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Backroad Ballots: New Podcast Separates Myths and Realities Surrounding Rural Voters [1]
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Date: 2024-07-25
The national conversation about the motivations of rural voters oversimplifies a complicated electorate that faces a common set of difficult economic issues, according to a new podcast whose producers include the Daily Yonder.
The new podcast series “Backroad Ballots” aims to help clarify what’s at stake in the countryside this November. Through interviews with rural scholars and organizers, host Olivia Weeks guides us through the nuances of who rural voters are and the difference they could make this election season.
The series is part of Rural Remix, which is produced by the Daily Yonder and the Rural Assembly (both projects of the nonprofit Center for Rural Strategies).
Weeks’ most recent production for Rural Remix was “Home Cooked,” a history of methamphetamines in America.
The first episode of Backroad Ballots drops today (Thursday, July 25, 2024) New episodes will come out every Thursday morning through August 15.
“I really think that stories about economic class get left out — or really botched by — mainstream media,” Weeks said. “I envision ‘Backroad Ballots’ as a sort of corrective to that.”
Episode one features rural organizers Annie Contractor and Anthony Flaccavento, who speak about progressive organizing efforts in small-town America. Contractor and Flaccavento say that some liberal thinkers have failed to understand or listen to rural people and that these oversights have political implications.
Nationally rural voters leaned about 2 to 1 for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Those national figures hide greater political diversity that exists state to state and regionally. And small changes in rural margins in swing states can determine who wins and loses the Electoral College, according to Daily Yonder analysis.
“In an evenly divided country, turnout matters, margins matter, and rural voters matter,” said Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies. “If we are going to keep democracy between the ditches, then country people are going to have to lay their share of the gravel.”
Episodes two and three feature political scientists Nicholas Jacobs and Chelsea Kaufman, historian Keith Orejel, and journalist Nick Bowlin. They unpack the demographics of the rural electorate, who actually shows up at the polls, and the divergence of rural and urban economies over the past two decades.
“This series covers all kinds of topics in rural life but all three conversations center a recognition that, like in all of America, there’s extreme wealth inequality in the countryside and it affects rural people — and their politics — in specific ways,” Weeks said.
In the fourth and final episode of “Backroad Ballots,” political scientists and authors Kathy Cramer and Hahrie Han will join Davis in a conversation about democracy.
In years past, the rural vote has been an important part of Democratic victories, Davis said.
“Politics are steady and predictable until they aren’t,” Dee said. “The rule for 30 years has been when Democrats compete for the rural vote, keep the margins close, then they win. But these vectors change fast, and realignment may be around the next corner.”
Subscribe to Rural Remix podcast to get new episodes of “Backroad Ballots.”
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[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/backroad-ballots-new-podcast-separates-myths-and-realities-surrounding-rural-voters/2024/07/25/
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