Luckily, we have just the playbook. For the past year, the non-profit Rural Urban Bridge Initiative has interviewed 50 Democratic candidates who ran in rural races in 2016, 2018, and 2020. Most of these candidates significantly outperformed the partisan lean of their district, and we wanted to know what they did right.
What we learned from Democratic “over performers” in previous electoral cycles is that they did a lot of the things that helped propel 2022 midterms candidates like John (“every county, every vote”) Fetterman (D-PA) and Marie (“not your typical candidate”) Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) to victory.
For starters, they and their campaign staff have deep roots in and knowledge of their communities’ values, history, and problems. Local fluency engenders trust even across lines of ideological difference and enables candidates to find islands of common ground in a sea of disagreement. An elderly Iowan family farm couple might not be keen to cancel student debt, but they may want to break up Big Ag monopolies, make sure their local hospital stays open, and regain the right to repair their John Deere tractor. They may appreciate if their state created a public bank like the beloved Bank of North Dakota that would extend them a non-usurious line of credit.
When it comes to personality, Democratic over performers in rural areas are typically humble, plainspoken problem-solvers, not dogmatic or grandstanding ideologues. They come across like ordinary people who care about the well-being of the places they seek to represent. They do not see their constituents as “deplorables,” nor do they seek to “school them” on where their self-interest lies.
Most are progressive populists who stand up for working people of all races and call out the concentration of wealth and power. They strive to bring back blue collar jobs, support family farms and small businesses, and address issues of local concern such as decrepit roads and opioid pill mills.
Successful rural candidates are also adept at depolarizing rather than inflaming culture war issues. They listen first, then speak, and use language that resonates with rural values like freedom, family, patriotism, pride of place, and the value of hard work. They also make room for disagreement and do not imply that those who disagree are bigots. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they stake out centrist positions—though some do, especially with respect to guns—but it does mean that they “speak Republican,” as one of our overperforming candidates put it.
Lastly, they seek out Independents, swing voters, soft Republicans, and sometimes even lifelong Republicans. Whereas many urban Democrats can win by simply mobilizing base voters, rural Democrats can, must and do flip Republicans. Whether it’s through knocking on doors, showing up at events in small towns or sending out non-inflammatory informational mailers that calmly compare and contrast their positions with those of their opponents, successful rural candidates travel down every dirt road they can find. Jeff Eggleston, chair of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Rural Caucus, said that Fetterman “spent time in our backyards,” campaigning in rural parts of the state more than any candidate he’d ever seen.
You can read our complete takeaways compiled into a report entitled “Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America?” for a more comprehensive list of what worked. The virtues of successful campaigns may seem obvious and yet, they run counter to the cookie cutter campaigns many establishment Democrats run. Think PAC-funded, blow-dried candidates reciting ten-point plans compared to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in her car mechanic’s uniform saying, “I like to get my hands dirty fixing things, not working the system.”
In the recent midterms, several Democrats whose campaigns employed many of the best practices identified in our report won more rural votes than Biden did. This was evident among candidates like Fetterman, Gluesenkamp Perez, and Diamond Staton-Williams (D-NC House of Representatives), all of whom won office, and also among candidates like Tim Ryan (D-OH) and Charles Booker (D-KY), who lost but meaningfully improved Democratic margins with rural voters, laying the groundwork for the next Democrat to do even better.
As disappointing as Ryan’s loss was, Ryan did better than Biden in all but one of Ohio’s 33 Appalachian counties. Booker likewise did better than Biden in Kentucky, including in all but six of the state’s 54 Appalachian counties. Ryan doubled down on bringing manufacturing jobs back to Ohio, running ads like this one that contrasted his pro-worker commitment to his opponent, venture capitalist J.D. Vance’s preoccupation with fighting the culture war.
Ryan’s and Booker’s pro-worker campaign themes are consistent with one of our key findings: Working and middle class voters prioritize pocketbook issues by a landslide, and candidates do well to honor the meaning that people assign to putting in an honest day’s work.
According to the Rural Democracy Initiative, 70 percent of rural voters are working-class; it is no coincidence that Democrats’ rural losing streak tracks their loss of Latino and white working class voters.
A handful of Democratic renegades showed themselves willing to break out of the national Democratic mold and reach rural working people where they live. Some of them won. More of them can.
Erica Etelson is a co-founder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
