Op-ed: A new covenant with rural America

The 2020 elections marked a new low-water mark in the Democratic Party’s decades-long collapse with rural voters. How did the party of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter manage to lose rural America by 36% – and how can the party of Joe Biden hope to reverse this slide?

President Biden’s $1.9 billion American Rescue Plan and upcoming infrastructure bill offer an opportunity to at least staunch the bleeding – but only if these programs actually deliver on their lofty promises. Managed well, these programs will deliver desperately needed fiscal relief to struggling rural towns and billions in funding for broadband and other infrastructure needs. Managed poorly, the entire effort could devolve into a cautionary tale of waste, patronage, and broken promises.

In the 1930’s, Franklin Roosevelt electrified rural America – an effort inspired by his frequent trips to Georgia. He backed up his words with actions: the dams got built, the wires got strung, and electricity delivered unimagined progress to communities too long forgotten. In the process, Roosevelt cemented the diverse New Deal coalition of urban and rural voters that would dominate national politics for decades to come.

In 2009, Democrats’ stimulus bill similarly promised high-speed broadband to millions of unconnected rural Americans. But this time, waste and mismanagement derailed the effort. One USDA broadband program funded to connect 7 million Americans managed only hundreds of thousands. These failures may not be the only factor behind the evisceration of rural Democrats in subsequent elections, but they certainly added kindling to the bonfire.

So, which of these two legacies awaits President Biden’s recovery agenda?

The scale and ambition of Biden’s plan is bolder than anything Democrats have offered rural America in generations. But the road to electoral devastation is paved with good intentions poorly executed. The fate of our economic recovery now rests in the hands of the agencies tasked with actually administering this unprecedented deluge of relief funding.

A few common-sense precautions would go a long way to ensuring Joe Biden’s rural infrastructure plan gets remembered more like Roosevelt’s than Obama’s.

First, we need clear rules demanding that rural infrastructure dollars actually go the areas with the greatest needs.

Sounds obvious, maybe, but you’d be shocked how bad a track record federal broadband programs have had in this department. In the early days of the USDA’s rural broadband program, two-thirds of all loans went to projects in towns that already had high-speed service. During the 2009 stimulus, one broadband provider was given $100 million in taxpayer funds to connect unserved homes in Kansas – and then spent the money in an area where 99% of neighborhoods were already wired.

USDA has reformed its broadband programs in recent years to get better about prioritizing unserved areas. The Biden administration would be smart to require states and counties to adopt these best practices as a condition for ARP funding, to help avoid a repeat of 2009.

Second, the Administration should roll their eyes at the think tank crowd desperate to overcomplicate this and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Some beltway advocates are pushing to increase the basic definition of “broadband service” to speed thresholds that would leave more than half the country considered unserved. However well intentioned, this overkill would result in “rural” broadband funding to be diverted from truly unserved communities like Plains to wealthier suburbs in Metro Atlanta where Gigabit download speeds are already widely available. Talk about a recipe for exacerbating rural resentment.

To be sure, the electoral divergence between rural and metropolitan voters runs far deeper than grievances about upload speeds or infrastructure funding formulas. Broadband wires alone won’t address the deeper cultural divisions at play. But getting this right will offer Democrats a starting point to rebuild faith with rural voters, by showing that progressive government can solve real problems in their everyday lives.

Georgia’s Democratic leaders can play an outsized role in catalyzing this rural turnaround story. Senators Warnock and Ossof are the only reason President Biden was able to get his Rescue Plan through the Senate in the first place; he’ll listen when they speak up for rural Georgia. Moreover, Rep. David Scott is the first Georgian, and the first African American, to Chair of the House Agriculture Committee, which gives him a huge megaphone on rural broadband policy.

Delivering, at long last, on the promise of universal broadband access can become the cornerstone of a new Democratic covenant with rural America. 90 years after Warm Springs inspired FDR to wire up rural America, Joe Biden has an opportunity to build his own legacy voters will remember for decades to come.

Gerald Rafshoon served as White House Communications Director under President Jimmy Carter.