How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values

[brooklynite]

Washington Monthly:

This spring, Democrats desperate for signs of a possible political comeback took heart when a young political novice, Jon Ossoff, came within two points of winning a special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District. Ossoff raised a record-breaking $8.3 million in three months and will face Republican Karen Handel in a runoff election on June 20. The seat, once famously occupied by Newt Gingrich, had recently been vacated by Tom Price, Donald Trump’s new secretary of health and human services. Though Price won reelection easily last fall, with 62 percent of the vote, Hillary Clinton ran surprisingly strongly, losing to Trump by only 1.5 percentage points—a vastly better showing than Barack Obama, who in 2012 was trounced by twenty-three points.

In the Washington Post, Paul Kane explained that the Democratic Party was targeting the seat as part of an “emerging strategy of focusing on dozens of GOP seats in diverse, well-educated suburbs across the country in advance of next year’s elections.” The race for Price’s old seat, added the Post’s Greg Sargent, “is being widely examined as a bellwether for 2018, because it’s a lot like many other GOP-held districts that Democrats will target—ones in which Trump won by a very slim margin or lost, and ones that are heavily populated with college-educated white and suburban voters.” NBC News reported that Georgia’s Sixth was one of ninety-seven districts the Democrats had identified in which Trump prevailed with 55 percent or less of the vote.

This strategy is rational if your primary focus is to pick up seats in the House of Representatives in 2018. Districts where Trump did the worst are the obvious low-hanging fruit. Those tend to be places like Georgia’s Sixth: metro areas with growing numbers of the “rising electorate” of college-educated professionals, single women, Millennials, immigrants, and other minorities who formed the core of the Obama coalition.

The strategy is highly questionable, however, if the goal is to win more broadly—say, the presidency in 2020. After all, the Democrats approached the disastrous 2016 election precisely on the theory that presidential contests are less about persuasion than about turning out your base, and that the most efficient way to turn out your base is to focus on where most of your supporters live. By crafting messages targeted to suburban professionals (and with a heavy assist from Donald Trump’s alienating campaign), the strategy worked well—in those areas. But the overall result was catastrophic. Trump won by much higher percentages than previous GOP presidential candidates in exurban and rural districts—enough (with a little help from the Russians and James Comey) to put him in the White House.