Democrats used to win elections in rural areas, but that seems like a distant memory now. This week, Zach is joined by Bill Hogseth, a political organizer from rural Wisconsin, to talk about the difference between making promises and delivering change—and how Democrats can win rural America back again.

Bill Hogseth is a political organizer from rural Wisconsin, where he works for the Wisconsin Farmers Union. He is the former Chair of the Dunn County Democrats.

Twitter: @billhogseth

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Opinion: Why Democrats Keep Losing Rural Counties Like Mine: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/01/democrats-rural-vote-wisconsin-441458 

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Zach’s twitter: @zachariahsilk

 

Zach Silk:

Hey, I’m Zach Silk, and I’m the president of Civic Ventures. Many of you know, that I grew up in rural America and rural issues are very close to my heart. And honestly, they should be close to everyone’s heart, particularly because of the way that we have our political system structured in the United States. It over-indexes to rural places, that is, rural places have more power in the system than urban places. I think it’s very important that we understand what’s going on in rural America. And I was taken aback by this extraordinary essay that came out last month. It’s by a fellow named, Bill Hogseth. He was the chair of the Democratic Party in Dunn County, Wisconsin. And in fact, he grew up and lives near where I went to college in Wisconsin. And his piece in Politico is titled, Why Democrats Keep Losing Rural Counties Like Mine. It’s an awesome piece. I loved it so much that I wanted to call him up and talk about it.

Bill Hogseth:

My name is Bill Hogseth, and I am a rural progressive organizer.

Zach Silk:

Thank you so much for coming on. I think you know this, but I’m from Wisconsin. I’m calling you today from Seattle, but I grew up in Wisconsin. I grew up in a tiny little town. There are many tiny little towns in Wisconsin. I grew up in a place called Wild Rose, Wisconsin.

Bill Hogseth:

Is that Wood County?

Zach Silk:

It’s actually Waushara County.

Bill Hogseth:

Waushara, Okay. I’m sorry man, Wisconsin geographies are…

Zach Silk:

It’s okay. It happens to be one of the deep red counties in the center of the state, just West of Oshkosh. We’re West of Oshkosh, a couple hours North of Madison. Where are you from in Wisconsin? I know you’re from Dunn County, if I read the piece right.

Bill Hogseth:

Yeah, my family is six generations deep in this area of the state that we call the Chippewa Valley. Parts of Dunn County, Triple County and Eau Claire County is where my family hails from. And I’m still living here. My wife and I live with our two little boys in Dunn County, in a small town called Elk Mound, and we are about 70 miles East of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Zach Silk:

I just wanted to say, thank you so much for writing that piece in Politico. It was titled Why Democrats Keep Losing Rural Counties Like Mine. I have to say every single line of that, I couldn’t help but feel like you were speaking what I was thinking out into the world. And it was great to read. And I really felt like particularly after the election, where now we’ve seen just successive elections where Democrats are losing rural America. And they’re asking what seems to me like all the wrong questions about why that is. And I just loved so much of what you had to say. I’m really honored to be able to talk to you. I’d love to hear what got you into politics and how you found yourself in involved in local politics.

Bill Hogseth:

I’ve always since I was a kid been a political thinker. In high school even before I could vote, I campaigned for Ralph Nader. And I always saw a connection between the policies that were coming out of places where lawmakers were, whether it was Madison or DC, saw a connection between that and the lives of people, and always saw it as important. Eventually launched off the sidelines in 2016, after Donald Trump was elected as president and I made it my goal to use pretty much all of my free time to make sure that he wasn’t reelected.

And part of the reason I decided to make that my goal was well, one, I was terrified with what his presidency would mean in the lives of my kids and my neighbors and my loved ones. A lot of those fears are coming to the surface right now. But the other thing is that recognizing that I live in one of the three or four most important swing States in the country, and I thought if there’s something for me to use my time to have a high impact, it would be to get involved in the political process and to do it at the local level to try to make sure we can get out the vote and as many votes as we can contribute to making sure he wasn’t reelected.

