I woke up this morning feeling pretty good. The redbud is in bloom, the mountains are starting to sprout just the lightest shade of green, and, near as I can tell, the local bear didn’t try to break into my house the way he did last summer.
However, according to a new book on The New York Times Best Seller list, I’m supposed to be seething with so much rage toward those who don’t worship like me, don’t look like me and don’t love like me that I’m ready to throw off democracy altogether.
I refer to the book that is lighting up the political chattering classes — at least the political chattering classes in the cities. That book is called “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” by political scientist Thomas Schaller and journalist Paul Waldman, and it makes the case that rural white Americans are “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” They’re “the most conspiracist group,” “anti-democratic,” “white nationalist and white Christian nationalists” and, finally, “most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.”
Political scientist Nicholas Jacobs of Colby College in Maine, who has written his own book on rural voters, had this to say in Politico:
This premise has triggered a backlash towards rural voters from some on the left. Amanda Marcotte, writing for Salon, said she’s tired of handling rural voters ‘with kid gloves,’ and time has come to pop the ‘racist, homophobic, sexist bubble’ they all live in. Daily Beast columnist Michael Cohen agreed, writing that ‘these aren’t hurtful, elitist stereotypes by Acela Corridor denizens and bubble-dwelling liberals … they’re facts.’ David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief at Mother Jones, piled on, agreeing that ‘white rural voters [are] the slice of the public that endangers the constitutional future of the republic.’
That’s quite a lot to be accused of.
Jacobs then proceeds to dismantle the book’s premise. “The ‘White Rural Rage’ narrative gets the research wrong,” he writes. “I know, because some of it is mine.” If you’re curious about that research, you can read his piece. For now, let’s just go with this: “You wouldn’t know it from the title or press tour,” Jacobs writes. “but Schaller and Waldman must frequently hedge their bets in the text, acknowledging that just a minority of rural residents often believe the most headline-grabbing factoid.”
I’ll let the academics fight all that out. But as someone who has lived almost my whole life in rural areas, I do have a few things to say, mostly about the “rage” part of their thesis. Granted, as a straight white male whose ancestors in this country go back to the 1600s, I’m not in the best position to speak for the experiences of those who aren’t like me. But if the authors are right, I’m supposed to be feeling that rage all around me from my rural, white neighbors; and as I move around Southwest and Southside, I sure don’t see it. Are voters here conservative? Absolutely. Have they voted in ways that liberal big-city commentators don’t like? Of course. But are they really filled with racist, sexist, homophobic rage? I am skeptical. I have followed politics in Virginia for parts of five decades now, mostly from a rural perspective, so I have some observations of my own to add to this discussion.
The conservatism of rural areas is nothing new.
The essence of the the Schaller-Waldman bill of complaint against rural America holds outsized power in American politics, through the small-state bias of the Electoral College and the two-seats-for-every-state Senate that accords lightly populated Wyoming (not even 600,000 people) the same weight as mega-state California (39 million people). This is true and, yes, that’s a problem if you have a minority consistently blocking the will of the majority. However, the authors’ complaint is not merely a structural analysis of the American system of government and whether a system designed in the more homogenous 1700s works in the more complicated 21st century. Their complaint is that these voters with outsized power vote overwhelmingly — almost automatically — for Republicans.
I cannot speak for Wyoming, but I can talk with some authority about rural Virginia.
Rural communities have always been conservative. That’s not new. What is new is how our political parties have become geographically polarized and much more ideologically pure. At one time, not that long ago, it wasn’t unusual to find moderate or even conservative Democrats, or moderate Republicans. Now all those are as elusive as mountain lions, occasionally rumored but not verified. If you talk to former Democratic voters who now vote Republican, they invariably tell you the same thing: I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.
