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Robert Farley has a good post at LGM about the base of Trump’s support in rural communities.  His post is based on this story in Vox. The Vox piece is worth a read in full, but one of the points made there was that very likely Trump supporters are the “locally rich” — people who aren’t rich by big city standards, but they’re doing much better than the average person in their rural commuity.  A lot of these folks are local business owners, who, as Farley points out, have some practical reasons to vote Republican:

The other thing I’d say is that the antipathy of local commercial elites to the Democratic Party isn’t entirely manufactured; it’s not simply an artifact of the culture war or of false consciousness or some such. Small business owners are not a natural ally of the Democratic Party, something we should probably keep in mind when we mindlessly fetishize the “local.” Those tomatoes at your favorite restaurant may be local, but it’s very possible that the workers at both the farm and the restaurant are paying worse wages and worse benefits than the Olive Garden halfway down the block, and it’s just as possible that the farmer and the restauranteur donate heavily to a bevy of right wing causes. While plenty of small business owners can probably explain intellectually why certain taxes and regulations are necessary and proper, it’s also the case that taxes and regulatory changes tend to fall heavily on small businesses because while they may be big enough to generate sufficient profit to buy a large house on the edge of town, they’re not so big that they can shrug off taxes or ignore the costs of regulatory compliance. Small businesses hated Obamacare not so much because the owners actually hated the idea of people getting health care (although there’s definitely some ideology) as because it generated pain-in-the-ass paperwork that might require hiring outside administrative assistance. Over the last four years this general sense has been compounded by the disruptions of Covid (aid programs being sufficient to keep people afloat but often forcing uncomfortable changes to business practices) and the tight labor market (always absolutely extremely bad for small business), which have moved this group very decisively into the Trump column.

In my experience growing up in a small town, and still visiting regularly, bitching about regulations might be a stated reason that small business owners justify voting for Trump, but the real reason runs a lot deeper and stronger:  they want to hire on the cheap.  These business owners might have workers that they’ve employed for decades, who they’ve treated “well” in their minds.  To be fair, they may have done things like giving them extended time off for family illness, and have a friendly and honest interest in the employee doing well. But there’s no way they’re going to pay these people anything but the lowest wage they can get away with, and there’s no fucking way they’re going to offer them benefits.  (Of course, the government takes care of that for them, since the wages they pay leave their employees eligible for Medicaid.)

If you want to get the average rural small businessman frothing with rage, talk about unions.  Workers having any sort of power is complete anathema to them.  And, frankly, I can think of more than one case where a long-time employee is just as Trumpy as their boss — they’ve accepted their place in life (under the boss’ thumb) and they see it as a violation of natural order when Democrats hold out hope that they could be paid a better wage and get some benefits.  A combination of fear over losing their job, and the scarcity mentality that is deeply ingrained in rural culture, makes it almost impossible for them to imagine anything better than they already have.  Add in some good old fashioned Fox News fear-mongering, and you’ve got a set of people who are going to be very difficult to turn into Democratic votes.

There’s no harm in trying to bring some more rural voters to the polls to vote for Democrats — as long as there is some kind of Democratic Party organization in the state, then a relatively small amount of money can fund a decent organizing effort.  But as long as they’re drinking from the poisonous Fox News well, it’s going to be a real push to make inroads here.

Don’t Give Small Town Business Owners Too Much CreditPost + Comments (164)