How to win rural voters without losing liberal values.

• Author: Longman, Martin

A CENTURY AGO, URBAN PROGRESSIVES AND AGRARIAN POPULISTS UNITED AROUND A POLITICS OF TAKING ON CORPORATE MONOPOLIES. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S FUTURE MAY DEPEND ON DOING THE SAME TODAY.

This spring, Democrats desperate for signs of a possible political comeback took heart when a young political novice, Jon Ossoff, came within two points of winning a special election in Georgia's Sixth Congressional District. Ossoff raised a record-breaking $8.3 million in three months and will face Republican Karen Handel in a runoff election on June 20. The seat, once famously occupied by Newt Gingrich, had recently been vacated by Tom Price, Donald Trump's new secretary of health and human services. Though Price won reelection easily last fall, with 62 percent of the vote, Hillary Clinton ran surprisingly strongly, losing to Trump by only 1.5 percentage points--a vastly better showing than Barack Obama, who in 2012 was trounced by twenty-three points.

In the Washington Post, Paul Kane explained that the Democratic Party was targeting the seat as part of an "emerging strategy of focusing on dozens of GOP seats in diverse, well-educated suburbs across the country in advance of next year's elections." The race for Price's old seat, added the Post's Greg Sargent, "is being widely examined as a bellwether for 2018, because it's a lot like many other GOP-held districts that Democrats will target--ones in which Trump won by a very slim margin or lost, and ones that are heavily populated with college-educated white and suburban voters." NBC News reported that Georgia's Sixth was one of ninety-seven districts the Democrats had identified in which Trump prevailed with 55 percent or less of the vote.

This strategy is rational if your primary focus is to pick up seats in the House of Representatives in 2018. Districts where Trump did the worst are the obvious low-hanging fruit. Those tend to be places like Georgia's Sixth: metro areas with growing numbers of the "rising electorate" of college-educated professionals, single women, Millennials, immigrants, and other minorities who formed the core of the Obama coalition.

The strategy is highly questionable, however, if the goal is to win more broadly--say, the presidency in 2020. After all, the Democrats approached the disastrous 2016 election precisely on the theory that presidential contests are less about persuasion than about turning out your base, and that the most efficient way to turn out your base is to focus on where most of your supporters live. By crafting messages targeted to suburban professionals (and with a heavy assist from Donald Trump's alienating campaign), the strategy worked well--in those areas. But the overall result was catastrophic. Trump won by much higher percentages than previous GOP presidential candidates in exurban and rural districts--enough (with a little help from the Russians and James Comey) to put him in the White House.

The debate within the Democratic Party about how best to win back power--reach out to rural white working-class voters, or work harder on appealing to educated professionals and other members of the rising electorate--does not align with the perceived divide between the Clinton and Bernie Sanders wings. True, Sanders's candidacy was partly based on the premise that a populist economic message could sell well in the Rust Belt industrial towns and declining rural areas that have been gravitating to the right. But even within Clinton's camp, many people--most notably her own husband--thought her campaign was making a terrible mistake by not fighting for those voters.

Since November, the confusion has only deepened. On the one hand, Democrats know that they are getting killed in the hinterlands and the heartland, and that this spells trouble not just at the national level but in the states as well. On the other hand, they are appalled by voters who supported Trump in spite of--or was it because of?--his evident racism, misogyny, personal corruption, and general contempt for accepted facts. And they worry that trying to win these folks over is more than just doomed; it could alienate the Democratic base by diluting key values that define modern progressivism: racial equality, women's rights, gay rights, and commitment to addressing climate change.

Democrats are increasingly realizing that to resolve this paradox they need what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calls "a strong, bold economic message," one that strikes a chord with rural white voters without alienating the base. Several Democrats seen as future leaders of the party, such as Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Ohio Representative Tim Ryan, have even floated specific policy plans they think would do the trick. Unfortunately, their ideas--a higher minimum wage, paid family leave, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, universal high-speed broadband-are pretty much the same ones Hillary Clinton ran on without success.

There is a much more powerful economic agenda hiding in plain sight. Americans from all walks of life are beginning to wake up to the way our economy, and indeed our way of life, has come under the control of an ever-smaller handful of ever-larger business monopolies. The bloody face of David Dao getting dragged off a United Airlines flight made many Americans question why, for instance, we let the airline market get cornered by four companies that can abuse us with impunity.

People in rural and small-town America know the dangers of industry consolidation better than anyone, having seen it strip away the livelihoods of independent farmers and local banks and merchants long before most city slickers even realized that corporate concentration was an issue.

All this points to a simple conclusion: Democrats should make fighting monopolies the central organizing principle of their economic agenda. This approach holds the promise of bringing together groups that seem inherently at odds: nativists and cosmopolitans, fundamentalists and secularists, urbanites and rural dwellers.

The strongest reason to think this could work is, quite simply, that it has worked before. A century ago, agrarian populists and big-city progressives united around a common opposition to monopoly, forming a movement that dominated American politics for decades and helped deliver a broadly shared prosperity. Because the economic landscape today is strikingly similar to what it was a hundred years ago...