How Democrats Can Win Rural Voters
An Open Letter to Kamala About WPA 2.0
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Hi, Kamala. Thank you for giving us the energy to have some hope once again. We were all feeling pretty low a month or so ago. Also, Allan Lichtman says you’ll win, which isn’t quite as meaningful as if Alan Rickman (RIP) magically appeared to say it, but still nice.
I’m encouraged that you’re not conceding the rural vote completely to the toxic orange sludge. Sending Coach Walz around the county to try and talk some sense into some of these people seems like a smart move. Perhaps it’s one small step toward not seeing a sea of red on election night maps.
Thanks, too, for being a normal person…
And thanks to you, too, Coach Walz, the most normal of normals.
In any other era, that would be enough for you to win this election. But America is sick right now. Mentally ill. In 2020, 74 million of its people still voted for a man who cheats, lies, and steals with every breath he takes, while his maskless throngs cheered him on.
Current poll numbers are not that different than when Hillary ran. And you know what happened there. The polls claim that it is, somehow, still a horserace. I don’t think that’s on you so much as it is on the likes of Fox News and Elon Musk infiltrating the body politic 24/7 with endless streams of lies and hate-fueled rhetoric.
The thick sludge of their propaganda is targeted toward their echo chambers, but a surprising amount of it, including attitudes about immigration, slips into the mainstream like an alien visitor inserting little earworms into people to control their thoughts.
Your rather brilliant strategy of ignoring or mocking the blatant bullying is a good change of tactics:
But in the long term, many of us have encouraged Democrats to listen to the grievances of rural folk, many of which are legitimate. Luckily, in the time-honored tradition that dictates that I, like the rest of my Substack (and Medium) brethren, know everything, I have a solution to some of their problems.
If rural voters continue to vote the way they did in 2016, 2018, and 2020, we are still in for a terrifying night on November 5.
Before we talk about that plan, let’s look at a few numbers.
Take a look at this screenshot showing how counties starting with the letter “A” in Texas voted in November 2016. This snapshot is a fair representation of Texas’s overall rural vote during the last few elections:
Texas is statistically somewhat extreme in this way, but rural Iowans voted similarly, about 65% to 30-something. Similar trends can be found in every white rural county in America in every election since then, including 2020 and 2022.
In other words, when it comes to the rural vote, like it or not, Trump has been an uncompromisingly dominant force. He has also captured much of what we used to call the “blue-collar” vote.
If you look at statewide races from 2018, you’ll see a similar pattern, Trump angst notwithstanding. The Blue Wave we hoped for back then dried up in towns of less than 100,000 and still shows no signs of a formidable crest.
Some people will stand in raging firestorms to vote for Trump. No matter what he does or says. It’s perplexing, it’s maddening, but we can’t change it by wishing it away or hoping they somehow turn off the radio to silence their crazed right-wing radio hosts.
Prosecutor Harris, do we want another election night where we are all staring at a map colored with a sea of red, hoping Wayne County in Michigan is the Democrats’ last hope for the evening?
There’s a one-step solution. It’s not snake oil
There is a tried and true fix to this. And it’s easy. The country is ready for it. You and Joe have already shown some signs of thinking more like FDR than like Bill Clinton, who enacted a set of terrible policies in response to Reaganism. If you do it right, market it right, and sell it to the rural parts of this country that are genuinely hurting, you will gain back a significant number of the voters your party has lost.
But you shouldn’t wait until you win the election to present a plan. After all, there is a very good chance you will not win the election, despite the wonderful enthusiasm behind your campaign. You’re not up against a normal opponent. You’re up against a group of hooligans who are cheating right in front of us. Let’s take slim election margins out of their hands.
Wait. White rural voters? I thought we were all in on diversity!
I know, I know, the trending pulse of our times says that you must nurture the diversity that is America. Well, you do need to do that, too. But you already have. As the man who destroyed an entire nation, Iraq, once said, “Mission Accomplished.”
