I quit my job in Washington State as the Executive Director of a nonprofit to go work for the Democratic Party on the campaign trail. I did this largely because I was concerned about Trumpism and its long-term implications. I ended up in Minnesota, working on two State Senate races within Minnesota’s 7th and 8th Congressional Districts. For the last two weeks of the election, we also worked on two Congressional races as part of a coordinated GOTV effort.
The two State Senate candidates I worked for lost. The two Congressional candidates won. I was intrigued when one of the successful Congressional candidates, Congressman Collin Peterson (D-Detroit Lakes) was quoted in Politico this morning.
Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who eked out 53 percent of the vote in his unexpectedly close race this November, blamed his party’s stances on the deficit, gay rights, abortion and the Second Amendment for turning off voters in his rural district.
“The party’s not going to change on those issues, so the people out there are not going to vote for Democrats,” Peterson said in an interview. “You might get some marginal difference, but we’ve become an urban party.”
Congressman Peterson is not wrong. I was a delegate to the Congressional District and State Conventions in Washington. I was representing the “Texas” side of Washington. At these conventions, if you hoped to be elected a national delegate or presidential elector, you had to be the most unique and most different person there. There was little room or respect for regular white males. A friend who is very active within the labor movement told me that some of his fellow union members lamented that they didn’t feel welcome within the Democratic Party.
Diversity should mean diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds. The assumption that all white males are privileged, which was heard frequently at the Washington State Democratic Convention this June, inherently belittles and dismisses the problems of every day Americans.
I drove from Minnesota (until I hit debris and my car broke down) to Thanksgiving with my family on the East Coast. I stopped in a town in Ohio for lunch. It was a small rural town called Wauseon, Ohio. As I entered the restaurant I read about the story of a student from Wauseon who had managed to get himself into Notre Dame, and had done well for three years. But he was three semesters behind on his tuition, so his family which owned the restaurant had placed a flyer begging for donations on his GoFundMe site so he could finish school.
It is those small humiliations that rural Americans are tired of. It is the fact that they don’t believe that there are any government programs that benefit them because they have no lobbyists and don’t have the money to make campaign donations. The system is weighted towards the rich folk in the Twin Cities or New York or Los Angeles. It doesn’t care about the people left behind in Bemidji, MN, Thief River Falls, MN or Wauseon, Ohio.
When rural Americans hear Democratic leaders saying that rural Americans are privileged; the struggling citizens of Wauseon want to scream from the top of their lungs. They can barely put food on the table; the mortgage is five months behind; and the kids have no job prospects because there is no way we can afford college.
When rural Americans hear Democratic leaders saying they want to enact stricter gun control, they want to scream don’t take my gun, I need it to hunt. Deer hunting is one of the last cultural traditions left in rural America. Further, in these times, many rural Americans use the meat from the deer meat, Venison, as a food source for the winter.
By being so inclusive, we excluded some of the people who would benefit most from a Democratic Presidency: working class and middle class Americans who live in small towns throughout the Mid-West.
The election of Donald Trump, and he won because of the votes of rural Americans in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, was rural America yelling out, “We have problems here that we expect to be addressed.” Donald Trump will, of course, fail to deliver on his promises and the problems facing rural America will remain in 2020.
The question is whether we as Democrats can recognize that Congressman Peterson makes a very good point. The question is whether we as Democrats can work to rebuild trust with rural Americans and look for the common challenges facing working and middle class Americans in urban and rural America. If we do, Donald Trump will be but a footnote in history. If we don’t, the Democratic Party will be a permanent minority.