Dems recognize need to improve in rural areas

A few hours after polls closed the night of the 2018 midterm, Democrat Beto O’Rourke was clobbering U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas’ largest counties, seemingly within reach of an upset win.

Then the rural votes poured in. By the end of the night, O’Rourke’s nearly 800,000-vote advantage in the five largest counties had been wiped out by Cruz’s millionvote edge in the other 249, powered by white conservatives in sparsely populated areas. Cruz won by 215,000 votes, out of 8.4 million statewide.

Four years later, rural Texas remains a bulwark for Republicans as their support continues to erode in urban counties and the fast-growing suburbs. Statewide Democratic nominees, acknowledging they can’t afford such lopsided rural losses, say they’re making a more concerted push this year outside the cities. They’re focusing their messaging in rural areas on less partisan issues, including shoring up the state power grid, building more rural hospitals, preventing private school vouchers and expanding broadband access.

“The Republican branding has been incredibly effective, that Democrats want to take your guns, that Democrats are not people of faith,” said David Currie, chair of the Texas Democratic Party’s Non-Urban/Rural Caucus. “I like to talk about four things: education, health care, jobs and Jesus. The Democratic Party gets labeled as a secular party, and I just don’t think that’s true. There’s a lot of us that are here, because our faith says this is the way we can work with government to help people.”

The party’s flagging performance in rural Texas took center stage in the lead-up to Saturday’s election at the Texas Democratic Convention in Dallas, where party delegates narrowly voted to give Gilberto Hinojosa — the chair since 2012 — another term leading the party.

Hinojosa’s main challenger, retired Air Force Col. Kim Olson, contended that the party has poured too many of its resources into cities and, in doing so, neglected rural areas where Democrats are struggling to recruit downballot candidates or even elect local party chairs.

At a meeting of the

Non-Urban/Rural Caucus on Friday, Hinojosa acknowledged the state party hasn't provided enough support to local chairs and party activists outside the cities and suburbs, though he attributed part of the failure last election to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Not that I haven't tried, but maybe I haven't tried hard enough,” Hinojosa said.

Because of the pandemic, he added, “we didn't do what we needed to do to help build (in rural Texas). And there are some issues that are important to you that we need to get better at — for example, regional messaging, rural messaging. And I get that.”

Still, some Democrats said the party plays a limited role in the outcome of statewide elections, which come down instead to the candidates, their campaign tactics and their ability to raise funds.

Susan Hays, the Democratic nominee for agriculture commissioner, said a number of Democratic candidates hurt themselves in rural areas last cycle by avoiding in-person campaigning, while Republicans mostly stayed on the campaign trail.

“People weren't getting out. And a famously terrible strategic decision, to not get out and talk to people, it put the world back online — where the misinformation was worse, and where you can't have a dialogue,” Hays said, adding that she's more bullish now that Democrats have returned to pre-COVID campaign tactics.

Currie, a former chair of the Tom Green County Democratic Party, also has encouraged candidates — especially those with less spending power than O'Rourke — to promote their campaigns on the small radio stations and newspapers in rural communities, where ad space is affordable.

“The rural weeklies, take a half-page ad out. They don't cost anything,” Currie said. “In San Angelo, you could get a minute commercial on Spanish radio for $10. They ought to be running those things all over the Spanish communities, the rural communities. … Everybody out there, they're listening to those little country radio stations.”

But even with a more aggressive effort, cutting into the GOP's rural dominance poses a challenge to Democrats, who will have to overcome President Joe Biden's woeful approval among rural voters — and the deeply entrenched antipathy toward Democrats in those areas, built over years of political neglect.

Early Texas polls, however, have found O'Rourke and other Democrats are within striking distance of their Republican foes, despite Biden's high rate of disapproval. And some Democrats said they have found rural voters — including Biden skeptics — are willing to hear them out, especially if they're running for positions that are less partisan in nature.

“We think this office actually is something that people can come together on,” said Jay Kleberg, the Democratic nominee for land commissioner who is running against Republican Dawn Buckingham. “It's land, it's our schoolchildren, it's veterans. It's caring for our neighbors in the wake of disasters. People are looking for decency; they're looking for competence. They're looking for something that we can agree on.”

Kleberg, a conservationist who grew up on his family's sprawling King Ranch between Corpus Christi and Brownsville, said he's also found success on the campaign trail emphasizing his rural roots to voters.