Analysis: You’ve read the stories about Trump’s appeal in rural America, but there’s another side that’s often left out: Rural Democrats who feel abandoned by a party they fear has stopped fighting to win the places where they live.
In the pandemic’s darkest days, a man living across the street from a Methodist church in this small town raised a flag in front of his house emblazoned with the words “Fuck Biden.”were so repulsed they brought it up with church leadership. A resident complained about the profanity to the zoning commission but never heard back. It wasn’t just that the slur offended their sense of propriety. Some here felt a sense of betrayal, too.
situated along Interstate 80 on the western edge of central Pennsylvania. Blue-collar “diner stories” about disaffected Democrats and independents who crossed over to support Republicans are so common they’ve become their own media subgenre. And the reasons for that massive defection have become familiar from repetition—the erosion of manufacturing and energy jobs, the withdrawal of private-sector labor unions, an explosion of technology and expanding cultural divisions.
have never felt so detached from their neighbors. “Life here has never been as coarse as it is now,” Frank says. Just as much as the diner-going, flag-raising Trump voters foretold the surprising rise and staying power of Trump’s populist revolt, conversations with beleaguered rural Democrats provide clues about the persistent decline of their party’s influence. The charged climate creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of increasing resentment of their neighbors’ devotion to Trumpism and decreasing willingness to interact with them.
But the reality for Democratic candidates and party activists is they can’t afford to disengage. There are elections this fall for the U.S. Senate and governor, and Pennsylvania Democrats are plainly aware that their successes hinge on turning out rural voters, or at least narrowing their losses with them.
“It’s my generation’s obligation to protect and preserve democracy,” Terry Noble said from inside the American Legion, a log cabin and bar where veteran service organizations and politically active residents often gather. “But in this situation, the enemy is not foreign, you know. It is domestic."In elections past, the county tacked back and forth from blue to red and back again. It voted for Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton .
Few people spend more time thinking about the Democratic Party’s fading appeal with rural voters than Theron G. Noble. A local lawyer, “Terry” knows everyone around DuBois and established the state party’s rural caucus in 2015. We met at the American Legion, a log cabin building off a main drive. In the quiet bar that smelled of heavy cigarette smoke, two retirees in “Veteran” caps nursed bottles of Miller Lite.
Noble grudgingly acknowledges that his conversations with Democrats often revolve around preventing blowouts. Pulling on an Amstel Light, he lists off the names and districts of six Democratic state lawmakers who held area seats just over the past 10 to 15 years. Now, there are two. “We had a lot of good union jobs, coal-mining jobs, down in the southern end of the county,” he says. “They all went away, and the jobs went away. We were demonized over that.
“For the better part of two decades now, the Republican Party has been formulating fear and really fear of others,” he says. “We, on the other hand, keep responding with policies and we get into the weeds on arguments. We do not hit back at the visceral level that they’ve been targeting for a long time. It has just really made people into tribes.”
Bridging the national rift between the two parties appears much further off, however. Maybe impossible. Their stories often mirror one another: a feeling that they’re viewed as social outcasts; an acknowledgement—and in certain instances alarm—that they no longer understand the motivations of people who live around them; hyperpartisanship infecting everyday routines, spreading from home to home, and deepening the mistrust in town.
“There’s a definite correlation between Covid and Trump, the political and the disease. And I’m not sure if there’s any difference between the two,” says Mary Ann Maloney, another retired educator and lifelong Democrat from the region. Democrats’ bafflement can veer into condescension and elitism, which Trump effectively harnessed to muster his supporters against the establishment that he said looked down on them.
“They weren’t even insulted,” Linda Parker, 66, and a Democrat from Treasure Lake in Clearfield County, says of the Erie audience. “The only thing I can come up with is he’s a voice for them. When you feel less than, you try to build your ego up by making other people less than. They know he’s racist. They know he’s sexist. They know that he’s xenophobic. And that all builds their ego up; makes them feel better about themselves.
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