In the spring of 2023, Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds was fighting to beat off a spirited primary challenge. Just as the primary was entering its final stretch, journalist Dwayne Yancey scored a scoop: Deeds was almost completely off the campaign trail for two weeks. He had lost his dog, a beagle named Mila. His days were spent looking for his lost pup.
“For 13 days, I wasn’t knocking on doors, I wasn’t calling people, I wasn’t campaigning,” Deeds told the Charlottesville CBS affiliate. “I was just preoccupied with the loss of this precious dog.”
For most politicians, leaving the campaign trail in the home stretch of a tough race would be a political catastrophe. Creigh Deeds, though, is no ordinary politician.
Deeds, a two-time candidate for statewide office with a long and distinguished career in the state legislature, is among the last of his kind. He’s a rural Democrat who has survived the Democratic Party’s 40-year collapse in small-town America. When the new session of the legislature begins in 2024, he may be the only Democrat in the State Senate representing an area outside Virginia’s urban crescent, a region that stretches from the Washington D.C. suburbs to Newport News and Virginia Beach in the Tidewater region.
For the last twenty years, Deeds’ district has stretched from the college town of Charlottesville to his old home in Bath County along the West Virginia border. Anchored by a growing, increasingly liberal city in Charlottesville and buoyed by his strong personal brand, Deeds never won less than 64 percent of the vote–––and often ran unopposed.
But this year, redistricting shifted his seat east. Under the new lines, Deeds’ district kept Charlottesville, lost Bath County and the cities of Covington and Buena Vista, and picked up Eastern Albemarle County, Amherst County, and portions of Louisa County. While his new seat was not significantly more Democratic and contained a majority of his old constituents, Deeds’ home was now well outside the district. Deeds had to move two hours east to Charlottesville, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, in order to run for re-election. Young Democrats in Charlottesville smelled opportunity.
Delegate Sally Hudson of Charlottesville soon jumped into the race. When she’s not legislating, Hudson is an Economics professor at the University of Virginia. She ran an aggressive and well-funded campaign that aimed to portray Deeds–––who, though he had not lived in Charlottesville, had represented the city in the state legislature for over twenty years–––as a rural interloper who was too conservative for his district. Hudson herself has lived in Charlottesville for about a decade, but is not originally from Virginia.
“He moved here from almost two hours away,” Hudson told CVille Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Charlottesville.
On the issues, Hudson acknowledged there were not substantive policy differences between their two campaigns, but pointed to positions Deeds took in the past as evidence of his insufficiently progressive impulses. The most prominent of these critiques involved gun control—Deeds had a mixed record on gun legislation, and had been endorsed by the NRA in 2005.
“I reserve the right to know more tomorrow than I do today,” Deeds told The Politic. “The changes that are reflected in me are just a reflection of the changes in the Democratic Party and in society.” In 2023, Deeds sponsored a bill to ban assault weapons.
But Hudson’s critique was not that Deeds still held conservative positions–––it was that his past views showed he was not the right choice for Charlottesville, a liberal college town.
Politicians like Deeds’ were not always so unusual. Democrats used to be the rule, not the exception, in much of southern and western Virginia.
When Deeds was first elected to the state senate in 1991, there were only two Republicans who represented the area surrounding his district. “You could basically draw a line from Virginia Beach to the Cumberland Gap, they were all Democrats,” Deeds said.
In the 1996 Warner v. Warner Senate election, in which future Governor and Senator Mark Warner lost narrowly to long-time incumbent Republican Senator John Warner, it was moderate and liberal Republicans in the D.C. suburbs that put John Warner over the edge. Mark Warner, the Democrat, performed best in rural southern and western Virginia. In 2001, the year Senator Deeds was first elected to the state senate, the Democratic Warner won Deeds’ home county, Bath, in his successful bid for governor. In 1996, Bill Clinton won Bath County. In 2020, Joe Biden failed to break thirty percent of the vote.
It’s not just rural Virginia’s political cartography that has shifted: the very experience of living in small-town America has transformed over the course of Deeds’ life.
“When I was growing up way out in the country in Bath County, we got the Staunton newspaper, the Covington newspaper everyday,” Deeds said. “My research tool was a set of encyclopedias that my grandmother bought off a traveling salesman in 1962.”
Senator Deeds’ kids, born in the late 1980s and early 90s, grew up four miles from the house their forebears built when they settled the county, then at the edge of the colonial United States, in the 1740s. Unlike their father, they grew up in the Information Age. The collective knowledge of the world was at their fingertips.