But here’s a cold hard truth. If you don’t do what I’m suggesting in this article, your party will eventually lose the Black vote, too. Someday. Maybe not today, but someday. Someone will come along and successfully reveal the truth that Democrats have not done as much for Blacks over the last 40 years or so as they should have. We still live in Ronald Reagan’s world, something centrist Democrats made a Faustian bargain with, bringing us to where we are today.
And besides, there is no conflict here. Presenting this very simple plan to the American people helps everyone. Black, white, and every person in between.
A deep affliction has been cast onto American society
Before I reveal the solution, one that has worked before, I need you to meet 30-year-old Tommy McGinnis, who had a nice job at an Ohio steel plant. That is, until the company idled the plant in 2015, along with Tommy and 250 others. After that, he struggled with opioid and meth addiction. The only reason he barely hung onto his marriage was that he supplemented his job at Walmart with an Uber gig so that he could afford drug counseling.
About half of the guys he went to high school with are in some form of incarceration, mostly for meth-related or meth-fueled offenses.
You would have liked Tommy, Kamala. He had some bad luck, but he was a hard worker. He treated his family well, even when he was struggling with his dependency issues. In his defense, his opioid problem began when he strained his back while lifting cases of soda for a beverage distributor before he took his Walmart job.
He’s dead, now, though. He finally succumbed to opioids, like so many of his neighbors.
Next, I’d like to introduce you to Demetrius Stallings, another likable fellow, this time from the south side of Chicago. He has been trying to ply his carpentry skills but hasn’t been able to find a sponsor to help him nail down a union apprenticeship (racism is still an issue within Chicago’s union culture). He was a star high school basketball player with big dreams until he tore up his knee.
He fancies himself a musician, too — his friends seem to enjoy the rap lyrics he bounces around as they hang together getting stoned and drinking. Mostly, though, he’s given up, at the ripe old age of 24, and believes he’s destined to die before he’s 30 in a neighborhood besieged with violence.
Meanwhile, in Terlingua, Texas, we meet Ray Orville. Terlingua is best known around the Big Bend National Park region as a remote drifter town where a popular bar owner was murdered by an unknown assailant after a long night of drinking.
Ray himself is fine. A former Iowa farmer who sold his small farm to a neighboring farm complex run by an agricultural conglomerate, he now runs river tours in Big Bend.
It’s the rest of his family that has him grieving. Two of his three brothers are incarcerated for drug offenses. His sister died of an opiate overdose last July. His remaining brother Pete once owned a small travel accessories boutique at Erieview Tower in downtown Cleveland.
Pete managed to get his hands on $3,000 through the Paycheck Protection Program. But he made less than $300 per day in sales, down from $1500 before the pandemic. The stimulus money disappeared almost as soon as it arrived. Pete’s business folded the next December. Still, he lasted longer than most other small retailers servicing Erieview, most of which were crushed by the pandemic.
He now survives as a manager for a fried chicken restaurant chain’s regional district.
While Ray’s brother watched his business die, the largest tenant in that same building, a multibillion-dollar highly leveraged aerospace firm, took advantage of the Fed’s COVID-19 debt purchasing program by issuing $1.5 billion in bond offerings, which would have been an impossibility without the Fed’s actions. The company celebrated by laying off 3,000 workers.1
That’s not a story about haves and have-nots. It’s a story about haves and not having a chance.
All of these people have a common problem. It’s not drugs. Although that, and this nation’s excessive punitive measures against drug users, is definitely a problem.
The bigger problem, of which drug use is but one symptom, is that millions of Americans don’t know what to do with themselves. There are millions of aimless wanderers doing what they can to survive.
Not all of them turn to drugs. Some of them turn to alcohol and beat up their loved ones. Others stay out of trouble and remain free of mind-altering substances but still suffer from depression and anxiety. Working for Walmart, working for Uber, Amazon delivery, and other service gigs leave people unsatisfied and afraid for their future.
William Julius Wilson’s underclass has reached rural America
You’re probably familiar with William Julius Wilson, right Kamala? He’s the guy who popularized the word, “underclass” to describe the inescapable poverty of blighted inner cities. In 1978. 46 years ago.
