Abstract

Needed: A Rural Strategy

This article focuses on the rural vote in the 2004 presidential election in the United States. Helen Waller is feeling lonelier these days. What angers Waller is a sense that the deck keeps getting stacked against rural America by powerful corporations and by politicians of both political parties who pay more attention to promised rural panaceas -- like free trade and a bigger-is-better attitude toward farming -- than to the painful realities of the countryside. The hurt Waller describes is a political force Democrats must reckon with if they hope to regain the White House and Congress in 2004. That means that the electoral votes of a single rural state -- such as Helen Waller's Montana, where rural support for the Democrats rambled in 2000 -- could have rendered Florida's disputed electoral votes inconsequential. As recently as 1986, when Democrats retook the Senate six years into the Reagan era, they did so by electing a fresh crop of senators from recession-ravaged farm states that included South Dakota's Tom Daschle, North Dakota's Kent Conrad and, four years later, Minnesota's Paul Wellstone. Since 1988 support for the Democrats among rural voters has dropped from 56 percent to around 36 percent. Offering rural voters something real -- in the form of a populist alternative to the Republicans -- may be the greatest challenge that Democrats face in the 2004 campaign.