The Rec List seems a bit jittery over the weekend, with interest in rural voters, coming from multiple thoughtful voices. It’s perfectly understandable. Census records tell us that 97% of the country’s geography is rural. Rural America’s loyalty to the GOP transcends generation after generation of voters, and Democrats can’t ignore that history, can we? Well, maybe this time we can, and should. Maybe this time, something is different. Maybe this time, rural voters, mostly, just won’t matter.
To be sure, Trump remains almost as popular as Jesus in rural America, based upon the evidence of my own eyes, as recently as this Summer, when I had occasions to drive the width of rural Kansas, the breadth of Southeast Missouri and Arkansas, and the Great State of Texas, from the Piney Woods to the Hill Country. But, while 97% of America’s land is rural, almost nobody lives “out there”.
Once upon a time, the Farm Vote dominated American politics almost everywhere almost all the time. According to reporting in the New York Times in the 1980s —
. . . the number of Americans in ''farm occupations'' go back to 1820, when they were reported at less than 2.1 million, or about 72 percent of the American work force of 2.9 million.
By 1850, farm people made up 4.9 million, or about 64 percent, of the nation's 7.7 million workers.
The farm population in 1920, when the official Census data began, was nearly 32 million, or 30.2 percent of the population of 105.7 million, the report said.
According to Agriculture Department estimates going back to 1910, however, the farm population peaked in 1916 at 32.5 million, or 32 percent of the population of 101.6 million.
For 100+ years after 1916, rural population has continued to decline. After all, How’r You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree? For the 2020 Voting Season, the total population pool, from which Trump’s rural vote support will be drawn, has fallen to less than 59.5 million people, well under 20% of the total U.S. population. Meanwhile, the population of America’s suburbs and cities exceeds 80% of the country.
Republican strength in the suburbs, paired with the support of rural voters, has balanced the strength of Democrats in the densely populated cities, keeping GOP office holders seated, at all levels of the State and Federal governments, in numbers often disproportionate to their actual popular support. But, for a few reasons, the electoral balance has shifted to Democrats, starting with the 2018 midterms.
The first reason, as already discussed, is the declining population of the GOP’s most supportive and reliable segment of the American electorate, rural voters.
The second reason is Trumpism’s corrosive effect upon informed GOP voters with brains, a/k/a educated suburban women, or as Trump likes to say, housewives. In the 2018 midterm election, after suburban women and everyone else got a face full of two years of what passes for governance under Trump’s GOP, Republican Congressmen and officeholders at all levels got their walking papers from voters in numbers not seen in many years. Republicans who did survive the Blue Wave often found themselves beating off much stronger challenges than they had ever faced before.
An excellent example of this sort of GOP survivor of 2018 is the Republican representing the suburbs adjacent to the very blue city where I live, Ann Wagner, R, MO-02. In the elections of 2012-2014-2016, her winning margins over Democratic challengers ranged from 21% to 32%. But, add Trump to the mix, and in 2018, Ms. Wagner held on to her seat by a comparatively skinny margin of 4%.
Add two more years of Trump to the mix: Ann Wagner is up to her knees in hot water and it doesn’t look like she has the necessary footwear. For the first time, Wagner faces a seasoned campaigner, with her own constituency inside of Wagner’s district, who is well funded and a veteran legislator, State Senator Jill Schupp. Ann Wagner is about to collect the wages of blindly voting the GOP line in Congress and never holding a town hall with her constituents. Just today, Daily Kos Elections reclassified the race in the MO-02 from Lean-R to Tossup. There are about two month left to help Jill Schupp to push that reclassification line over to Lean-D. Donate $2 for the 2nd, right here. Eastern Missouri deserves and needs two Democrats to work together advancing our interests in Congress.
Which brings up a third reason why the demographics of the St. Louis Suburbs are driving political change, as illustrated by the MO-02 election. I doubt this has been proven by political scientists, or even studied. So let’s all it a hypothesis. I’m not a political scientist, but as a retired lawyer, I put it thus —
Whereas,
- Republican Gerrymandered Congressional Districts often bolster expected Republican support in a suburban district by grafting more conservative rural areas onto such Districts
- Over time, suburbs around cities tend to expand outward into formerly rural areas.
- Republican Gerrymanders of Congressional Districts based on the 2010 Census, will be unavoidably blind to demographic and political movements and shifts occurring over the many years after the Census occurs.
- For at least two generations, the suburbs of the MO-02 Congressional District have expanded into, and moved relatively more highly educated voters into, formerly rural areas.
Therefore,
- Voting patterns in a 2010 GOP Gerrymandered Congressional District will tend to trend toward greater support of Democratic candidates as less conservative suburban, educated voters move into the outward reaches of suburbs colonizing formerly rural areas.
To simplify, a GOP gerrymander will degrade over time in suburban Congressional Districts that expand into and transform outlying rural areas, if Democrats gain suburban support.
I have been a personal witness, since the early 1950’s when St. Louis was one of America’s largest cities, when I grew up in the heart of the MO-02. In the 1950 Census the City of St. Louis was America’s 8th largest city. I was a toddler in Wood River, IL, on the opposite side of the Mississippi from St. Louis, a short distance downstream, when my father abandoned my mother, brother and self, forcing the remaining family into the arms of my mother’s relatives in the heart of what was then and now remains the MO-02 CD.
I grew up there, graduated from a prominent suburban public school district, and kept my address in the district until I started graduate school in a different state, after decades of direct ties to the district. Though I resided elsewhere for nearly 50 years after that, my work and family connections kept me connected to the MO-02 in many ways.
My rather long viewpoint, of the MO-02 the encroachment of suburban into formerly rural territory, in this district, has, frankly, taken my breath. Through it all, until now, the GOP has enjoyed a virtual sinecure in the MO-02, holding the seat continuously since 1993. But, the areas where I grew up and bicycled widely, no longer retain a recognizable form, and FSM save a cyclist from the traffic. When I was a teenager dating local girls, roads, streets and lanes, that I could have transited in minutes on my motorcycle, back in the day, offer endless traffic jams in the heart of a suburbs that sprouted in what I once knew as cornfields.
Depending on how long you think 50 years might be, the transformation of the St. Louis suburb has either been slow and orderly or fast and chaotic. As a more or less eye witness, I vote fast and chaotic. And now, it is once again the time for Democrats in the MO-02 to take the helm. It is time for Congressional Republicans to become of rump party of rural voters, with no traction at all in America’s cities and little purchase in the well educated suburbs. The suburbs are pushing them out and wising up.
