During this election cycle, Postindustrial columnist Mark Yonkman kept a list of the things his rural neighbors said bothered them, as well as reasons they were going to vote for Trump.
The themes that jump out are the following:
1. Authenticity is crucial for a candidate.
2. Burdensome regulation is the biggest issue farmers, small business owners, and rural voters have by far.
3. The woke agenda is moving far too fast. The poster child for this is allowing males to participate in female sports.
4. Strength is mandatory for someone who is going to be your commander-in-chief.
Kamala failed on all of these. To this list, I would add a fifth:
5. If you are trying to persuade a former Trump voter to vote for you, don’t call them dumb, wrong, and racist.
Kamala also failed on this item at the end of her campaign.
Authenticity is key to the rural voter
Rural voters reward authenticity. Trump has this in spades – whatever he is thinking comes moments later out of his mouth. Kamala’s start was promising, but then she cratered.
• A host on The View asked a softball question on what she would have done differently over the past 3 ½ years, and she answered with, “Not a thing comes to mind.” Not only was that a shocking response, it was also patently false. It was followed by a string of non-answers in various settings in the weeks after. The mood shift in my rural community was palpable. This would have been fatal in a primary.
• She never should have labeled herself as middle-class – it invites litigation. I didn’t meet anyone who thought the daughter of two professors, who never wondered whether or not she would go to college, who summered in India and went to high school in Canada, was middle-class. Farmers can smell this kind of pandering a mile away. No one cares that Trump is a billionaire. And no one cares that Kamala’s parents did a good job of raising her in an elite environment, and she went on to do good things – she has a great background. She ruined it by trying to make it sound like she was the daughter of a hairdresser and a pipefitter.
• Her final position on immigration was fine, but she had no credibility at that point, saying she wouldn’t do anything differently than Biden. Both things can’t be true. I heard over and over that people were frustrated that she couldn’t simply say that she learned from Biden’s immigration mistakes and that she wouldn’t repeat them.
• Kamala just isn’t a very good liar. When she didn’t want to answer a question, she ended up with terrible word salads – and it was easy to tell that in her mind, she had a completely different answer. This gave her zero authenticity.
Burdensome regulation is 80% of what rural voters complain about
Trump understands this. It is what he means when he talks about the “Deep State.” So did Obama – he wrote the playbook on how to win the Electoral College vote.
Obama spoke frequently about how pervasive overregulation had become and that under his administration, he would push for smarter and less regulation, and as a rule of thumb, he would eliminate one regulation for each new regulation he enacted. When he spoke about it, he focused on little “r,” meaning the little regulations that burden ordinary Americans and for which no one is lobbying to eliminate.
It is these little regulations that are the concern of virtually every rural voter I know. And much of Project 2025 is designed to eliminate the little burdensome regulations. Justice Gorsuch wrote during the campaign a book called “Over Ruled.” Again, he talked about little “r .”
Does a magician’s pet rabbit really require a written evacuation plan, with arrows on its cage pointing up to the handle so that you know which way to carry it?
The Biden-Harris team threw out Obama’s playbook and went all in on regulation. In fact, they went full bore on enacting what I would call Project 2021. It was a laundry list of regulatory items that donors wanted, but not voters, and that Biden and Harris were happy to enact. These include the following:
• Banning menthol cigarettes. No one wanted this other than Karen, who runs the American Cancer Society. This irony wasn’t lost on Black voters.
• Banning cars that are guaranteed to start during a hurricane evacuation, wildfires, or during war – AARP wanted breathalyzer cars – and they got it. Beginning in 2026, your car won’t start unless you pass that test. No one wanted this.
• Banning gas stoves – which account for a statistically insignificant amount of greenhouse gasses. Environmentalists wanted this ban because they viewed the gas stove as the gateway gas to having a gas furnace and hot water heaters in homes. It has nothing to do with safety or global warming. No voter wanted this ban.
• Banning rural fire departments. Firefighting unions have been trying for some time to eliminate volunteer firefighters. Under the Biden administration, the unions and OSHA got together and drafted proposed new rules that would effectively eliminate the volunteer firefighter by requiring 240 hours of training per year to be a volunteer. This is like having the coyote and the fox design the hen house.
Obviously, no farmer can spend that much time training. A U.S. Forest Service safety officer I talked to was also of the view that no volunteer fire department would be able to comply with the new rules. That would eliminate all volunteer firefighters. Again, no one wanted this.
This list goes on and on and is simply the opposite bookend of Project 2025, which is mostly about deregulation. Republicans were simply much more transparent about it.
What did Kamala do during the campaign when youth voters complained about “Shrinkflation” – meaning too few Cheetos in a bag of what farmers call luxury processed foods that no one should eat in the first place? More regulation. A nationwide price gouging statute. Farmers, I suspect accurately, reacted negatively, knowing that if a processor can’t charge the customer, those profits will be taken out of the hide of the supplier – i.e. farmers.