Before the Internet, information was, in effect, curated in two manners: locally, by robust regional newspapers, and nationally, by distant executives in the CBS, ABC, and NBC offices in New York. Information was closer to communities, in the form of dogged local journalists––shoe-leather beat reporters who attended every high school football game, sentencing hearing, and mayoral press conference. But it was also farther away, in the form of Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley or the bound leather of The World Book encyclopedias.
“People didn’t have to go into town as much because they could get what they needed in their local communities. And there was a greater sense of community,” Deeds noted. “I think that the transformation of the Information Age and the transformation of the transportation system has made our communities much larger.”
These changes are not unique to Deeds’ experience. Small towns across the United States have been hollowed out over the last half century. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, less than a third of rural counties grew in population. The U.S. has only one-third of the number of banks it had in the 1980s. The banks that have survived are larger–––part of a broader trend of corporate consolidation that has led to the decline of the American mittelstand, the small and mid-size businesses that anchored so many small American cities and the rural regions that surround them. Young people leave for school and do not come back.
Population in rural America declined for the first time between the 2010 census and 2020 census, driven in large part by youth out-migration. The rural counties that have seen growth are largely outdoor-recreation hubs or popular retirement destinations—places like Flathead County Montana or the Ozarks in Missouri. The number of farmers in the U.S. has declined by 5 million over the last century. Colleges in rural America are closing or cutting programs.
Democratic struggles in rural America have not been confined to Virginia. In 2000, the four states with the highest proportion of their GDP coming from agriculture—South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Iowa—sent six Democrats and two Republicans to the Senate. In 2008, they sent five Democrats and three Republicans to the Senate. In 2022, South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Iowa sent zero Democrats to the Senate.
This problem is not new. Democrats have bemoaned their party’s struggle in rural America for twenty years. Former DNC Chair Howard Dean made confronting the issue a centerpiece of his DNC Chairmanship, calling it his “50-State Strategy.” Dean believed investing in basic organizing infrastructure across the country would allow the party to build support in regions where it has not traditionally thrived. In the process, Dean believed the party would activate new, low-propensity voters who Democrats had previously failed to reach and be better able to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.
As Chairman, Dean put his plan into action. During his four-year tenure, Democrats scored impressive wins across the country–––including surprise flips of Senate seats in Montana and Alaska. It is difficult to separate the specific effect of Dean’s strategy from other factors in Democratic successes in 2006 and 2008. But it’s clear that since Dean’s tenure ended and the Democratic Party shifted away from investments in hard-to-win states, Democratic performance in rural America has gotten significantly worse. In 2008, Barack Obama won 455 rural counties. In 2020, Joe Biden won 194.
“The American people have not lost their minds,” Dean said. “When we run good candidates, then we can win, or we do well.”
The problem, he argues, is a lack of resources and effort.
“You have to have candidates who are willing to be there, and you have to have an organization. And frankly, the Democratic Party has not supported the organization in the states the way they should, that’s beginning to change,” Dean told The Politic “But it’s very slow, because Washington is always about the people in Washington, and they forget that everybody else actually really matters in this country.”
Dean’s strategy always had skeptics, who believed the plan reallocated resources to unwinnable races. When Obama won the presidency, many of those skeptics were swept into the White House. Rahm Emmanuel, whose opposition to Dean’s strategy is well-documented, became Obama’s first chief of staff. David Axelrod, Obama’s lead political strategist and campaign guru, and Chuck Schumer, now the Senate Majority Leader, were also reported to oppose the 50-state strategy. Democratic strategist Paul Begala once described Dean’s strategy as “hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.”
The ground game Dean had built at the DNC was dismantled after his tenure ended in 2009. Instead of folding its operations in with the DNC, the Obama campaign maintained its separate structure, Obama for America (later renamed Organizing for America). This parallel organization hoovered up donations, leaving the DNC out of decision-making.
The upside of maintaining this separate structure was that it gave Obama’s team complete and direct control over its strategy; the downside was that it starved state and local Democratic parties of resources. This was a particularly damaging time to direct funding away from races in rural areas: precisely as Democrats moved away from Dean’s fifty-state strategy, Republicans unleashed a wave of spending on state legislative races. This was part of Operation REDMAP, the Republican Party’s attempt to gain control of redistricting in as many states as possible after the 2010 Census.
Maps drawn by Republicans during the 2010 redistricting cycle have created enduring Republican majorities for the last decade and a half. The results speak for themselves–––over the course of the Obama administration, Democrats lost 958 state legislators, 12 governors, and scores of other statewide officeholders.
“It was a disaster for eight years,” Dean continued. “I don’t think they have ever recovered from that.”
It is not just a lack of financial resources that hamper Democrats in rural America. Compared to Republicans, Democrats haven’t made as much of an effort to craft a message that appeals to rural Americans, according to Dean.
