Beth Macy built her career writing about the plagues inflicted on rural America, most famously the opioid epidemic in “Dopesick,” but also the job losses from trade agreements that devastated communities across Appalachia.
Now running as a Democrat in the kind of House district she says she is uniquely qualified to reach, she recited the 4-H pledge from memory — “I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service” — before about 25 farmers and three goats in a barn in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. A giant fan tried in vain to blow off the 100-degree heat.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some of that pledge coming out of Washington?” Ms. Macy asked as some in the crowd nodded.
Ms. Macy is among a small number of candidates trying to prove that Democrats can win back the House not just by contesting swing districts in the nation’s suburbs and industrial cities but by talking and listening to the rural voters who have bolted the party over the last 25 years. The House Democrats’ campaign arm is investing heavily in candidates like Jamie Ager, a fourth-generation farmer in western North Carolina, and Rebecca Cooke, who grew up on a dairy farm in northwest Wisconsin.
Rural voters have been President Trump’s most enduring supporters, but they have edged away from him as the Iran War has spiked prices of diesel and fertilizer. Tariff wars have made it harder for farmers to sell their products, and rural families depend especially heavily on the Affordable Care Act subsidies that were cut in the president’s signature spending and tax-cut law last summer.
But Democrats are not exactly pushing on an open door. Rural voters complain, too, about a party that has abandoned them for decades.
In Bridgewater, Va., a well-kept town of about 6,800 residents with American flags lining its main street, the town manager, Jay Litten, showed little emotion as Ms. Macy asked what issues mattered to the community. What about immigration raids, she wondered. Mr. Litten demurred, saying he tried to keep divisive national issues out of local discussions.
Mr. Litten, a lifelong Republican, put his hand to his chin trying to think of a single town in the Shenandoah Valley that is even competitive for Democrats. Finally, he suggested that Ms. Macy try setting up Zoom or telephone calls rather than asking to show up at a town hall.
“You’re not going to find many small-town managers willing to make it look like they’re buddying up to Democrats,” he said.
Even some of Ms. Macy’s supporters say it would take a blue tsunami for her to win in Virginia’s Sixth District, about the size of New Jersey and stretching from Roanoke, where she lives, to the Northern Virginia city of Winchester. About 40 percent of the district is in rural Shenandoah, poorer than the rest of the state and the country, with fewer college-educated residents. The incumbent Republican, Ben Cline, won with 64 percent in the last cycle.
But Ms. Macy grew up poor — unlike anyone in the newsrooms where she once worked, she said. She actually wanted to run in this Republican district rather than a much bluer version in a new map that Democrats in the state legislature tried and failed to implement ahead of Election Day.
“I’ve spent my whole career writing about the people left behind,” she said, adding: “People are really angry. They think their vote doesn’t matter and I just want to say, it does if we get out there and vote.”
She tells of a fourth-generation business owner who showed up on her porch with a campaign contribution. He’d never voted for a Democrat before, he said, but he’d been horrified when Mr. Trump wrote after the murder of the film director Rob Reiner that he’d died of “a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
“It was the lack of decency,” Ms. Macy said.
“I don’t think we should be rubbing the faces of the Triple Trumpers in their bad choices,” Ms. Macy said. “We should be welcoming them into the tent and making the tent larger.”
Mr. Ager, running in an overwhelming rural district that surrounds Asheville, N.C., tries to stay away from any label, he said — even “moderate” feels too politically coded. As for Democrats, he said, “there’s some misunderstanding between the heady intellectualism of the party and people struggling to get by.”
“While people are struggling economically and trying to get ahead, the Democrats are arguing about the pronoun question,” he said. “The intention is good, but in the order of operations, what matters?”
Some people assumed Mr. Ager would run for office as a Republican, but the party doesn’t stand for his values, he said, “helping people and making sure the little guy has a shot.” At the same time, he added, “the Democrats have tried to show up and just command how people should be, and get a little judge-y.”
The farmers who came to see Ms. Macy at the barn in Virginia sat around picnic tables set with Mason jars full of sunflowers and small American flags. They talked about their costs rising because of tariffs and the war, but also about climate change, with a late frost and then a drought shriveling the hay harvest.
Susan McConnell Corbett, 76, showed the front page headline from her local paper: “Local Farms Face Worker Shortage as ICE Raids Continue.” Democrats, she said, had the better policies for rural America, but they had failed to make that case.
David Horn, 73, described himself as a former Republican. “I wish there were more people here,” he said, “because what she said just made really good sense.”
He worries that too many people are getting their information from conservative talk radio. “They’re so far right, Democrats can’t do anything right,” he said. “These local people who are working dairies or out in the field are listening to this stuff, they think it’s all gospel.”
Several of the farmers had come because they were invited by Pete Barlow, whose family has been in the valley for 10 generations. Mr. Barlow was running for the House seat himself, but dropped out before the primary and is now working as Ms. Macy’s political director.
“I think she is our best chance in generations to have real representation in the area,” he said.
Mr. Barlow is an Anabaptist Mennonite and has been a Democrat ever since his grandmother sat him in her barber’s chair as a child and said, “No one in the Republican Party did anything for your folk.” Many of his friends from the church voted for Mr. Trump, he said, which he sees as a vote to “kick everybody out of the country” and cut poor people from health insurance rolls.
But Democrats, he said, “have forgotten how to talk to people out here.”
“Even though we can intellectualize and we can talk about policies that would work better, we say that people are voting against their own self-interest,” he said. “But that’s not quite true, because people are self-interested in respect.”
The post Seeking Control of the House, Democrats Try Again in Rural Districts appeared first on New York Times.
