Janet Lynn Stumbo leaned on her cane and surveyed the two dozen or so voters who had convened in a small Appalachian town to meet with the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party.
A former Kentucky Supreme Court justice, the 70-year-old Stumbo said the event was “the biggest Democratic gathering I have ever seen in Johnson County,” an enclave where Republican Donald Trump got 85% of the presidential vote last November.
Paintsville, the county seat, was the latest stop on the state party’s “Rural Listening Tour,” a periodic effort to visit overwhelmingly white, culturally conservative towns of the kind where Democrats once competed and Republicans now dominate nationally.
“The gut check is we’d stopped having these conversations” in white rural America, said Colmon Elridge, the Kentucky Democratic chair. “Folks didn’t give up on the Democratic Party. We stopped doing the things that we knew we needed to do.”
It’s not that Democrats must carry most white rural precincts outright to win more elections. More realistically, it’s a matter of consistently chipping away at Republican margins in the way Trump narrowed Democrats’ usual advantages among Black and Latino men in 2024 and not unlike what Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, did in two statewide victories.
That’s communism! But yeah, that seems like a good idea for some of those communities. You can’t easily fix isolation, poverty, and lack of industry, nor are changes imposed from outside likely to succeed. However they claim to be independent, resilient, and to look out for their neighbors - why not take that to the next level? Build things their way. Lean on each other. Let their strengths build on each other.
From the outside, the best way we can help is infrastructure: roads, bridges, internet, services like health services, clean air and water, a strong department of education to ensure their kids get a good education even if localities can’t afford it on their own