Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear speaks with reporters outside an event at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 20, 2024. (Photo by Jacob Fischler/States Newsroom)

CHICAGO –– Democrats should focus on pocketbook issues to win back rural voters, speakers including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said at a Rural Council meeting at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday.

Beshear urged the group of rural Democrats to reject social issues and a left-right ideological framing. Most voters, he said, were not worried about political labels, but about jobs, health care, transportation, school quality and safety.

The Republicans dominating rural districts and states, Beshear and other speakers said, were not delivering on those issues.

“With Republicans going through the extreme ends that they are on every issue, now is our time to both run and govern on those issues that matter the most,” he said. “And when we do that, we don’t move a state or the country to the right or the left. We move it forward for every single American.”

The event, one of the dozens of official events for party delegates and candidates a few miles from the national program broadcast from the United Center, was infused with the idea that rural campaigns are not Democrats’ strongest, with hints that rural issues may be outside the mainstream of an increasingly urban Democratic Party.

“I think we’re the most courageous Democrats in America,” former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota said.

But speakers also projected hope that the party could reverse a decades-long trend of losses in rural areas, including in November’s presidential election, largely through the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’ running mate.

Walz, several speakers said, is uniquely able to reach voters in rural areas.

“I dare the Republicans to say we are the elite party,”? Heitkamp said. “I dare them to say that we don’t know and we don’t have people in our party who care about rural America. I dare them to say that we are not rural.”

Beshear acknowledged he had been considered for Harris’ running mate, for which he said he was grateful.

“I’m proud that a governor from rural America was a candidate in that veepstakes,” he said.

But he called Walz “a great governor” who would be “a great vice president.”

The speakers urged Democrats not to abandon rural areas as unwinnable, but to contest every election.

“We have to keep organizing and investing in red states and rural America,” Caroline Gleich, a candidate for U.S. Senate from Utah, said. “Because we can and we will win.”

Not served by Republicans

Despite their dominance in rural elections, Republicans have let down constituents from those areas, Beshear, Heitkamp and other speakers said.

U.S. House Republicans are delaying passage of a new farm bill, the once-every-five-years law authorizing farm subsidy and education programs, Heitkamp said. A bloc of far-right Freedom Caucus members never vote for the farm bill because of its price tag, despite its importance for rural communities, she said.

Former President Donald Trump started trade wars, which hurt U.S. farmers’ capacity for exports, and botched the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. Deputy Agriculture Secretary Xochitl Torres Small said.

Torres Small won a New Mexico House seat in 2018.

“I was elected in the middle of the time when Donald Trump was president,” she said. “In the middle of the trade wars that were causing farmers to lose money, in the middle of rural hospitals worried about closing their doors because Donald Trump took too long to recognize the crisis of COVID.”

Alternative Democratic messaging

Explicit in the message from the event was that overtly partisan messaging could turn off rural voters, who are often not strongly political.

And implicit was that national Democrats’ shift to the left on social issues this century could distract from messaging rural voters might find more appealing.

Beshear, a popular Democrat who twice won gubernatorial elections in a red state, called himself a “proud pro-choice governor” and a “proud pro-diversity governor” at the top of his remarks before describing nonpartisan appeal.

“We run as proud Democrats — and folks, aren’t we proud Democrats?” Beshear said, prompting cheers from the crowd. “But the moment we take those hats off we serve every single American.”

“This is our chance, yes, to be proud Democrats, but to show everyone in this country, Republican, independent, Democrat or other, that there is room for them in this campaign,” he said. “That there is room for them with us.”

And Heitkamp, in communicating support for LGBTQ rights, demonstrated some unfamiliarity with the subject, stumbling over the phrase “LGTBQ+ neighbors.”

Speaking with reporters after his remarks, Beshear said Harris and her agenda represent the people who’d attended the meeting.

“Kamala Harris represents working people,” he said, praising her recently released economic policy plan. “The plans that I see are plans that will work for everybody.

Warm welcome for Gwen Walz?

Walz’s wife, Minnesota first lady Gwen Walz, made an unannounced visit to the event.

She received a warm reception from the crowd as she told of growing up in a small town and meeting her husband when both were public school teachers.

And she related a story meant to display small-town values.

As a high school English teacher, she tutored a star player on the football team coached by Tim Walz. The student, once a problem in class, continued his tutoring and eventually graduated.

“Tim Walz and I see education and see people one individual at a time, making a difference, one person by one person, and letting that ripple out,” she said. “We cannot underestimate the power of seeing and recognizing individuals.”