti-Trump, but his large margins in Middle Suburbs across the country were key to his 2016 victory.

* * *

In Pennsylvania’s Middle Suburbs, Fetterman limited Oz’s margin of victory to 11 points, significantly down from the 15-point margin Trump racked up in 2020, according to ACP data provided to me.

* * * 

Working Class Country.  These counties are even Whiter than Middle Suburbs and tend to be rural and sparsely populated. They often have low college education rates.

In Pennsylvania’s Working Class Country counties, Fetterman shaved Oz’s margin of victory to 27 points, down from Trump’s 2020 margin of 36 points. Such counties include ones along the state’s northern border or in the southwest corner of the state, abutting West Virginia.

Rural Middle America.  These counties are also rural, but also tend to include a lot of small towns and smaller metro areas. They are somewhat less agriculture-dependent than Working Class Country.

In Pennsylvania’s Rural Middle America counties, Fetterman limited Oz’s gains to 31 points, down from Trump’s 37-point margin in 2020. As Chinni noted, nearly three dozen of these counties are spread throughout Pennsylvania’s vast heartland. 

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, long-time Speaker of the House, has indicated she will no longer seek to be part of the Democratic leadership.  This led to a few Tweets by Matt Barron, a political consultant whose Twitter handle is "Mr. Rural."  You can see these below.  The first is about the likely new house leadership, including Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, and Pete Aguilar of California.  

Matt Barron writes:  "So the new House Democratic Leadership will be from NY (45th most-rural state), MA (47th most-rural state) and CA (49th most-rural state).  Democrats really have become the party of the coasts."

The second Barron tweet is about Pelosi's failures:  "Great news.  This is the woman that disbanded the House Democratic Rural Working Group in 2011 and would not enable the creation of a Rural Desk at the DCCC.  Take Hoyer and Clyburn with ya."

 

Meanwhile, the 134 PAC in West Texas has been tweeting about future strategy for rural organizers, here and here:

The first says, "We aren't asking for resources from the central party as they have never provided any.  Our work is to raise the resources ourselves to do what the party does not or cannot do."

The second says:  "The priority for rural Democrats should be to forget about statewide and national elections and focus solely on building up our local organizations and communities."

Lastly, I'll just note that Adam Frisch (D), who ran against Lauren Boebert (R, incumbent) in mostly rural and exurban CO-03 (western and southern parts of the state), has conceded the race to Boebert.  He did so even though he lost by just about 500 votes and was entitled to a recount.  Indeed, NPR is reporting that the recount will go ahead regardless of Frish's concession--and that Frisch has already re-filed to run against Boebert again in 2024.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

Analysis of Fetterman's win in Pennsylvania: the working class and rural vibes

This is from Trip Gabriel's story in the New York Times on Sunday, which was headlined "Democrats See a Blueprint in Fetterman’s Victory in Pennsylvania."  The subhead was "John Fetterman flipped a key Senate seat in part by attracting white working-class votes, including in the reddest parts of his state."  

“It was enormously beneficial,” Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said of Mr. Fetterman’s red-county incursion. “It’s really what Democrats have to try to do. I know we’ve had a debate in our party—you work to get your urban and suburban base out and hope for the best.” But Mr. Fetterman showed that a Democratic win in a battleground state could also run through rural Republican regions, Mr. Casey said.

Mr. Fetterman’s 4.4-percentage-point victory over Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, outpaced Mr. Biden’s 1.2-point win in Pennsylvania in 2020. Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, who posed for his official portrait in an open-collar gray work shirt, won a larger share of votes than Mr. Biden did in almost every county.

In suburban counties, where the Oz campaign tried to undermine Mr. Fetterman with college-educated voters by painting him as an extremist and soft on crime, Mr. Fetterman largely held onto Democratic gains of recent years, winning about 1 percentage point more of the votes than Mr. Biden did in 2020.

Mr. Fetterman’s biggest gains were in deep-red counties dominated by white working-class voters. He didn’t win these places outright, but he drove up the margins for a Democrat by 3, 4 or 5 points compared with Mr. Biden.

Gabriel quoted Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania:  

Pennsylvania elections are about margins, and he cut into the margins Republicans had across the counties that they usually control.  He got a lot of looks from voters who aren’t very open to looking at Democrats right now.

The story continues: 

In almost no county did Mr. Fetterman improve on Mr. Biden’s margin more than in Armstrong County, in the northern exurbs of Pittsburgh, where more than 97 percent of residents are white and fewer than one in five adults has a four-year college degree.