There’s much truth to that. There’s also some truth in the reverse: I know people who consider themselves former Republicans because that party has moved further to the right than they are comfortable with. Now, parties have a right to be whatever they want to be, but Democrats, who profess adherence to principles of “tolerance” and “diversity,” show little interest in either when it comes to more moderate Democrats. Look at how party activists have reacted to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. He’s an imperfect vessel, of course, so don’t ask me to defend everything he’s ever done. But here’s the political reality: The only Democrat who is ever going to get elected in West Virginia is someone like Manchin, who supports gun rights and, yes, fossil fuels. If there’s not room for him in the national party, and the only Democrats people see speaking for the party are more liberal voices from big cities who are talking about things they don’t agree with, then of course rural voters are going to vote Republican. If Democrats want to reclaim any ground in rural America, they need to “make space” — to use the popular liberal phrase — for Democrats who are quite different from those in metro areas.
My point: I’m not sure rural areas have changed at all. What’s changed is that our parties have realigned so much along ideological lines that one of them can no longer be competitive in conservative communities.
Do rural voters really vote “against their own interests”?
That’s a common complaint from many liberal commentators — that rural voters vote against their economic interests in favor of Republicans who offer only what the authors here call “culture war trinkets.”
Republicans would dispute that Democrats offer a better economic program for rural voters, but let’s not worry about that right now — let’s take the Democratic argument at face value. Why would rural voters put a higher value on cultural issues than economic ones? I can think of several reasons. All those Democratic promises depend on government working, and rural voters simply don’t have any reason to trust that the government will work. Maybe they should, but they don’t.
If you live in an urban area, you see lots of examples every day of government working — the water from your kitchen faucet comes from a municipal water system, a government-subsidized subway system or bus system takes you to work, the local government picks up the trash and, depending on where you live, the local government might even help provide entertainment in the form of major league sports teams. If you live in an urban area, as long as your tap water runs and your bus or train is running and your trash gets picked up, it’s easy to have at least some faith in government. You might even have a lot of faith that government can work well.
If you live in a rural area, you see none of this — you only see the tax bills. My water comes from a well out under the flower bed; no municipal transit system takes me to work; my trash pick-up is done by a private hauler. I don’t seem to encounter any government in my daily life beyond the post office, a state highway system and the occasional deputy running radar. And lately, even the post office has been unreliable. In rural areas, we see government very little and don’t expect much from it, and are naturally skeptical that it’s going to work very well.
To be sure, rural areas benefit from an awful lot of government we don’t see, often more than their urban counterparts. In Virginia, rural schools are subsidized by the state, although I suspect few of my neighbors understand this. Our broadband is subsidized. Much of our health care is subsidized. Pretty much everything is subsidized. No one really sees this, though, not the way urban residents see their government in action. As a result, it’s easy to believe the myth that we rural residents are rugged, independent, self-reliant people when we’re actually some of the most subsidized people in the land. It’s also easy to distrust a distant government — so if a Democrat is promising to improve someone’s economic status by implementing Program XYZ and a Republican talks up cultural issues, it’s easy for me to understand why that voter wouldn’t believe the Democrat, especially when they agree with the Republican on those cultural issues.
On some economic issues, Democrats have been out of tune with rural voters.
Nowhere has the Democratic vote collapsed more dramatically than in Southwest Virginia’s coal country. As late as 2004, Buchanan County was still voting for John Kerry for president. By 2020, it was casting 83.5% of its votes for Donald Trump.
Why might former Democratic voters in Buchanan County have decided to vote Republican? Could it possibly be the Democratic Party’s growing hostility to Buchanan’s oldest industry, coal? There are very good environmental reasons why we ought to be worried about carbon emissions, but Democrats have moved to retire coal with precious little consideration of what happens in coal country. There are vague promises about a “just transition,” but the hard reality is that coal jobs — some of the highest-paying jobs in those counties — are being eliminated while the renewable energy jobs that have replaced them have been created somewhere else.
