Heartland Democrats to Washington: You’re Killing Us

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Heartland Democrats to Washington: You’re Killing Us

New report blames elitist national party for alienating voters, and threatening the party's chances in 2020.

By MICHAEL KRUSE January 11, 2018

AUSTIN, Ind.—Steering his white Dodge Ram while wearing a tan knit cap, a drab green Carhartt coat and a smear of brown livestock feed on his cheek, Terry Goodin jounced over frozen-hard mud toward his 100 head of beef cattle. “Make sure they’re all four legs down and not four legs up, in this kind of weather,” he told me in his southern Indiana drawl. The temperature overnight had dipped toward zero. Now, midmorning, it stood at 16 degrees. On the rear of his old pickup truck was a “Farmers For Goodin” bumper sticker, and rattling around his head were thoughts of what he was going to say the following week in a starkly different setting—up in Indianapolis, at the regal limestone capitol building, in his introductory speech as the leader of his caucus in the state legislature.

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The facts are harsh. “The number of Democrats holding office across the nation is at its lowest point since the 1920s and the decline has been especially severe in rural America,” Bustos writes in the report. In 2009, the report notes, Democrats held 57 percent of the heartland’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now: 39 percent. In 2008, Barack Obama won seven of the eight heartland states. In 2012, he won six. In 2016? Trump won six. There are 737 counties in the Midwest—Trump won all but 63 of them. “We can’t keep bombing in the rural parts of these states,” Bustos told me

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Goodin’s Indiana District 66 went heavy for Trump. One reason: It used to have plenty of decent-paying, union-boosted jobs, anchored by the Morgan Packing plant. Now, there are far fewer, and paychecks for the ones that remain have gotten smaller. Two years ago, Goodin’s hometown of Austin, population 4,200, was the epicenter of “the largest drug-fueled HIV outbreak to hit rural America in recent history,” in the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Resulting mostly from the sharing of dirty needles to shoot painkillers, more than 200 people were infected—a rate “comparable to some African nations,” the CDC said.

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“Tell me how in the world Nancy Pelosi, or some of those folks in Congress,” Goodin said, “how would they even be able to sit there and talk with Delmis Burns? Do they even know that a guy like Delmis Burns exists? That’s why I say that the East Coast elitists have forgotten America. They’ve not been to America, they forgot America, they forgot about certain parts of America. Maybe they’ve done that intentionally. I hope they haven’t.”

Intentional or not, what’s clear from the report is that many of these 72 rural Democratic lawmakers feel the national party is indifferent to the trouble it has caused them locally. And they’re angry about it. Their assessments are blunt, searing—and directed straight at Democrats on the coasts, in cities, in Washington.

“The Democratic Party is a party of elites,” Michigan state Rep. Donna Lasinski told Johnson.

“Democratic leaders don’t understand the needs of rural voters,” former Illinois state Sen. John Sullivan said.

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