Can Harris-Walz Policy Win Back Rural Voters? Rural Jurors Still Out.
It's a hell of a lot better than bailouts for the damage done by tariffs.
The Harris-Walz campaign rolled out a package of policy proposals today aimed at strengthening rural America, prior to a campaign event in western Pennsylvania’s Lawrence County. With just three weeks to go before Election Day, the campaign knows that Trump carried rural precincts by almost two to one in 2020 against Joe Biden, but shifting even a few thousand rural votes could make a huge difference in tight races in battleground states.
Rural healthcare has seen disastrous losses for over a decade, with small-town hospitals closing and doctors, nurses, and other medical staff in short supply. The rural hospital crisis has been a result of consolidation in the industry, but also the refusal of red-state governments to accept Medicaid expansion as part of the Affordable Care Act. That sure taught the libs, and those states’ rural constituents, a lesson!
The Harris plan seeks to recruit 10,000 new healthcare professionals in rural and tribal areas, by offering incentives like scholarships and early student loan forgiveness for healthcare staff who live and work in rural areas. The plan includes a new grant program that would train and fund rural community health workers and expand the availability of clinics. The campaign notes that “When a provider trains in a rural area, they’re more likely to remain living and working there.”
Harris also calls for permanent funding of an existing program that extends Medicare coverage for telehealth services in rural areas; that program has helped people get healthcare they couldn’t otherwise, but it’s set to expire at the end of this year. Making it permanent would double the current funding and free up more money for communities to get the equipment they need for telehealth.
Another proposal seeks to halve the number of “ambulance deserts,” or places where people live 25 minutes or farther away from ambulance services, by the end of the decade. The program would expand availability of EMTs and paramedics through grants for training and equipment, and even for building new first responder stations. A related plan would provide grants to small volunteer ambulance services for training and equipment.
In addition, the proposal calls on Congress to take steps that would help rural pharmacies stay open, as well as adding about 3,000 pharmacies to replace those that have closed. It would also expand a Medicare designation for “Rural Emergency Hospitals” that would allow emergency departments to remain open in areas that can’t support a full-service hospital anymore.
The plan also discusses multiple ways that some of the campaign’s already-announced initiatives would help folks in rural areas, like the expanded child tax credit, a proposed $6,000 tax credit for new babies, and Harris’s recent proposal to have Medicare cover home healthcare so elderly or disabled Americans can live at home, not in a nursing home.
Similarly, the document points out that other Harris economic policies aren’t just for urban and suburban folks, but will also help rural areas, like her plans to make new housing more affordable or to offer a $25,000 startup tax deduction for new businesses, as well as greater support for programs that will help train teachers who’ll work in rural area, expanding rural broadband (already funded in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law), and even funding for clean-energy school buses and charging infrastructure.
Also, not a small point: In each policy area, the plan notes that Donald Trump mostly wants to eliminate programs that are already benefiting rural communities, like his call to repeal Obamacare, which would accelerate already-bad rural hospital and healthcare shortage.
On the other hand, Trump promises to deport all the immigrants who currently work in rural areas, so that ought to be real popular with people who don’t rely on their labor, the end.
[AP / Harris-Walz Plan for Rural Communities (Twitter thread)]
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Ambulance desserts, on the other hand, are the sweet treats that'll put you in the hospital.
The "elephant in the room" that no one wants to talk about is that "rural voters" aren't just "rural" voters.
The die-hard attachment "rural voters" have to the GOP isn't because of some perceived benefit they get by voting Republican. They're the racist, bigoted voting block that left the Democratic Party in the 1950s and 60s that was successfully wooed by Nixon and Reagan.
I agree with another non-comment here - you could give them the world and they still are not going to vote for a party that gives any recognition to minorities.
The question the media should be asking, rather than "Can Democrats appeal to rural voters?" is "Can deeply racist and bigoted rural voters get over their goddamned racism and bigotry for Christ's sake?"