“I expected him to win, but I didn’t think he’d do that well,” said Robert Beuth, 72, a retired factory worker in the county who voted for Mr. Fetterman, speaking of the statewide result. “I think the biggest drawback for a lot of people about Oz is that he moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to run for election. To me that’s not right.” He added that he hoped Mr. Fetterman and other Democrats in Congress would “come up with some ideas” to help “poor people working two or three jobs just to get by.”

To be sure, Dr. Oz carried deep-red Armstrong County, whose biggest employers include Walmart and a coal mining company, with 71 percent of the vote. But Mr. Fetterman’s 29 percent share was 5.4 points higher than Mr. Biden’s support two years ago.

I've written a lot about Fetterman in the last six months, and my most recent post is here.  My August Politico piece about his rural efforts is here, and my Daily Yonder piece on the same theme is here.  

Postscript:  This is from a NYT piece titled, "How Democrats Can Create a Fetterman 2.0" by Michael Sokolove, who also wrote about Fetterman just after he won the primary.  Here's the bit most salient to Fetterman's rural strategy:

Rural voters in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere in America, have been increasingly beyond the reach of Democrats. So why bother when you can just mine the deep trove of Democratic votes in the cities and close-in suburbs?

But Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor and an unconventional politician in almost every way, did not waver. And the results showed that he had substantially cut into the huge margins that Donald Trump ran up in Pennsylvania’s deep-red communities in defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and again four years later in losing the state, just barely, to Joe Biden.

* * * 

One lesson from Mr. Fetterman is that he showed up, repeatedly, in places that Democrats rarely visited. He began during his run for Senate in 2016, when he lost in the primary. After he was elected lieutenant governor in 2018, a job with few official duties, he traveled the state constantly.

The essay then quotes Jeff Eggleston, chair of the state's Democratic Rural Caucus: 

He has physically spent more time in rural Pennsylvania than any candidate I’ve ever seen,He got to know people. He spent time in our backyards. He made real, meaningful relationships, so people were willing to make a huge sacrifice in order to get him over the finish line.

And here's the bit most salient to his Working Class vibe:

Mr. Fetterman’s style and appearance are the first things that set him apart. Neil Oxman, a Philadelphia consultant who has run more than a dozen statewide races, including those of the two-term governor Ed Rendell, said that “you can’t discount the look” — his signature outfit is a Carhartt hoodie and cargo shorts. Mr. Oxman noted: “It’s an entry. He can talk to blue-collar people in a way that other Democrats have been failing at.”

Finally, Ezra Klein talked a lot about Fetterman on his podcast last week, including how Fetterman literally embodied a working class vibe.  (Same sort of stuff I wrote in my two essays above in Politico and the Daily Yonder).  There was a particularly memorable line about Fetterman not only being at the bar, but being in the bar fight.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On Democrats' quest to win back working-class voters

A few good articles have been published on this topic in recent weeks, and I'll highlight just two here that were published in the New York Times. 

The first is an essay by Alec MacGillis titled "Tim Ryan is Winning the War for the Soul of the Democratic Party." The dateline is Zanesville, Ohio, population.  , and the lede follows:

Tim Ryan is a “crazy, lying fraud.” That’s how J.D. Vance, the best-selling memoirist turned Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, opened his remarks at his September rally alongside Donald Trump in the middle of the congressional district Mr. Ryan has represented for two decades.

Mr. Ryan seems like an unlikely object of such caustic rhetoric. A 49-year-old former college-football quarterback, he is the paragon of affability, a genial Everyman whose introductory campaign video is so innocuous that it might easily be mistaken for an insurance commercial. His great passions, outside of politics, are yoga and mindfulness practice.

 * * * 

For years, he has warned his fellow Democrats that their embrace of free trade and globalization would cost them districts like the one he represents in the Mahoning River Valley — and lobbied them to prioritize domestic manufacturing, which, he argued, could repair some of the damage. 

* * *  

After years of being overlooked, Tim Ryan is pointing his party toward a path to recovery in the Midwest. On the campaign trail, he has embraced a unifying tone that stands out from the crassness and divisiveness that Mr. Trump and his imitators have wrought. A significant number of what he calls the “exhausted majority” of voters have responded gratefully.

