Election 2010: Small towns give thumbs down to Democrats

For thirty-four years, Ike Skelton managed to win race after race in his rural corner of Missouri.  But this year, the Democrat was swept aside by the Republican surge. 

Actuality One:  I’ve instructed my staff to cooperate fully to make the transition smooth.

Skelton lost to political newcomer Vicki Hartzler.   One of his supporters, Kansas City attorney Larry McMullen, told public radio station KCUR that the mood here had simply changed.

Actuality Two:  "Of course this is a Republican district and over the years Republicans have crossed over to support Ike. Now Republicans, smelling blood in the water, are rising up and saying, let's just throw everybody out."

Democrats were tossed out in rural districts across the US – not just in the Midwest or the South. 

Scott Murphy – a businessman from Glens Falls — won his rural seat in a special election just last year here in northern New York and worked to distance himself from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

 Here he is during a debate on WMHT television the week before the vote.

 Actuality Three:  That’s why I’m rated as one of the most centrist members of congress…those are the skills that I bring from my career building businesses and bringing jobs.

 Murphy tried to focus the campaign on local issues – everything from dairy farms to his district’s troubled horse-racing industry.

  But he ran smack into a wave of small-town voters who see any Democrat as suspect.  Chris Callahan from Waterfort, New York, joined an anti-Murphy rally the day before the election.  

 Actuality Five:  Murphy is just aligned with Obama, it’s the wrong way to go, it’s been tried, it hasn’t worked.

 Bill Bishop is a journalist who writes about small-town politics for a blog called the Daily Yonder. 

 He says Democrats are now an endangered species in House districts where most small-town voters live.

 Actuality Six:  They just pretty much disappeared from a lot of rural America…From the Dakotas across Minnesota and Michigan and Wisconsin to the territory of New York and Pennsylvania – and then all of New Hampshire switched. 

 Rural America has been trending conservative for decades.  Small towns tend to be older and whiter – and they have more military veterans. 

 The surprising thing, according to Bishop’s analysis, is that Democrats still managed to win and hold a lot of rural seats.

 Politicians like Ike Skelton built a wall of incumbency – using their deep local roots, and big campaign war chests to protect themselves against their districts’ conservative lean.

 But this year, that all changed, with roughly forty rural Democrats toppled in a single night. 

 Increasingly, Bishop says, people in small towns just feel politically and culturally isolated from a Democratic Party that that they perceive as being led by a mostly urban politicians.

 Actuality Seven:  When Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are mentioned in these advertisements, they’re described as someone other than us – politics now is about teams and it’s about tribes.

 The danger for Democrats here in the North Country is that small towns will play a big role again in 2012. 

 Bill Owens won the 23^rd district in a squeaker, but in two years he’ll face rural voters like Sally Lewillier from Brownville.

Actuality Eight:  The Republicans are going to win, I hope, and take back the country that we need to have taken back — the Democrats under Obama have ruined the country.

Small town voters will also help to sway a lot of electoral college votes in the next presidential race, and tilting Senate races from Missouri to Montana.