There’s no shortage of Democratic strategists offering candidates and party officials a roadmap out of the political wilderness the party is stuck in at the moment, and their advice varies wildly. While some strategists are urging Democrats to back off their vocal support for gun control or even “moderate” their messaging in order to curry favor with rural voters, a pair of academics from Cornell and Johns Hopkins argue that there’s no reason to do so.
Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown insist that “Democrats don’t need to change their values to attract more rural voters.” Instead, they “need to understand their struggles and engage them in the process of making their communities better off.”
Some assume that the rural-urban divide emanates from social issues or the so-called culture wars—issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, and gun control—yet even on these issues, the difference in views is underwhelming. Take gun control, for example. We examined several questions—including requiring background checks, banning assault rifles, and other such measures—and found that rural white people, on average, are just eight percentage points less in favor of regulating gun use than their urban peers.
Now, as my colleague Tom Knighton discussed yesterday, there’s good reason to discount those polls suggesting broad and bipartisan support for the gun control measures Mettler and Brown surveyed. Issues like universal background checks, for example, can get 80% approval in surveys, but when people actually have the opportunity to vote on them it’s much closer to a 50-50 proposition… and rural voters tend to be overwhelmingly opposed.
Take the 2016 background check referendum in Maine, for example. Pre-election polls showed majority support for the measure, but on Election Day voters rejected the referendum with 52% of the vote. Cities like Portland and Bangor voted overwhelmingly in favor of the idea, but in rural precincts the measure was voted down by 60, 70, and even 80% of residents.
An 8% difference in Mettler and Brown’s survey could easily translate to a 20 or 30-point gap in reality, and I think the pair are just flat out wrong to suggest that Democrats can build a sizable coalition of rural voters without backing off their gun-banning ways.
Mettler and Brown get closer to acknowledging reality when they talk about the organizational dynamics for political parties in rural America.
Yet in recent times, the GOP has formed enduring and powerful allegiances with groups that stepped up to interpret developments for citizens, construct shared social and political identities, and mobilize voters. Evangelical churches and local rod and gun clubs, hunting clubs, or shooting ranges affiliated with the National Rifle Association, for example, helped mobilize voters into the Republican Party.
Conversely, the Democratic Party in earlier times benefited from a supportive relationship with organized labor, but to the extent that previously existed in some rural places, it has now largely subsided. State and national organizations of the Democratic Party have failed to provide needed support for rural county organizations, and in many places abandoned them. As a result, the party has been hobbled as a countervailing force to conservative organizations.
If there really is no significant difference between rural attitudes towards gun control and those found in deep-blue urban areas, then you’d think Mettler and Brown would be advocating for Democrats to use gun clubs and ranges to recruit voters. Instead, they argue that “Democrats need to recommit to building the party’s organizational infrastructure around the country, and in rural areas especially.”
I think they’re getting the problem backwards. The reason why Democrats aren’t investing as much in party infrastructure in rural areas is because their brand is toxic, and the reason for that is that the positions Democrats take on issues like gun control stand in stark contrast to the views and opinions of most rural voters. Democrats can spend as much as they want bolstering local committees in places like Wise County, Virginia or Garfield County, Montana, but it’s not a lack of infrastructure or Democrat messaging that keeps those residents from voting blue come Election Day.
One caveat, though, is that if Republicans start to ignore those rural voters then Democrats really could make some in-roads. I’ve been critical of Winsome Earle-Sears’s gubernatorial campaign in Virginia this year for largely ignoring Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s support for semi-auto bans, prohibitions on “large capacity” magazines, and a host of other gun control measures, and if Spanberger overperforms in rural Virginia today that will be a big reason why. Mettler and Brown have the wrong diagnosis for Democrats, but they’re at least paying attention to rural voters. If Republicans start to take those voters for granted, then they shouldn’t be surprised if the left starts to make even small gains in rural America.
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