And his core message — a demand for more aggressive government intervention to arrest regional decline — is not only resonating with voters but, crucially, breaking through with the Democratic leaders who presided over that decline for years. The Democrats have passed a burst of legislation that will pave the way for two new Intel chip plants in the Columbus exurbs, spur investment in new electric vehicle ventures in Mr. Ryan’s district, and benefit solar-panel factories around Toledo, giving him, at long last, concrete examples to cite of his party rebuilding the manufacturing base in which the region took such pride.

The second piece is Shane Goldmacher's "The Battle for Blue-Collar White Voters Raging in Biden's Birthplace."   The dateline is Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the lede follows: 

The fate of the Democratic Party in northeastern Pennsylvania lies in the hands of people like Steve Papp.

A 30-year veteran carpenter, he describes his job almost poetically as “hanging out with your brothers, building America.” But there has been a harder labor in his life of late: selling his fellow carpenters, iron workers and masons on a Democratic Party that he sees as the protector of a “union way of life” but that they see as being increasingly out of step with their cultural values.

“The guys aren’t hearing the message,” Mr. Papp said.

Perhaps no place in the nation offers a more symbolic and consequential test of whether Democrats can win back some of the white working-class vote than Pennsylvania — and particularly the state’s northeastern corner, the birthplace of President Biden, where years of economic decline have scarred the coal-rich landscape. This region is where a pivotal Senate race could be decided, where two seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs and where a crucial governorship hangs in the balance.

Post-election postscript:  Democrats did ok in Scranton.  Democrat Matt Cartwright, who has long represented the district, was re-elected.   Also, John Fetterman, the very embodiment of a blue-collar dude, narrowly defeated Dr. Mehmet Oz to win the open U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania.  

Where white majority is fading, election deniers thrive

The New York Times reported last week from several places that are not necessarily rural, but which may be exurban, and where politicians who are election deniers are thriving.  The Times reporters Michael Keller and David Fitzpatrick see a correlation between this phenomenon and a fading white majority.  

The first place featured is Fort Bend County, Texas, which is part of the greater Houston metro area.  Another region featured is far southwestern Virginia, the more rural Buchanan and Wise counties, with populations of 20,000 and 36,000 respectively.  

Here's the gist of the story:    

A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.

* * * 

Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.

“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to protect their status.”

* * *  

Lawmakers who objected were also overrepresented among the 70 Republican-held districts with the lowest percentages of college graduates. In one case — the southeast Kentucky district of Hal Rogers, currently the longest-serving House member — about 14 percent of residents had four-year degrees, less than half the average in the districts of Republicans who accepted the election results.

* * *  

Representative H. Morgan Griffith’s [district] in southwest Virginia is among the poorest in the country. Once dominated by coal, manufacturing and tobacco, the area’s economic base eroded with competition from new energy sources and foreign importers. Doctors prescribed opioids to injured laborers and an epidemic of addiction soon followed.

Residents, roughly 90 percent of them white, gripe that the educated elites of the Northern Virginia suburbs think that “the state stops at Roanoke.” They take umbrage at what they consider condescension from outsiders who view their communities as poverty-stricken, and they bemoan “Ph.D pollution” from the big local university, Virginia Tech. After a long history of broken government promises, many said in interviews they had lost faith in the political process and public institutions — in almost everyone but Mr. Trump, who they said championed their cause.

From Marie March, a restaurant owner in Christiansburg, Virginia, had this to say about local support for Trump's dispute of the election results: 

You feel like you’re the underdog and you don’t get a fair shake, so you look for people that are going to shake it up.  We don’t feel like we’ve had a voice.

March attended the January 6 rally and won a seat in the Virginia state legislature last year.   The story continues:  

[March] said she could drive 225 miles east from the Kentucky border and see only Trump signs. No one in the region could imagine that he received fewer votes than President Biden, she insisted.

“You could call it an echo chamber of our beliefs,” she added, “but that’s a pretty big landmass to be an echo chamber.”

 Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

"There are Two Americas Now: One with a B.A. and One Without"

That is the headline for Thomas Edsall's guest column in the New York Times a few days ago.  It is a follow up on the widely discussed work of Mary Ann Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton economists who are well known for their scholarship on deaths of despair.  Some of the focus here is on the upward trajectory and optimism of Black folks and the downward trajectory and pessimism of white folks.  They also note the recently rising mortality rate among Black men, quoting Carol Graham of Brookings: 

Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:

The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks.