Trump promised to “bring back King Coal,” which was a foolish promise because a president doesn’t have that power. At this point, the marketplace is retiring coal faster than the government is. But it’s easy for me to understand why some former Democratic voter in Buchanan County might vote for the guy who at least expresses interest in his plight — even if he does nothing about it — over candidates who don’t seem quite as interested, or who promises some government program that nobody believes will work anyway for the reasons I outlined above.
Election results dispute the charge that rural whites are racist and sexist.
Some are, sure. There are disgusting people everywhere, unfortunately. But let’s look at some math. In the privacy of the voting booth, some of the whitest counties in Virginia have voted for Black candidates more enthusiastically than some of the most diverse ones.
Buchanan County, Dickenson County, Lee County, Norton, Russell County and Wise County have voted for Black candidates for statewide office four times (Douglas Wilder 1985, Wilder 1989, E.W. Jackson 2013 and Winsome Earle-Sears 2021), the same number of times as Fairfax County (Wilder 1985, Wilder 1989, Justin Fairfax 2017, Hala Ayala 2021).
While Fairfax County obviously has far more voters than those Southwest counties, those Southwest counties have cast a higher share of their votes for Black candidates than Fairfax County ever has. Fairfax County went 52.9% for Wilder in 1985, 55.9% for Wilder in 1989 and 67.2% for Fairfax in 2017, 69.3% for Ayala in 2021.
By contrast, Wilder topped out in Southwest at 62.7% in Norton in 1985, and then upped that to 65.5% in Norton in 1985. Jackson took 73.7% in Lee County in 2013, while Earle-Sears’ high point in the state in 2021 was 87.5% in Lee County. Her low point in those Southwest localities, if you can call it that, was Norton at 72.3%.
When given the opportunity, white rural voters in Virginia have proved themselves to be pretty open-minded on matters of race and ethnicity. In the 2021 attorney general’s race, rural Virginia voted overwhelmingly for a Latino — Republican Jason Miyares, of Cuban heritage — over a white Democratic incumbent. In Lee County, where the Hispanic population is just 2.2%, he took 87.2% of the vote.
We’ve had fewer women run for statewide office, but those who have run have generally run strong in rural areas. In 1985 and 1989, Democrat Mary Sue Terry won almost every locality in the state in both her runs for attorney general. She lost only 10 localities the first time, eight the second time around. In her first campaign, she polled higher in Appomattox County than she did in Arlington County, and better in Franklin County than she did in Fairfax County. She then lost almost everywhere in her 1993 run for governor, but her previous landslide victories over male opponents suggest that gubernatorial outcome had more to do with bad luck and bad timing than sexism.
Republican Jill Vogel lost her 2017 bid for lieutenant governor but ran strongest in rural Virginia, topping out at 81.5% in Bland County and Tazewell County. The 2021 lieutenant governor’s race was a contest between two women; but once again, the Republican candidate — Winsome Earle-Sears — ran strongest in rural Virginia, taking 86.8% of the vote in Scott County.
True, rural Virginia has fewer female legislators than any other part of the state, and it’s certainly worth asking why that is. However, where Republicans have fielded women, they have won — and won handily. Ellen Campbell of Rockbridge County took 60% in her House of Delegates district last fall over a male challenger. Tammy Mulchi of Mecklenburg County triumphed over multiple male challengers for the nomination and then took 62% in her special election for state Senate in January.
While we have fewer examples of religious minorities, Republican Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, consistently won the rural counties in his 7th District by wide margins, until he lost the nomination for other reasons. This next data point might not be as persuasive, because it involves only Democratic voters. But in the 2021 Democratic lieutenant governor’s primary, Del. Sam Rasoul of Roanoke — who is Muslim — ran strongest in rural Virginia and won the western half of the state. His problem was that he didn’t do as well among metro voters — he took just 7.7% in Virginia Beach but 69.5% in Floyd County, 65.3% in Buena Vista, 62% in Alleghany County (and percentages of around 80% or more in his home base in the Roanoke Valley). Here’s a thought experiment: The Republican candidate won the general election by just 50,000 votes. If Democrats had nominated Rasoul, might he have managed to squeeze enough votes out of western Virginia based on regional pride to have won?