“The obstacles those in the inner cities now face are nearly insurmountable.”, he said. The main reason? A lack of jobs — a “systematic blockage of opportunities.”2
Wilson has been criticized by some for downplaying the role of racism when describing inner-city desperation, but the two are tied together, are they not? If there is systemic racism, there is a systemic blockage of opportunities. The criticism was a bit harsh considering he came from the right place in casting blame on inner city issues by pointing out that inner cities are job deserts.
The underclass that Wilson spoke of has spread to rural America. The rural underclass is metastasizing right in front of us. Those 80% to 20% numbers you see on election night are a reflection of a deep level of frustration that is forcing people to turn inward and view anyone outside of their small world as an enemy. Ask Demetrius Stallings what happens to his friends when utter hopelessness sets in.
Or ask the classmates of the most recent Georgia school shooter.
Demetrius will tell you that one of his friends was shot on the CTA’s red line while riding to work one morning. And that a friend’s 9-year-old niece was shot in a hail of gunfire while attending a birthday party in the north Lawndale neighborhood.
There is a deep well of hopelessness that has spread across the interior of the country. County jails are full of meth users.
Meth is an exceptionally sinister and addictive drug that exacerbates the hopelessness of aimless working lives. These days, too, half the illicit drug supply is laced with lethal doses of fentanyl. Alcoholism is up.
We all know about the opioid epidemic, which is partly caused by poor medical administration. Unfortunately, it is also true that opioids for many are a form of comfort food. Speaking of comfort food, Kamala, obesity now afflicts 34.2 percent of the rural population, according to the CDC.
Rural workers want to work with their hands
Rural workers who’ve lost generational jobs don’t want job training that gives them call center skills. They don’t want to deliver food for Uber. They want to work with their hands.
Those coal miners that Trump wants to keep in those toxic mine shafts? They’ll be happy doing other work with their hands. I bet at least half of them would do crazy good things with their own 3D Printers, given a chance and a little training.
If you offer a plan to keep those working hands busy, Kamala, you will put a serious dent in those rural numbers that the stable genius beguiles with his lies and chicanery.
You will also help cure the various afflictions tearing apart the fabric of rural life. That guy in Lexington, Kentucky who always has a different half-built car in his driveway every five months? Offer him an extra financial boost, Kamala. Offer him some hope. Before you know it, he’ll roll out a new car customization business with that $50,000 tax break you’re already offering new businesses.
Rural towns have downtown areas that need to be spruced up, maybe even rebuilt. There are roads and bridges to fix. Homes to repair. And as I’ve alluded to, there is an entire industry based on 3D printing just waiting to be born3.
Urban workers want to work with their hands, too
The beauty of the solution is that it will work in urban areas, too. Our friend Demetrius from the south side of Chicago will benefit. Ask Barack to give you a tour there. You’ll marvel at the beautiful Victorian homes.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone paid Demetrius to fix them up? Someone like you, Kamala. Through WPA 2.0. Why make Demetrius suffer through the bizarre hazing culture of white-dominated unions? Just bypass the damn things and put Demetrius Stallings to work like he wants.
Take a tour of what used to be called Bronzeville in Chicago and let your FDR-fueled imagination run wild at the possibilities:
BRONZEVILLE - The City of Neighborhoods
Background Douglas, the community area that encompasses Bronzeville's northern half, began as the property and home of…www.thecityofneighborhoodsproject.com
There are amazing neighborhoods throughout Chicago’s south side (and other urban areas) that can use a little tender loving care, care that would bring pride back to these places and get people working again, and silence the guns.
Not just Chicago, either. Joliet, Illinois is another example of a city with struggling neighborhoods lined by old, beautiful homes that need restoration, places that the house flippers from HGTV won’t touch because they’re in Black neighborhoods that don’t fit their demographic.