“We don’t win the elections we should win because we’re terrible at messaging,” Dean said. “Politics is simply war by other means,” he continued, invoking the words of the 19th-century German general Carl von Clausewitz. “The Republicans win more than they should because they’re much better organized. And if you’re organized in war, you can win.”
Many important Democratic voices on the party’s struggle in rural America home in on three interconnected themes. The first problem they identify is a lack of understanding: Democrats do not invest the requisite effort to understand rural voters’ concerns.
Delegate Sam Rasoul, who represents the Roanoke area in the Virginia House of Delegates, noted that recent Democratic statewide candidates have spent less time courting voters in small cities and rural areas than they have in the past, choosing to invest time and resources in more competitive races.
“When I first got started in 2007 running for office, the Buena Vista and Covington Labor Day parades were coveted events that everyone went to–––in particular, the statewide candidates,” Rasoul recalled. “And then for the first time in 2017, after many, many decades, the Democratic statewide ticket decided not to attend.”
Covington and Buena Vista, old industrial towns, have historically been bastions of Democratic support in rural western Virginia. Their Labor Day parades have long served as the unofficial kickoff for campaign season in western Virginia. That’s changed.
“Some consultants told them all the votes are in the urban crescent,” Rasoul said, explaining why Democrats have stopped attending the popular annual events. “It’s that kind of mentality that left hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Democrats essentially without the tradition of being represented.”
Rural Democrats in other parts of the country echoed Rasoul’s sentiment.
“There’s really no secret sauce, it’s just going anywhere and everywhere, talking to everybody,” said Democrat J.D. Scholten, an Iowa State Representative who vaulted onto the national stage when he almost beat former Representative Steve King in 2018.
Before serving as DNC Chairman, Dean was the Governor of Vermont for five terms. He echoed Scholten’s sentiment. “I campaigned very hard when I was running for governor in areas that I knew I was gonna get clobbered. You have to respect people, they may not vote for you, but you have to respect them, and that will pay you back,” Dean said.
The second problem identified by critics of the Democratic approach to rural outreach is urban liberals’ sense of entitlement. Many Democratsare frustrated that Republicans have such a lock on the rural vote. This frustration is exemplified by some liberals’ complaints that rural voters “vote against their interests” when they support the GOP. It’s such a common gripe that it’s referenced in nearly every article criticizing Democrats for their challenges garnering support in rural regions.
This belief, that the superiority of Democratic policies entitles them to rural votes, leads Democrats to avoid the hard work of tailoring their message to rural audiences.
Rural broadband is an example of this lack of tact. Broadband is crucial infrastructure, but, as Democrats’ failures show, it’s not enough to win an election. Political observer J. Miles Coleman, Senator Heitkamp, and State Representative Scholten all cited Democrats’ rhetorical reliance on broadband as an example of the Democratic Party’s lack of effort to reach out and understand rural voters.
“Democrats will talk about rural broadband, but it’s like, okay, after, after a few elections, you need to throw something else in there,” Coleman said.
“Democrats were like, Okay, well, they should be happy because we got them broadband, they should be happy because we passed the Farm Bill,” Heitkamp said “And there wasn’t the kind of ongoing dialogue with people in the communities.”
Heitkamp, Scholten, and Coleman are not saying that rural voters do not care about broadband, or that Democrats have not improved broadband infrastructure. They’re gesturing toward the idea that Democrats believe policy alone should be enough to win them rural votes. Their critique is that these same Democrats fail to show up and engage with rural voters–––while they fail to ask rural voters what matters to them.
Beyond their lack of engagement, Democrats have a built-in messaging disadvantage in many rural communities. Talk radio is the dominant form of media in much of America and is overwhelmingly conservative. Fox News is the most watched cable network. Voters know the Republican message because they hear it through their car’s radio, through the TV in the corner of the local bar, and through their Facebook feed.
“Republicans don’t have to work on messaging because, whether it comes from Fox or OAN or whatever, they just have to say the buzzwords,” said Scholten. “All these entities are just kind of circling around the average voter and talking about how awful Democrats are. That’s what we’re up against in these rural communities.”
Scholten highlighted the role that conservative talk radio has played in this disconnect. The consolidation and decline of local newspapers has left many towns reliant on the radio for news and community information.
“If you go into a smaller town, you go on Main Street, almost every workplace on that street has that one radio station on,” Scholten said.
The Sean Hannity Show, a conservative radio show, is broadcast daily on over 500 stations nationwide. Glenn Beck and Mark Levin’s shows, also conservative, reach over 400 stations.
“I look across the state of Iowa, I believe there’s 22 talk radio stations,” Scholten said. “And so what do we do, we might run like a thirty-second ad with a month left several times a week on those stations–––that doesn’t compete with that level of just bashing the Democratic Party.”
