Jaime Harrison, chair of the DNC (Photo by John Griswold)
One of the more interesting parts of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week was the tensions that developed in the unacknowledged spaces between the show as an international marketing abstraction and the specific idealisms of various Americans. One example was in the second meeting of the Rural Council on Thursday, August 22.
The session began with a panel on reproductive rights, with Jocelyn Frye, President of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization; Tammi Kromenaker, owner of the Red River Women’s Clinic, now in Minnesota; Emily Boevers, MD, an Iowa OB-GYN; and State Representative Marilyn Lands (D-AL-10).
Women are endangered unnecessarily and unjustly in rural America, panelists said, by everything from “draconian” policies regarding their bodies (chief among them the overturning of Roe by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022) to “healthcare deserts” and lower average income than elsewhere in the country.
These situations are “dire,” Representative Lands said, adding that in twenty years we have gone “so far backwards that it’s just obscene.”
But the tension was there for anyone to see, as when the chair of the DNC Rural Council, Kylie Oversen, told a TV station in her home state of North Dakota that “a lot of rural Democrats get overlooked, as they are in flyover states and red states.” That is, the Republican bloc has grown in rural counties in recent decades, overtaking Democratic voters in 2008 and is now 25 points ahead. (The numbers are several points lower for women voters only.)
And though 62 percent of American women who live in rural counties “support a nationwide right to abortion,” less than a majority (48 percent) of Republican women there do. This has consequences that went unacknowledged by the panel. The current Democratic administration, touted as a great success at the convention, could not protect against the loss of Roe by a MAGA-loaded court doing, presumably, the will of many rural voters.
(Perhaps the greatest tension of the convention, which its marketing nature could never admit, was that despite polls beginning to show an advantage for Harris beyond margins for error, the country was, essentially, still split in two. Speakers including Harris who made sweeping promises to work for all Americans, regardless of party affiliation, could seem glib in those moments.)
Other hints of tension within the rural healthcare discussion included mention of non-reproductive issues, such as mental health support, insurance costs, and the aging and depopulation of the countryside, since each issue makes its own demand on limited resources. Democrats more often suggest a single-payer health plan solution (Bernie Sanders, who came in second during Democratic presidential nominations in both 2016 and 2020, did), but this has the support of only 13 percent of Republicans. The more comprehensive the proposed solution, the further away consensus moves.
The panel, which ran long, was hustled offstage so Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack could speak. But the first thing Vilsack said was that in his official role with the USDA he could speak on personal things at the convention, such as his politics, but he could not speak on agriculture, so his wife, Christie, would do much of the talking. Christie Vilsack explained that while farm income over the last three to four years was “the best ever,” “not all farmers realize [i.e., get] it,” and that this begins to affect public resources and rural populations. She said 545,000 farms had been lost in America since 1980—151 million acres of farmland, equivalent to the landmasses of Florida, Georgia, both the Carolinas, Maryland, and half of Virginia, combined. She said the Trump administration told farmers, “Just get big or get out,” and implied Democrats managed things better, but she did not go out of her way to admit this reduction happened over the course of four Republican and four Democratic administrations.
Secretary Vilsack returned to say that Dems had “finally found the opportunity” to go out in rural areas and express their appreciation. He listed ways those areas and their people are important, from national food security to fuel, water, and “preserv[ing] beautiful landscapes.” Rural citizens in the United States serve disproportionately in the military, he said. (With a volunteer military, this is a sure sign of economic need.)
“A damn important place,” he said. Democrats understood that, he said, and they had put a “historic” amount of money into rural healthcare, for instance. (This created a tension with complaints by earlier speakers of inadequate funding.)
The final speaker at the second meeting that week of the Rural Council was Jaime Harrison, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, and creator of the Dirt Roads Democrats PAC. He praised the Biden administration for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which increased funding to rural areas to “more than $4.58 billion to support 1,300 rural transit systems…increased funding for the Public Transportation on Indian Reservations Program and the Appalachian Development Public Transportation Assistance Programs [and] provides $1 billion on a competitive basis for essential ferry service in rural areas….”
Similarly, he praised Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which among other things provides assistance to farmers, ranchers, and foresters. “As Democrats,” he said, “we have to take credit for these things. Because you can sure as hell bet Republicans are trying to take credit for the things we have done.”
Funding and outreach programs (such as those paid for by Dirt Roads Democrats) can help create a “blue wave” in rural areas, he said.
“Joy cometh in the morning,” he called to the audience, using the line from Corinthians and Psalms that was so popular at the DNC. But it raised a question. If Democratic stewardship had been as good as portrayed at the convention, why did we need an entirely new dawn?
