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We live in an era of poisonous political conflict, to the point where it became necessary for someone to make a movie about a second U.S. civil war [ [link removed] ] to show us all what a horrible thing this would be.
Yet this polarization is largely geographic. It is often described as being about the coasts versus the heartland, but it is more accurate to say that the divide is urban and suburban versus rural. Missouri and Nebraska may be “red” states—isn’t it amusing that the conservatives are the “reds” now?—but not St. Louis [ [link removed] ] or Omaha [ [link removed] ]. New York [ [link removed] ] and Virginia may be “blue” states, but outside the cities and suburbs, Republicans still win in a landslide.
This map of Virginia [ [link removed] ] is particularly striking, because even small cities such as Staunton, Winchester and Danville are counted as separate electoral districts from their surrounding counties, so they stand out as blue dots in a sea of red. The kind of lopsided left-leaning ideological composition you find on a college campus or in a newsroom is mirrored by the lopsided right-leaning margins you find in rural counties.
For Democrats, their party’s failure to compete outside urban areas is the main reason why a presidential election that probably shouldn’t be close is a toss-up [ [link removed] ]. It is also why the “red” states are allowed to serve as laboratories of autocracy [ [link removed] ], with states such as Arizona [ [link removed] ], Florida [ [link removed] ], Missouri [ [link removed] ], Tennessee [ [link removed] ] and Texas [ [link removed] ] generating oppressive new laws that are emulated elsewhere.
As I warned [ [link removed] ] a while back, “To the extent each party establishes an unchallengeable local dominance, it believes that this dominance is its natural state and that it has been somehow unfairly deprived of the same degree of power and influence nationally.” It would have a huge moderating effect if at least one of the parties figured out how to be competitive everywhere.
So Democrats need to break Republicans’ monopoly over rural America and learn how to appeal to voters outside the cities. But how?
The Reverse Southern Strategy
Currently, Democrats are making the first big mistake on this issue, which is to send the message that they just don’t care. In The xxxxxx, a review [ [link removed] ] of the fate of the Democratic Party in Florida—once a toss-up state and now a Republican stronghold—describes how the state party was hollowed out by an alliance of out-of-state and big-city donors pushing an agenda “to the left of what a winning Democratic coalition in Florida would accept.” Too much of today’s left-of-center politics is driven by highly active donors and organizers in the urban centers—and by fanatical ideological enforcers on social media—and has lost touch with the concerns and attitudes of everyone else.
This should remind us of the basic mistake of the Republicans’ notorious Southern Strategy, which set out to court white Southern voters after the end of segregation. Despite what has been said about it, the intent of the Southern Strategy was not to appeal to racism [ [link removed] ] but to pivot to economic issues in place of race. Yet this goal was pursued in a way that communicated that Republicans, who had won or at least been competitive for the Black vote up into the 1960s [ [link removed] ], no longer cared about this constituency. By pivoting to appeal to one group—Southern and rural whites—they gave up on urban Black voters and alienated them for generations.
This similarity struck me because I recently heard someone describe the problems with today’s rural areas as the absence of jobs and a growth in welfare dependence and drug addiction—which is precisely how you might have described economically depressed inner-city Black neighborhoods a few decades back. This parallel comes with the same sense that one of the major parties just doesn’t want to show up, doesn’t want to address those concerns and is focused on appealing to an entirely different set of voters.
The Paradox of Maximalism
When I talked recently with political analyst Ruy Teixeira [ [link removed] ], he pointed out that Democrats often think they are addressing the basic policy issues that would appeal to the heartland. Take the Green New Deal, a set of subsidies and big infrastructure projects that emphasize “green” energy. The “New Deal” part is supposed to evoke the old FDR political coalition and come across as a program for more blue-collar jobs and greater rural development. But in practice, a lot of people hear only the “Green.” It sounds (and not without reason [ [link removed] ]) like a pie-in-the-sky boondoggle motivated by the environmentalist dogmas of city slickers.
Or take the current obsessions of the culture wars. For every conservative stoking a moral panic about Drag Queen Story Hour, there is someone in a left-leaning urban enclave who thinks that holding such an event, in a city where there is already wide cultural acceptance for gender and sexual diversity, is the single most effective thing they can do for the cause of tolerance.
Some have argued that Democrats should simply give up on the culture war so they can win elections again in conservative rural areas. Yet one could argue that in these areas, policies to encourage diversity and tolerance are even more desperately needed. These are the places where a young woman in need of an abortion, or a young gay man struggling with his identity, or someone who wants to live outside the usual norms, is likely to feel far more alone and in far greater need of help.