Dean echoed Scholten’s sentiments. “Republicans get to deliver their version of the Democratic message,” he explained. “It’s not an effective way to win.”
There is a simple and compelling counter argument often offered to those who worry about Democratic losses in rural areas: it does not matter. Why should the party care if it loses 80-20 in rural America, if it still wins elections?
But this argument seems to contradict the Democratic Party’s belief in representation, its commitment to making sure diverse voices are heard. Their party platform says so explicitly: “Democrats are the party of inclusion. We know that diversity is not our problem—it is our promise. As Democrats, we respect differences of perspective and belief.” The position of the Democratic Party is that the variety of the American experience should be celebrated, that it is important for all voices heard.
“There’s an ethical imperative for the party, as we believe fundamentally in equity in all of its forms,” delegate Rasoul said. “If that is a fundamental value of the party, more so than any other party, we should be investing time, energy and resources as equitably as possible in all corners of America.”
Governor Dean put it more bluntly: “People who argue that we don’t need rural America are just plain dumb,” he said. “It’s a classic Washington argument. ‘Oh, we’re important and nobody else is because they’re not as well educated as we are,’”
Senator Heitkamp highlighted the issue through a different lens. “As long as they get the presidency and the Senate, it doesn’t seem like they care a whole lot about anything else,” she said. “We used to lose rural America 60-40. Now we’re losing it 80-20. We can’t be a majority party, as I have said, and lose rural America 80-20.”
Misconceptions about the demographics of rural America also influence many liberals’ response to their struggle to appeal to rural voters: that rural America is white America. But rural populations are diverse, and are growing more so. A quarter of rural Americans are people of color. Large parts of the rural South are majority- or plurality-Black. Much of rural California and Texas are majority-Hispanic. There are significant Indigenous populations across the mountain West. But these rural voters of color, like so many other rural voters, are not being adequately served.
Deeds pointed to Virginia’s rural Black population—especially those residents along the coast of the Chesapeake Bay on the Northern Neck or the Eastern Shore—as an example of a group that elected officials aren’t reaching. “They need to be talked to. They need to be heard,” he said.
“I’m the last one that has a strong connection to a rural area in western Virginia, and I think I do have a voice.”
When Democratic incumbents in rural America retire, they are rarely succeeded by Democrats. Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota–––Democratic Senators who retired in 2012 or 2014–––were all succeeded by Republicans. Each of these Democrats is the last of a long line of progressive politicians in their state. With each of their losses comes a loss of Democrats’ cultural knowledge and institutional power.
The loss of incumbency kneecaps state parties. Holding office allows politicians to mentor future generations and build a lasting web of aides, operatives, and local officials. Democratic Senators, Governors, and other elected officials hire liberal interns from their states. Lobbyists, associations, and pressure groups hire politicians’ former staffers. If the party holds no office, this entire ecosystem shrivels and dies. Young interns work for politicians from other states, establishing networks there instead of at home. Local lobbying firms do not hire Democratic ex-staffers, because the Democratic Party is irrelevant to their clients. The talent pipeline runs dry.
State Senator Creigh Deeds is another final survivor of a long line of rural Democrats.
“I’m the last one that has a strong connection to a rural area in western Virginia, and I think I do have a voice,” Deeds said. “In the modern Democratic Party, the forces are primarily in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, Richmond.”
“But the reality is that people everywhere deserve representation,” he continued. “And I’m the only person that really has a lot of experience representing rural areas. I’m the only person in the Democratic leadership that has the experience of growing up in a rural area.”
In his primary last spring, Deeds edged out Sally Hudson by less than five hundred votes. Had she triumphed instead, Deeds would have been replaced by an academic who grew up elsewhere. Assuming he wins the general election in his D+17 seat, for the next 4 years, Deeds will be one of the only voices for rural Virginians in the Democratic caucus in Richmond.
Yet Deeds’ seat is dominated by Charlottesville and Albemarle County, the increasingly populous and liberal area surrounding it. When Deeds retires, it is unlikely his successor will have comparable ties to rural Virginia. But his eventual retreat from public life will be another step in the slow bifurcation of America, another step away from unity and towards division.
The loss of rural Democrats weighs on Deeds. The Democratic Party has changed since he was first elected–––for the better, in many ways. It’s become committed to representing the diversity of the American experience and leveraging the power of government to improve the lives of all Americans. In this mission, Democrats have made much progress. But they have largely left rural voters behind.
“We’ve got to be able to speak to people everywhere,” Deeds said. “It breaks my heart.”
Cover image: Original Graphic (Malik Figaro/The Yale Politic)