Near the end of the piece, Edsall also turns to the rural-urban axis, quoting the work of rural sociologist Shannon Monnat of Syracuse University's Lerner Center:  

Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”

For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over the same 28 years, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25 to 44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”

The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men 45 to 64 saw death rate per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45 to 64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.

I wrote about these issues in my 2018 law review article, The Women Feminism Forgot:  Rural and Working-Class White Women in the Era of Trump.  

The Edsall column continues:

In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:

The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.

In a separate 2017 paper, “More Than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:

Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

More on class migration as depicted in Groundskeeping by Lee Cole

I've already shared excerpts from this debut novel in two other blog posts, here and here.  These are my final excerpts from Lee Cole's Groundskeeping with a focus on depictions of rural and working-class white folks and issues. The first vignette below involves the promotion of the man, Kelly, who has been supervising the Groundskeeping crew on which Owen, the protagonist, works. Owen is a college graduate, but he has never really launched in a career that used his degree.  Now he is favored for a promotion over Rando, who doesn't have a degree.  

We’d been working in the arboretum for about a week when Kelly announced that he’d taken an administrative job with the university and would be leaving Maintenance and Landscape Services by the end of April. There were only ten of us now at the morning meetings, the rest having been laid off. We all knew that Kelly had been gunning for an administrative position. He wanted an office with his name on the door, where he’d never again get chain grease smeared on his khakis.

 

Congratulations, Rando said, with more than a hint of sarcasm.

 

Thank you, Randy. As I hope y’all know, it’s been a great honor serving as your fearless leader. They want to hire a replacement in-house, someone who knows what they’re doing. Undoubtably, some of you will want to apply.

 

We’d all been drowsily eating our Pop Tarts and granola bars, waiting for our coffee to cool, but this caught our attention.

 

Anybody’s welcome, but they strongly prefer someone who has a college degree, he said, putting “strongly prefer” in air quotes. That means you two, I guess. He pointed to James and me. Though I’d never thought about it before, we were the only grad students. Everybody else was either contract, like Rando, or in the middle of their undergraduate degree.

 

A degree in what? Rando said.

 

Anything, said Kelly. Don’t matter.

 

I been here ten years longer than these motherfuckers, Rando said. No offense.

 

None taken, I said.

 

What difference does a degree make?

 

Kelly held up his palms. I’m just the messenger, he said. You don’t have a degree, Rando said.

 

I have military experience.

 

So what? So that matters to some people. Look, like I said, any of y’all can apply, and I encourage you to. But I wanted to be up front and let James and Owen here know they’d have a pretty good shot.

 

I questioned the wisdom of announcing this in front of the other men, who were giving us hateful looks. But maybe that was Kelly’s intention.

 Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (pp. 191-192) (Kindle Edition).  Among other things, we see a shift from valuing military experience to requiring a college degree--a certain degree/credentials inflation that does not serve the working class, who have to go into debt to get that degree.  

In this scene, Owen takes his girlfriend, Alma, to visit his dad and stepmom in tiny Melber, Kentucky, where Owen grew up:   

The road to Melber carried us past trailer courts and subdivisions, reaching, finally, the bottomlands at the Graves County line. I wished she could’ve seen it in the late summer, when the fields were lush with burley tobacco—velvet-green rosettes, their long leaves curled and yellowed at the edges, sprawling out in rows. Now the same fields were bare, or sown with ryegrass, waist-high and the color of straw. The creeks we crossed on ramshackle bridges were only muddy trickles, and the woods were parched and grayish brown, save only the sycamores, whose stark white branches flashed like ghosts in the passing countryside.

 

I narrated the scene, partly as a way of distracting myself from the nausea and anxiety I was feeling, and partly because I wanted, on some level, for her to see it the way I saw it—as a terrain imbued with significance and narrative. Here was Dan Foley’s house, where I used to set off bottle rockets. Here was the abandoned Citgo station, where, as I was climbing through a window at age thirteen, a blade of glass sliced my calf. Here was Josh Briggs’s house, where I used to shoot clay pigeons. Here was the trailer where Molly Miller, the first girl I kissed, used to live. I left out, of course, that Dan Foley’s father had committed suicide when we were fifteen by hanging himself from the metal track of their garage door, or that Dan had gone on to join the marines and was now stationed in Texas, where he’d become an alcoholic.

