In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt won reelection in Coke County, Texas, with 92 percent of the vote. The margins were similarly stunning in rural counties across Texas: Oldham, Sterling, Glasscock, Roberts, and on and on. The Democratic Party earned the numbers it put on the scoreboard that year. Rural Texas was swept up in a surge of federal relief and public works projects. Amid the unemployment of the Great Depression, the New Deal put people to work fixing roads, enhancing soil, and repairing schools — work that paid desperately needed wages and left lasting improvements. Plans were shaping up for rural electrification, an initiative that would be led by rural Texan hometown hero Lyndon B. Johnson and would light up the countryside.
Today Coke County, Texas, has no Democratic Party chair. Neither do Oldham, Sterling, Glasscock, Roberts, or seventy other counties in Texas. All told, over a quarter of Texas counties have Democratic Party vacancies. That figure has doubled in the last decade.
Nationwide the number of county Democratic Party vacancies is 20 percent, according to a new paper by Clinton Willbanks and Michael E. Shepherd, titled “Texas in the Rear-View Mirror? How the Democratic Party Ignores Rural America and Underperforms in Elections.” Since 2016, their study finds, the Democratic Party has operationally withdrawn from rural America, leaving vast swaths of the country without organized opposition to Republican candidates.
The Democratic Party’s organizational abandonment of rural counties is a dramatic recent trend. Before 2016, fewer than 10 percent of rural Texas counties lacked Democratic Party chairs, barely higher than in urban areas. But following Donald Trump’s initial presidential victory, Democrats let their…
Auteur: Meagan Day