You know all about house flippers. You’ve talked about the stranglehold hedge funds have over housing. I know, for sure, that you are aware of some of the reasons underlying the housing cost crisis (there are many other reasons, but I get the sense you don’t need any help understanding them).
There are neighborhoods and downtowns all across the country that need help. In urban areas and rural areas. Even in suburbs, where enormous malls are left abandoned:
PHOTOS: Inside the abandoned Lincoln Mall in Matteson, 2 years after it closed
I don’t know about you, but when I see the pictures in the above link, I don’t see an apocalypse. I see men and women standing over rows and rows and rows of 3D printers thanks to WPA 2.0.
It’s time for WPA 2.0 — a solution that worked and is now forgotten
The New Deal brought a sense of urgency to a crisis similar to what we are facing today. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a publicly administered infrastructure program that brought us no less than the great feats produced by the Tennesse Valley Authority (championed by a Republican senator) but encompassed almost the entire spectrum of American life:
The WPA built traditional infrastructure of the New Deal such as roads, bridges, schools, libraries, courthouses, hospitals, sidewalks, waterworks, and post-offices, but also constructed museums, swimming pools, parks, community centers, playgrounds, coliseums, markets, fairgrounds, tennis courts, zoos, botanical gardens, auditoriums, waterfronts, city halls, gyms, and university unions. Most of these are still in use today.4
…infrastructure projects of the WPA included 40,000 new and 85,000 improved buildings. These new buildings included 5,900 new schools; 9,300 new auditoriums, gyms, and recreational buildings; 1,000 new libraries; 7,000 new dormitories; and 900 new armories. In addition, infrastructure projects included 2,302 stadiums, grandstands, and bleachers; 52 fairgrounds and rodeo grounds; 1,686 parks covering 75,152 acres; 3,185 playgrounds; 3,026 athletic fields; 805 swimming pools; 1,817 handball courts; 10,070 tennis courts; 2,261 horseshoe pits; 1,101 ice-skating areas; 138 outdoor theatres; 254 golf courses; and 65 ski jumps.
— From Wikipedia article on the WPA5
WPA: The Forgotten Bits
In 1935, the federal government, in order to foster a decent living wage for creative people, invested $27 million to employ artists, musicians, actors, and writers under something called the WPA’s Federal Project Number One.6
It employed 40,000 of them.7
For example, writers for The Federal Writers’ Project, which was part of Federal Project Number One, wrote everything from city, state, and local guides, to children’s books. All paid for by the government. Imagine if artists in Chicago’s Little Village got a hand from the government to do more of this:
Little Village
Little Village on Chicago Sun-Timeschicago.suntimes.com
Some people might call it a handout. I’d call it culture. I’d call it stopping the spread of the metastasizing cancer of hopelessness that is eating this country from the inside out.
From mathematical modeling to A.I. modeling
In 1938, also under the auspices of the WPA, the Mathematical Tables Project was born.8 This was a group of mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists who couldn’t find good jobs during the Depression. The government hired them to create a repository of mathematical formulas that are still maintained and used.
Scientists and mathematicians aren’t looking for work these days, so a modern-day version of this might involve the government directly participating in A.I. research, paying market-rate salaries to attract top researchers in the field (these can be more than $1 million per year9), and providing free access to APIs that run language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 (or 4, or whatever version they’re at now).
It may mean acquiring or at least investing in a company like OpenAI, which was founded on a mandate of “a fiduciary duty to humanity.” It may even mean seizing it.
OpenAI violated its charter by offering paid tiers for access to GPT almost as soon as it was released.10
We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.11
A.I. companies are stealing from authors and illustrators and developing expensive tiers aimed at the wealthiest among us to recoup the billions they are pouring into their climate-changing server houses.
The government can address this failure by establishing its own competitor to OpenAI (and others) and creating a public access tier (and paying the salaries needed to sustain it), then regulate the industry in a way that compensates authors and artists, among others the industry steals from.
From basic black employment to black empowerment
By 1935, there were 250,000 African-American adults working on WPA projects.12
What might happen if 3D printers flooded Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, along with the training necessary to help folks learn how to use them, along with financing to bootstrap businesses (such as your proposed $50,000 tax break)?