So it’s not a matter of dropping the culture wars but about pursuing more modest goals. This is the classic paradox of the political activist: On the one hand, your most active supporters want you to push for their maximalist agenda. On the other hand, doing so threatens even the most minimal goals of that agenda and causes you to pass up wins on the easy issues. To put it in practical terms, Democrats need to focus less on pushing for Drag Queen Story Hour in the public library and more on keeping Moms for Liberty [ [link removed] ] off the school board.
The Limits of Policy
Yet I am skeptical about how much difference specific policy changes would make, because people aren’t responding only to policy. Instead, policy issues tend to get “coded” as left or right, Democrat or Republican, urban or rural, often somewhat arbitrarily. When Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama [ [link removed] ], for example, standing up to Russia and voting for a strong national defense was viewed as a conservative and Republican policy—and now it is widely seen as the policy of liberal Democrats. A policy is never considered just as a set of facts about a particular piece of legislation and what it will accomplish, but as a statement about what kind of person you are.
That’s what makes the urban-vs.-rural divide so intractable. In talking to Teixeira, I was struck by the extent to which even the political experts are stumped about how to reverse these associations.
I have one modest suggestion to make. The country’s liberals—in any sense of that word—should consider a course of action that might seem a roundabout way to promote change but might actually be the fastest route: reinvesting in local news.
Consider an example from my corner of rural Central Virginia. During recent state-level elections, I received a flyer in the mail from a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. Festooned across the front of the flyer were images of the evil opponents I was supposed to vote to defeat: Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This was not the first time I’d seen a similar ad. None of these people live within 300 miles of Virginia, none of them were on the ballot and none of them have the slightest thing to do with the House of Delegates.
Why were they on the flyer, then? Because they are national political bogeymen who would be more recognizable to voters than any local opponent. This, in turn, is because local news has collapsed [ [link removed] ] and has done so particularly in rural areas, where small populations won’t support a local paper. Instead, everyone has a satellite dish and smartphone, so people get their whole view of politics from national cable news—or worse, from Twitter. They react to Nancy Pelosi on a flyer because they saw something bad about her on Fox News Channel, but they have no idea who their local Democratic Party candidates are or whether they should like them or hate them.
Similarly, I have found local political discourse to be oddly obsessed with events happening far away. What goes on in the cities reverberates into the countryside—but frequently in a distorted view. People across the country still think New York City, which has been blessed with very low murder rates for decades, is a hellscape of runaway crime straight out of a Charles Bronson film [ [link removed] ] from the 1970s. Or we hear talk about immigration as an unprecedented crisis, but mostly from people living far away from the big cities where most immigrants arrive [ [link removed] ]—people who are not directly affected by immigration, and for precisely that reason find it easy to believe in a nonexistent wave of “migrant crime.” [ [link removed] ]
A revival of local news outside the big cities would put more people in touch with local issues and give local candidates someone to run against who lives closer than San Francisco. A revived network of local news would also require reporters to embed themselves in rural communities, learn what is important to people there and figure out how to talk to them. The first step of bringing your message to the heartland is to translate it into terms your audience can relate to.
Back to the 40-Yard Line
All these recommendations can be summed up in the old saying that most of politics happens “between the 40-yard lines.” Normal politics, which is what we are trying to get back to, is a contest between two variations of broadly popular, widely accepted policies.
Consider the whole reason for the urgency of the current election, which is that Donald Trump and his supporters are crafting a whole authoritarian ideology [ [link removed] ], including most recently the idea that the president can assassinate political rivals with impunity [ [link removed] ]. Yet this authoritarian ideology is not broadly popular. Consider the recent vote on military aid to help Ukraine defend itself against authoritarian Russia. It was held up by a small ultra-Trumpist fringe of the Republican Party, yet when put to a vote, it passed by a lopsided margin of 311-112 [ [link removed] ].
The party that can focus on this kind of issue, holding its radical fringe at arm’s length and defining itself by a broadly popular agenda between the 40-yard lines, will reap the rewards. But this implies the need for a wider political realignment. The policies that are broadly popular in America are generally liberal policies, in the widest sense of that term. They are policies that reject the illiberal tendencies on both the right and the left—no Moms for Liberty or admiration for Vladimir Putin, but also no hectoring left-wing “cancel culture” or support for Hamas.
The party that can regain its sanity first will win. But this will require a new liberal coalition, drawn from the center left and the center right, finding common cause against illiberals on both sides.

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