Mark Yonkman is the founder of the newly created Super PAC Reclaim the Rural Vote and a rural vote messaging expert. Mark’s background straddles not only the rural and urban worlds but the black/white, gay/straight, and farm/professional worlds as well. Read more of his Rural Whisperer columns here.
Authenticity is key to the rural voter
The baseline characteristic rural voters want in a candidate is authenticity.
Trump has this in spades. He says exactly what he is thinking. He is a billionaire and not ashamed of it. Certainly, he says whatever he is thinking at the time. When Kamala got the nomination, she started out strong, and it felt like if you let Kamala be Kamala, she would be articulate, strong, and persuasive. She simply ignored Trump, which took away his power.
Now, she is faltering.
It began with her interview on The View when she answered a softball question on what she would have done differently over the past 3 ½ years with “Not a thing comes to mind.”
Not only was that a shocking response, but 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 weekend I helped out with my Township’s Trunk or Treat. Like much of rural Michigan, our Township has become mostly Republican as the Democratic Party took a hard left turn. And indeed there were a couple of folks dressed in full MAGA regalia. So I casually asked about 20 people a very simple question:
“Who do you think is going to win?”
Interestingly, not a single person disparaged either candidate. Everyone thought it was neck and neck and most thought it was a choice between the lesser of two evils. No one likes Trump as a person. Yet almost all were voting for him. At least they know exactly who he is.
I even met a Trump voter who is going to vote for Harris. As I let her talk, she was happy to point out all of Harris’ deficiencies. The main criticism being that she is not authentic – Harris simply doesn’t say what she’s thinking – and it is painfully obvious when it is happening. She expected Kamala to simply say that she had learned from Biden’s immigration mistakes, that she wouldn’t repeat them, and that the border would be secure on her watch.
This voter would have been able to make her decision to go with Harris much earlier. And she thought that a lot more people would be voting for Harris. I heard this complaint over and over.
She and several others also didn’t like that Harris was portraying herself as middle-class. Being middle-class has many dimensions and is not determined by income. A woman who is the daughter of two professors living in Berkeley, who summered in India, went to high school in Canada, and who never worried about going to college is not middle-class. No more than Oppenheimer’s or Einstein’s children are middle-class or that the Dalai Lama is middle-class. You simply would not use those terms for any of those families.
Instead, Kamala is exactly how many of us want our daughters to turn out. Successful, bright, articulate, and worldly. Lean into that just as Trump leans into being a billionaire. Voters are just fine with success – it is inauthenticity that bothers folks.
Kamala should be talking about herself and her vision
I advise all of my Democratic friends to never say a negative word about Trump. If you’re trying to convince a persuadable voter to vote for Kamala, 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 is now leaning in and doing exactly that.
At the same time, the voice she is using is 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.” This is not a winning strategy. Let surrogates bash Trump – Kamala needs to talk about Kamala.
She would be much better off talking about her plans to address the economic and military threat that the United States faces from China, and how she plans to attack the overregulation that farmers and other small business owners in the Upper Midwest are facing. Those are the two issues that people talk about the most when they are in an unprompted, ordinary day-to-day conversation.
If you ask the same person what they are concerned about, you get a completely different answer which might be Social Security, inflation, or food prices. But I don’t think that’s really what is driving them. I think it is more important to listen to what they say when you’re not asking them. Kamala is talking about issues that the polls tease out but not the issues that people are actually talking about.
Trump’s superpower is that he ignores the polls, and he 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.
One argument that seems to be effective
I have been asked several times who will be receiving my vote. I immediately respond that Trump is simply too old and is showing signs of decline. I point out that his father died of Alzheimer’s and I can see the beginnings of that in Trump’s recent behavior. So, I am voting for the younger of the two candidates.
No one challenges this test.
Instead, you end up in a conversation about whether or not the decline is that bad. That’s exactly where you want to be. It means that my test is good, but perhaps my observations could be off. I’m happy to have a discussion on that point.
