Courthouse News Service: Democrats Set Sights on Winning Back Rural Voters
by Team Espy
Early in Tuesday’s meeting, Nevada Lieutenant Governor Kate Marshall said that “if we learned anything in 2016, we learned that we need rural voters. We need to listen to rural voters.”
Marshall, who referred to rural voters as the Democratic Party’s “firewall” in 2020, offered that liberals must recognize the unique problems of regions of the country too often painted as monolithic and take real stock of rural community members who were essential “long before that term became a work of art.”
Expanded, reliable access to broadband internet and quality health care were two central refrains of the council meeting, which also touched on education, good paying jobs, green agricultural initiatives and a shot in the arm for infrastructure like roads, bridges and airports as key to winning back rural America for Democrats in November.
The realities of keeping up with rural Americans’ needs traced through a conversation between Tom Vilsack, former agricultural secretary in the Obama administration, and Mike Espy, a former ag secretary from the Clinton years currently running to represent Mississippi in the U.S. Senate.
