The Culture War Has Democrats Facing Electoral Demise in Rural America

The average rural voter is more likely than the average voter to say racial discrimination toward white people has gotten worse since Obama’s 2008 election. Rural voters are also less likely than the average American to agree that racial discrimination against Black people is one of the biggest problems facing America today, or that white people start out with an advantage — key pieces of conversations in the United States about privilege that the GOP has used to fan the culture wars about things like “critical race theory” in schools.

María Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, which works to expand Hispanic voter registration, said these views have hardened — from the tea-party wave to the rise of Trump — due to a lack of leadership from Democrats to level with the American people about the changing country. 

“There has to be a way to explain the Democratic Party and the richness,” she said. “In the vacuum of not having enough leadership, people are piping in, disproportionately, Fox News every single day, they’re going on Facebook, and their feelings of being concerned about a changing country are being reinforced.” 

Shor said despite the fact that he and many in his party might find these views on race, ethnicity and identity to be abhorrent, Democrats shouldn’t write off working-class white people, in the same way they haven’t shunned the Black, Hispanic or educated suburbanites who have been shown respectively to be more likely to diverge from party orthodoxy on issues like LGBTQ+ rights, policing and raising taxes on the rich.   

“I don’t think it is coherent for us to say these peoples’ views are too repugnant for us to try to win their votes,” he said. “Politics is a game of trying to entice people to join your coalition — the way that you do that is by speaking in language they can understand, and by offering them something meaningful.”

What Democrats can change

From her current perch in Kansas, Mosley said one of the biggest challenges facing her party is awareness that they exist in rural communities, citing the “wall” between Democrats and rural voters. 

Rural voters are less likely than the average voter — 65 percent to 72 percent — to say they live around a Democrat, compared with urban and suburban voters, who are slightly more likely than average to say so. What’s more, rural independents and Republicans are less likely than their counterparts in the nationwide electorate to identify Democrats as their neighbors. 

“A lot of times the wall is just not wanting to be different in the community, where it’s very small and everyone knows everyone, and there’s a lot of things that get said about Democrats that aren't true,” she said. “If you don’t interact with someone you know who’s a Democrat, we just seem like the bogeyman.”

Indeed, rural voters are more likely than the average voter to view the Democratic Party as too liberal (55 percent to 47 percent) and as out of touch with their community’s needs (62 percent to 53 percent). Less than a quarter of rural voters agree with the statement that the Democratic Party “cares more about my community,” compared with 2 in 5 who say the same of the Republican Party.

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