Biological Males participating in female sports
This was the poster child for everything woke. Enough has been written about this, and I won’t go into it. But I would point out that Democrats don’t seem to understand that there is no longer a single GLBTQ+ voter group. GLB is not on the same page as TQ+. It is just that the Trans lobby has co-opted the former legacy gay donors and lobbying groups. My gay friends universally say that they feel like they are on a bus ride, and they don’t want to be on that bus.
A Commander-in-Chief needs to exude strength
Many in rural America refer to the president as the commander-in-chief. My father always did. And virtually everyone I talked to in rural America thinks that we are heading for some form of war. Of course, so does the military. Even President Biden said we are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been. Trump understands this which is why he frequently would talk about World War III.
Rural voters talk about whether an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) will ruin solar panels, whether our grid is resilient, why we aren’t mothballing coal-fired power plants just in case, why we can’t get the right to repair farm equipment in case there is a war; and how farmers are going to get DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid, a critical additive needed for running most farm equipment) during a war. If you don’t know what DEF is and how it stands between you and food, you shouldn’t be running for office.
Harris didn’t talk about these issues. She talked about abortion.
President Obama pointed out once that abortion was not an issue for a commander-in-chief. Have you ever heard President Zelenskyy talk about abortion? Yet Harris, the backup Commander-in-Chief chose that as her signature topic. In the upper Midwestern swing states, all of which already have abortion, talking about abortion only serves to rub the abortion loss in the face of the Right to Life crowd.
The military is also 82% male. And as the deputy commander-in-chief, I would think that her Chief of Staff would be “Gen. Hard Ass” and that she would have a significant number of males and former military on her staff.
Yet the one time when I looked at her staff the top nine people were all females. Maybe I’m crazy, but I do think that you need to have some people in your team who look like your voters.
At the end, she blew it with the Liz Cheney/Trump comment. My father, who volunteered for World War II and served in active duty in the Korean War, and being generally anti-war, would often say, “Give a war hawk a gun and have them confront another nine guys who have guns pointing in their face. They won’t be as hawkish then.”
I have heard this line a lot in rural America. And somehow, Trump picked it up. Yet the press and the Harris staff viewed it as violent rhetoric.
She had the opportunity to flip the script. I would’ve said, “Listen, when I’m picking my platoon to go into combat, Liz Cheney would be my first pick. Not some felon who can’t legally own a gun.” Calling this violent rhetoric just made her look weak.
Don’t call your voters (or their team) dumb, wrong, and racist if you want them to vote for you
I advise all of my Democratic friends to never say a negative word about Trump. If you’re trying to persuade a persuadable voter, attacking their team is not the way to do it. Everyone knows exactly how bad Trump is – there is nothing any of us can add to make that more clear. Yet Harris, at the end, did that almost exclusively.
At the same time, the voice she was using was sounding more shrill and scolding. “Can you imagine if Trump is in the White House?” The problem is that rural voters are hearing the unspoken portion which sounds something like “And you are an idiot if you vote for Trump.” Meaning, you were an idiot the first two times as well. This is not a winning strategy. Surrogates can bash Trump – Kamala needed to talk about Kamala.
It seemed to be lost on Democrats that all voters already thought that Kamala was the nicer, more polite, and better person. Every Trump voter I talked to agreed with that. If you have already won that argument, continuing to point out the awfulness of President Trump is a fool’s errand.
Kamala’s Ellipse speech was the final blow. Her campaign manager sold the event as her opportunity to reach persuadable voters. But former Trump voters didn’t want to be reminded that some of their teammates stormed the Capitol. Yet she re-litigated the entire event. It left me cold. She went on to remind them that they lost the abortion fight. She reminded voters how dependent we are on Chinese goods but that she had no plan to address the issue. She then reminded voters that her solution to high food prices was more regulation – the cost of which would be passed on to farmers.
Trump’s superpower is that he ignores the polls and is somehow able to discern what people are actually concerned about. So he talks about China, the risk of making our vehicles with batteries using Chinese-sourced minerals, tariffs to slow our dependence on China, and World War III. I hear these same issues every week in casual conversation.
Conclusion
Note that nothing I wrote about above deals with race or gender. Democrats seem to forget that we have already elected a Black person and a woman. Hillary Clinton did, in fact, win an election by 3 million popular votes.
It is simply because she refused to run for the Electoral College vote and had no one with a rural background on her staff that she lost in that race.
So now it is time for the Democratic Party to move on from the race and gender excuses. There will always be people who are homophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, ageist, anti-Muslim, misogynistic, anti-Catholic, and many other things. But that is simply a level of noise that always exists in any society.
Nor did people talk about jobs or the economy. (Yet if you ask them what bothers them they say the economy. This is a red herring). And no one wants a union job – Democrats don’t get this. Upper Midwestern voters want to have their own business.
Democrats need to focus on the real reasons why they lost this election.
In Part II, I will list some of the dozens of other missteps that were made during her campaign. They are, in many respects, much more interesting than the 5 themes discussed in this Part I.
Stay tuned!
