Dems need to compete harder in rural areas with candidates like congressman from Maine, Economist columnist says

As Democrats lost millions of rural voters in the last decade, "They took to lamenting Republican advantages in the electoral college and the Senate," writes James Bennet in his Lexington column on American politics for The Economist. "What Democrats have not done is compete harder. They instead condemn rural voters as mourning their white privilege in a diversifying country. Bennet, the first American to write the column, notes Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's lines at big-city fund-raisers about "deplorables" "clingers" to guns and religion.

Bennet has an example for Democrats to follow: Rep. Jared Golden of Maine's 2nd District, the second most rural in the nation. "The district tells the story of how Democrats lost their appeal to rural and working-class Americans, and with it at times majorities in Congress to match the party’s consistent majorities in the national vote. It also suggests how the Democrats might recover," with candidates like Golden, who is favored to win a third term in November.

Golden hates What's the Matter with Kansas, the 2004 book by Thomas Frank that argues rural Americans' vote on social issues at the expense of their self-interest. “No, people are not voting against their own self-interest. They know what’s important to them,” he said, while the Democratic Party “has developed too much of an attitude that anyone that disagrees with us is just not smart.”

This Marine vet of Afghan and Iraq "says he is a Democrat because he believes government has a critical role to play in helping people," Bennet writes. "But he thinks his party has taken a grandiose view of that role, alienating rural voters by trying to dictate national standards that ignore local realities—such as unrealistic credentials for day-care teachers—and wasting money on people who do not need it. He supports anti-poverty initiatives like the child tax credit, but was outraged that Democrats continued permitting it to couples earning as much as $400,000 a year. . . . Golden worries that Democrats think they can write off rural voters and rely on demographic change to supply majorities by turning more of America into Portland. 'I don’t know if that’s even true,' he says. 'Secondly, even if it is, don’t you just want to do right by everybody?'"

Golden and Bennet met in Skohegan, over a successful local beer made by a company that a teacher and millworker started in a barn; now they "are turning the idled mill in town into a brewpub, hotel and apartments. The brewers want to help clean up the Kennebec River," and they and and other local business people met with Golden that day. "Their excitement about the future of their pretty, faded town was infectious."

“I think my job is to try and connect them with as much help along the way or clear as many roadblocks as possible,” Golden told Bennet. “I think they want to believe in a government that will help them do those things. But they’re very skeptical of it.”