The Democratic Party dropped the ball with courting America’s rural voters, and frankly, it's largely their fault.
How much money did the Harris campaign spend with Michigan’s rural Democratic County parties?
Zero.
How about the Michigan Democratic Party?
Zilch.
About the DNC?
Nothing.
How about outreach?
None.
The Democratic Party also publicly and frequently said they would buy no products from rural businesses and communities.
And they enforced that rule.
Would you vote for someone who won’t do business with you? Who won’t talk to you? Who won’t even give you signs to put in your yard?
Now that we are seeing where the Harris campaign spent the over $1.5 billion dollars she had at her disposal, Michigan’s rural county chairs are livid. My county’s Democratic Party at the time had $600 in its account. How could she have wasted so much money without spending a cent on rural Democratic parties in Michigan and not having any rural engagement?
Alas, the Harris team thought it was better to spend $450,000 per day to have her face on the Sphere in Las Vegas than to give even $5000 to a Rural Michigan county, which would have been a fortune to us. I’m glad she won Nevada. Oh, wait a minute . . .
I had never intended to write this column. But numerous Democratic rural party members asked me to. They feel that they can’t say anything.
The Michigan Democratic Party intentionally and very publicly said they would spend no money in rural counties
When I returned to the family farm a few years ago, I wrote a book with my thoughts and observations. Through my contacts, a former lieutenant of the Michigan Democratic Party gave me a personal introduction to Lavora Barnes, who is the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. He also told me there was zero chance she would talk to me – she doesn’t do rural.
I thought maybe he was a tad bitter and probably overstating things. He was not. If anything he was understating the state of affairs.
I never heard back from her. Which is shocking because never in my career has someone not returned a phone call when someone calls with a personal reference from a colleague or friend. It simply does not happen in the business world.
I also sent the book to Kamala’s staff. They received it because her Chief of Staff copied me on the email she sent to the women they had designated to manage the vote in the Upper Midwest. I took a peek at their backgrounds, and they seemed like a particularly poor team to connect with the Wisconsin dairy farmer. They would do great in Ann Arbor. It hadn’t quite sunk in that they had no intention of going after the rural vote. This was exactly the same mistake Hillary made.
They never responded, either.
If you came across someone in your key swing state, who is from a legacy homesteading family who settled Michigan in the 1870s, who was a General Counsel of the largest bank in Michigan, and of a Fortune 500 company in New York, who was a foster home for the city of Detroit, who adopted two black daughters, who is gay, who is a private pilot, who started a foundation with a federal judge to get Black and Latino college students into law school, who has organic carbon negative farming on his farm, powers his house with solar panels and two windmills, who lives in the one-room schoolhouse that his great great great grandparents helped build, who was the vice chair of an art museum, and who is trying to help the Democratic Party, wouldn’t you have someone talk to that person?
Who were they talking to?
The Michigan Democratic Rural Caucus
But it gets worse. I was invited to attend the Michigan Rural Caucus.
The event lasted for a full 15 minutes before the first fight broke out. I was in the meeting when someone asked why the Democratic Party wouldn’t supply them with yard signs to hand out.
The Democratic lieutenant from Team Urban in Detroit, bluntly told the party chairs and other operatives that the Democratic Party would not spend any money in a county that they could not win. Meaning all of us. Even for signs. Counties needed to pay for signs themselves. Our county had just $600 in their bank account. Oh, and even though you were using your own local funds, you had to have those signs made in Flint or Detroit.
Another person said, “But you won’t even answer our phone calls and emails.” She replied, “We don’t have the staff for that.” There are so many things wrong with that statement. That is when the shouting began.
The Democratic Party explicitly stated they did not want rural feedback
In later sessions, various people were immediately shut down when they tried to offer suggestions or a different perspective on Democratic initiatives. Party leaders clearly stated that they were not seeking input from the rural counties. Party leaders were there to tell the county chairs what the party platform was and how to sell it to voters. I can see why they hated my book.
The preliminary agenda I received had only three items on it: how to message to the Black voter, messaging to union members, and workplace equity. Team Urban’s agenda. We have vanishingly few Black voters (my family being one of the few), we don’t really have unions up north, and where I live workplace equity means getting a millennial to show up for work.
The final agenda was in much better shape, but not a single session was about what rural voters wanted or designed for feedback on Democratic Party initiatives.
After the session on Black voter outreach, a party chair from the Upper Peninsula quipped that she would be totally prepared once they got their first Black voter.
The Democratic Party won’t do business with rural, locally-owned shops
In all of their messaging, including at the Rural Caucus, the Democratic Party proudly stated that they would use only “union-made” goods. In other words, they wouldn’t do business with rural businesses. We don’t have unions. And they enforced it. Some candidates had to have their yard signs printed at an urban Metro Detroit sign shop allegedly owned by a Trump supporter, but that had unionized employees.
This was intentional. While at the Michigan Democratic Convention, I asked if anyone was aware of this. The answer was yes, absolutely, and others have asked for exemptions. They were all turned down. After all, they said, Union trumps Rural.
Having no statewide rural outreach makes an enormous difference
In the two weeks leading up to the election, I received phone calls, texts, emails, and flyers in the mail from the Republican Party and Trump every day. Not asking for money but asking me to vote for them. I asked a lot of people if they had the same experience, and this held true throughout rural Michigan. Even I began to smile every time Trump called me.
They had to data mine this information. I have two phone numbers, and they had both of them. I received personal phone calls from the Trump campaign wondering why I had not returned my absentee ballot. I was called personally several times to say that Trump would soon be on the line and could I please hold. One time, I hung up on Trump when Elissa Slotkin’s campaign manager called. The Trump campaign immediately called me back, thinking that they had lost the connection. Now, that is outreach.
Even the DNC had no Upper Midwest rural outreach group. Jaime Harrison instead assembled the perfect rural Southern messaging team – which is the antithesis of the rural North. Sure enough, that DNC-affiliated team began sending out anti-Midwestern messaging.
Their very first email to rural voters proudly pointed out that everything they used would be union-made – the unsaid part being “and never purchased in rural Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.” Rural messaging experts, indeed.
Jaime Harrison just doesn’t understand that not everyone can fly the plane. More on that later.
Democratic operatives I spoke to chuckled and noted that I was picking up on this stuff pretty quickly.
Of course, none of us received anything from the Democratic Party. Harris never called me – Trump called or texted me every day. Yes, I know that was all fake, but it does make you feel wanted.
If your rural county parties have no funds, the state party is intentionally ignoring you, the Harris campaign doesn’t care this is going on, and the DNC doesn’t understand the difference between a rural Southern slave-based state and a Midwestern homesteading-based state, Democrats explicitly won’t do business with you, how did anyone in the Democratic Party think Kamala could possibly win the Electoral College vote?
From my dashboard, every light was flashing red.