I left out that I’d climbed through the window of the abandoned Citgo station in order to smoke a blunt dipped in cough syrup with Josh Briggs, and that Josh Briggs had never left Melber, that he’d been fired from a good job with the river barge industry and had since done some time in jail. I didn’t mention that post–high school, Molly Miller had spent about five years journeying further and further into opioid addiction, the apotheosis of which was her death by fentanyl overdose in the bathroom of Paducah’s public library. Maybe because I left out these things, Alma did not seem as interested as I’d hoped. Was she thinking of how the place could’ve produced me? I hoped that it did not remain two-dimensional for her—a painted backdrop, seen through a passenger window. What would one see who’d never seen it? Empty fields. Churches with graffitied plywood windows. Shoddy houses and single-wides where people she’d never met once lived. To anyone from the outside, it looked like a country town, so close to vanishing that it was hardly there at all. But I could see its inexpressible privacies.

 

We reached, finally, the four-way stop and the green sign reading Melber. It was the town’s sole marker, the only thing that let you know you were somewhere instead of on the way to somewhere else. It was here, every Halloween, that the burning hay bale came to rest. Across the street was the post office and the hairdresser’s shop with a barber pole out front and a rusted, antique Pepsi machine that no longer functioned. Next door was the town’s only restaurant—the Kountry Kitchen. A letterboard sign in the lot advertised catfish and hush puppies.

 

Here we are, I said.

 

Alma looked around, her expression vaguely troubled. You weren’t kidding, she said. It’s not much.

 

My dad’s place could be seen from the four-way. I turned right and pointed it out to her. It had been a batten-board house, built in the ’50s, but five years prior, he’d installed this plastic siding that was supposed to make a house look like a log cabin. It looked more like Lincoln Logs to me. 

Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (pp. 225-226) (Kindle edition). 

They go out to dinner at a nearby restaurant, described thusly: 

 The Rebel Smokehouse was such a perfect distillation of the rural South’s grotesquery that it was almost unfair. It was nestled between a Harley-Davidson dealership and an indoor gun range called Range America. A sun-faded Confederate flag had been raised high on a pole in a nearby yard, so that the restaurant was literally in the shadow of it. Even if I took faithful notes, if I wrote it all down exactly as it was, who would believe me?

Cole, Lee. Groundskeeping (p. 229) (Kindle edition)

  

In the scene that follows, Owen is asking his father for a loan.  What is revealed here is the less educated parent's judgment of his son's failure to make a living in what the father sees as a conventional way:    

To be honest, I called because I need your help with some money. I wanted to ask you for a loan.

 

A loan?

 

Yeah, just till I get my next paycheck.

 

Several seconds passed. I don’t know, he said. He cleared his throat softly and let another period of silence go by, as if he were giving me a chance to retract my request. I just don’t know if I can keep enabling you to fail, he said finally. This tree-trimming business, this aimlessness—how can I keep supporting that? It hurt me physically to hear him say this. I assumed he thought I was a failure, but assuming it and hearing it were two different things. I tried to come up with some response, but the muscles in my throat tightened...

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.   

Profspring: Folks with well-educated parents dominate academia

Andrew Van Dam writes for the Washington Post under the headline, "People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows." The subhead is "First-generation academics were always rare. Now they're vanishing."

To understand critical issues facing the U.S. economy — soaring inflation, worker shortages and perhaps a looming recession — researchers must understand human behavior. They need to know how everyday Americans will react when pump prices double or shelves go bare.

That’s why it’s somewhat alarming to learn that academia in general — and economics in particular — has quietly become the province of an insular elite, a group likely to have had little exposure to the travails of America’s vast middle class.

In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts. 

The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years.

* * * 

To an outsider, the long path to a professorship can seem frustratingly opaque, particularly in economics. PhD programs tend to require a hidden curriculum of classes in subjects such as mathematics that are not technically required for economics majors. If you discover economics late in your college career and don’t have expert guidance, it might already be too late to get on the PhD track. Similar hidden hurdles lurk in the job market and academic publishing.

* * *

Stansbury said she also wonders if courses like Econ 101 might put off students from low-income backgrounds. “I also worry that some of the terminology that’s used, like ‘unskilled’ or ‘low ability’ to describe people who are in low-paid jobs or with little formal education, is offensive,” Stansbury said. “And I can see that this would be disproportionately so to people who are coming from backgrounds where these words are describing family members and friends.”

This study is one of the first to describe academia’s struggles with economic diversity, but its racial diversity issues have been well documented.