We have even fewer examples of LGBT candidates running; however, I’ll just point out that the mayor of Pulaski is gay — and that Pulaski is a place that generally votes about 70% or more Republican.
The evidence suggests this: Give rural Virginia a candidate they agree with and rural voters will back them, regardless of race or gender or religion or, in the case of Pulaski, sexual orientation. That seems no different to me than how urban residents vote.
If there’s rage in the land, it’s rage about economic dislocation.
In 1905, the mayor of Newport News marveled that “the great Southwest was the big bad wolf of whom the other sections of the state, from a political and economic stand-point, stood in awe.” A century ago, Southside’s manufacturing cities were some of the most affluent in the state. Now both regions are often considered “double distressed.” Both regions have suffered great economic traumas. It seems reasonable to me that both of them might be a little justified in feeling some rage toward … somebody. If Democrats wind up bearing the brunt of that, well, in the case of coal country, that might be justified. Only now is the Biden administration trying to persuade clean energy companies to locate in Appalachia. Biden is also a terrible communicator who gets no credit for this; but even if he were, everybody understands that this is a few decades late.
I don’t mean to sound like a Republican apologist here, because I’m surely not. Case in point: I’ve consistently made the point that, demographically speaking, we need more immigration, not less. My point here is simply that these liberal big-city commentators (and, frankly, my emphasis here is more on big-city than liberal), seem to regard rural America through an anthropological lens — as some strange, primitive society in need of being civilized instead of understanding the “lived experience” (to use another favorite liberal phrase) of many rural people. I live in a county that is 94% white and votes 76% Republican. The most political rage I’ve seen lately has been over whether to allow a Wawa convenience store. In my supervisor district last fall, the most conservative candidate lost — an independent defeated by a much more reasonable Republican by a wide margin. The “white rural rage” thesis doesn’t ring true to me. Maybe it’s somewhere, but not here.
I also haven’t met anybody who thinks Trump is anything but an execrable human being who appeals to the worst instincts of us all. But I know lots who intend to vote for him because he seems to show more interest in their concerns — even if it’s all a charade — than Democrats do. This is simply a modern application of the age-old “lesser of two evils.”
Democrats, nationally, generally aren’t speaking to rural concerns, and have no credible spokespeople when they do. Back in 2017, congressional Democrats made an attempt — by sending legislators from New York City (Chuck Schumer) and San Francisco (Nancy Pelosi) out to Berryville in Clarke County to talk up how their platform would benefit the whole country. Really? Any rural voters in Virginia who paid attention knew exactly what that was — literally, the minimum drive out of D.C. to find some convenient rural backdrop for a photo op. Why should any rural resident identify with them, any more than some urban dweller is going to identify with me living out here in the woods? Democrats do have some rural figures — Jon Tester represents Montana, Angus King represents Maine. Why aren’t Democrats putting them forward? Ironically, the national Democrat who seems to show the most interest in rural America is an Indian-American congressman from Silicon Valley: Rep. Ro Khanna, who has spent time in eastern Kentucky (and a few years ago spoke in Blacksburg, making his case that the nation’s tech wealth needs to be better distributed geographically).
Until Democrats figure out how to speak to rural Americans, they will continue to get their 15.9% of the vote (or less) in Buchanan County where they once polled majorities. But is that rage? Or just a rational assessment of who is most likely to agree with them?
A gubernatorial veto of the budget still looms as a possibility
Each week I write a free political newsletter that goes out Fridays at 3 p.m. You can sign up for that or any of our other five free newsletters.
In this week’s West of the Capital newsletter, I look at:
- What the next round of campaign finance reports will tell us about the congressional primaries
- What’s likely to happen in next week’s veto session and soon thereafter (teaser above)
- How the presidential race in North Carolina might seep into Virginia
- The proposal to rename Washington Dulles International Airport after former President Donald Trump