A modern-day WPA could employ the likes of our friends from Ohio, Chicago’s south side, and farm country to rebuild America. Many rural American towns that now serve as post-apocalypse science-fiction movie locations could be spruced up and made whole again.
You don’t need to go into specifics about how you are going to change this. Americans don’t like specifics. They’d rather chew on rusty nails than listen to a policy wonk, anyway.
I only beg that once you implement such a program, you don’t turn it over to private industry through federal contracts. If you do, you’ll ruin everything. This needs to be run by the government.
It’s Personal for Me
Finally, Kamala, I need to tell you that if I hadn’t had a handout when I was young I wouldn’t have worked six-figure salary jobs for most of my last 20 years or so (don’t ask me where all the money has gone, but it has!).
When my father died about 35 years ago, he left about $5,000 for me. Not much. But it turned out to be enough. I wanted to take a long trip somewhere because I had never traveled much.
Instead, I bought a Macintosh LC, a copy of Quark XPress, a copy of Adobe Photoshop, and taught myself enough computer-based graphic design within the scope of a few freelance graphic design projects to land a job working for a cranky desktop-publishing-hating lady at McDonald’s Corporate office.
She looked past her prejudices against digital graphics and taught me how to do real graphic design. I eventually became an art and creative director, and after that, I learned how to code and made a decent living writing a lot of software.
None of this would have happened without that $5,000. My background wasn’t one of riches; it was more like a lot of the people I’m describing in this article. My mom died from a drug overdose, my dad from an alcohol-related car accident.
People who say some of us don’t need a kickstart haven’t lived life. Sadly, today, that $5,000 wouldn’t get the job done for most people.
We need a big government intervention in the welfare of the people of this country, and we need it now. We need you, Kamala, as the Democratic candidate, to propose one. Make it simple. Do it now, because time is running out. If you don’t think the stable genius can pull this election out, you weren’t watching what happened to Hillary.
And hey, I get it. You’re a better candidate than Hillary was if only because the vast right-wing conspiracy she identified hasn’t had twenty years to hammer at your reputation.
Still, I’m nervous. I think we all are.
What’s the Plan?
So, Kamala, sit down at your kitchen table in front of the television camera with Coach Walz, have the coach take a sip of beer (that part is important), record a video clearly showing that the beer has been half consumed, and tell Americans the following:
“If you have a skill, any skill, the American government will fund its deployment through WPA 2.0. If your only skill is working hard, we’ll fund that, too. We’ll rebuild every small town and every urban district in America, and we’ll pay for it by taxing the crap out of Donald Trump’s rich friends.”
NOTE: The names of the people in this article are fictitious, but are composites of real lives.
Footnotes
It’s true that the economics for a sustained 3D printing economy are probably not there, but like any nascent industry, full-throttled government support could change that.
Leighninger, Robert D. (May 1996). “Cultural Infrastructure: The Legacy of New Deal Public Space”. Journal of Architectural Education. p 226–236. doi:10.1080/10464883.1996.10734689. JSTOR 1425295
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This is one of the best things I've read in a long time. I really hope Kamala and Tim win and the right people have read it, remember it and put your thoughts into action. It worked before and we need it now as much or maybe more than we needed it then.
Another possibility for WPA 2.0 Train people to run (and repair) heavy equipment. Many kids (especially boys) love playing with and learning about heavy equipment such as backhoes, excavators, bulldozers, cranes and a wide variety of construction equipment. Channeling that interest to good paying jobs would be an excellent way to lift up kids who don't want to go to college. (Two of my 3 sons went this route and are doing well.)
Providing easier (and less expensive) access to training on these machines would be very beneficial to lower income people who may have limited access (for a number of reasons) to on-the-job training, technical schools or union training programs. These jobs will never be outsourced overseas and are very much needed. Many local county and state Public Works departments have older or surplus equipment and facilities which could be used, along with retired employees as teachers.