The Democrats’ Rural Problem Is They’ve Forgotten How to Farm

Jim Hightower's Lowdown

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As any farmer can tell you, if you want to harvest a crop, you’ve got to get out of the office and go to work in the field.

Why can’t the Democratic Party grasp this basic reality when it comes to producing votes? This year was going to be different. Pressed by progressive rural activists, national party leaders agreed to open a network of get-out-the-vote offices in rural areas of battleground states. SPOILER ALERT: Kamala Harris won fewer votes there than Biden harvested four years earlier.

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What happened? Very little. And too late. Opening a campaign office is hardly the same as being there for the long haul, building trust and nurturing local support. Harris was behind from the start, though, since Joe Biden’s Democratic Party operation had not bothered to hire any rural staffers or even prepare an agenda. Apparently, their idea of a good rural program was Hee-Haw.

The Harris campaign did put out a plan, but in September – just two months before the vote! Also, they had too many “rural strategists” and too few ground-level organizers at campaign headquarters. Those organizers did their best, but were mostly disregarded by campaign consultants. For example, a good list of rural surrogates was recruited, but never used. Worse, Harris herself was absent – she was never scheduled to visit a farm, or even pay a culturally-symbolic visit to a state fair.

This is Jim Hightower saying… The Democrats’ real problem is not any one campaign, but more than a decade of policy and political abandonment of rural communities. Do the “smart” political honchos in Washington think that people out here don’t notice the party’s absence and disregard for them? Again, any farmer knows you can’t harvest a crop if you don’t plant one and cultivate it.

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Want to get in on rural grassroots politics that are effective and meaningful? Go check out our friends at RuralOrganizing.org!