Zach Silk:

I’d like to go down this politics road a little bit more. One of the things that you said in the piece is you talked about your dedication to good organizing and really [inaudible 00:04:52] large the party has done a lot of organizing, there’s real commitment to organizing in Wisconsin. I think Barack Obama famously made a lot of organizing commitments across the country, especially in 2008. And there is a resurgence of organizing that’s been going on, but it wasn’t enough to win Dunn County, and you point that out. Can you talk a little bit about your perspective on the limits of organizing or maybe better put, what is the positives and benefits of organizing? Because I don’t think we want to disparage it. But there are limits to it, because even after all that great work, it wasn’t enough.

Bill Hogseth:

Yeah. And just to start, I want to just say I identify as an organizer, it’s part of my DNA. I really believe that the change that we need to make in the world that’s going to help the lives of real people, starts with getting real people involved in the process. And to me, that’s the heart of good organizing. And I didn’t mean to disparage organizing in saying, oh, it wasn’t enough, so it’s not important in my article. My hope in writing the article was to provide the perspective of someone who did dedicate his life in a volunteer capacity to organizing and give up my free time to make sure that I was getting my neighbors off the sidelines and having them take responsibility to get out to vote. But I kept on having these nagging thoughts while we were having conversations with voters and while we were recruiting volunteers and doing all that grassroots work that, I would have people on the phone or at the doors before the pandemic ask me, well, I don’t see anything different in my life after the Obama administration, what’s the Biden administration going to do for me?

And there were those conversations with folks who live in rural communities, where it was hard for us to point to something that was going to change their life in a measurable, visible, tangible way that was connected to their experience as a rural American. And so to get back to your question, I think organizing is an essential part of the process, especially in rural areas where you really need to have those relationships on a one-to-one basis where people could start trusting Progressive’s in rural areas again. But if you don’t have some transformative vision or some big audacious plan for how you’re going to change people’s lives that you can point to when you’re doing that work, it makes the organizing really, really difficult.

Zach Silk:

I’m an organizer, lifelong organizer like you, I think organizing is the central part of making progressive change in America. The reality is that at the end of the day, what we have on our side as people, and the only way you get people to express power is to organize them. I agree, it’s an essential ingredient, but let’s be honest, it’s not enough. Some of what you said in your piece really resonated with me, and I’ve got a lot of complaints about the way that Obama, and team governed. Really, it’s important to understand that you’ve got to do the organizing, but just as important, you have to do the delivering. What you’ve done when you’ve done organizing is you’ve lifted people up and given them hope for a different tomorrow. That’s part of the key of organizing. That’s helping them believe that things can be different if they just band together, but when you disappoint them and you don’t deliver, it’s really, really devastating.

And as we know, Obama actually did very well with rural America, particularly in the upper Midwest, but it collapsed. And I think the support for Democrats collapsed and part of that is attached to the governing, the delivering. It was a really, honestly a complete disconnect. If you went back and read the things that Obama, would say in speeches in places like Wisconsin were put in television ads, and then you looked at his governing record, they couldn’t be more opposite. And I know you’ve said a little bit about that in your piece about this notion that if you don’t have an agenda that’s going to deliver for rural people, it doesn’t matter how much organizing you do or how much speechifying you do, you really have to deliver. Could you talk about what your thoughts are on what it means to deliver and fight for rural affairs.

Bill Hogseth:

Let me just start and say, I’m an organizer, I’m not a policy expert. A lot of my thoughts just have to do really with starting the policy question by looking at people’s lives in the community where you live, and having an open heart and looking for where is the suffering happening, and where are people experiencing that in their lives, and then working backwards from there to identify what are the policies that are actually going to change people’s lives. And so really connecting it to people’s experiences, and finding ways to change the material conditions that people find themselves in right now, because the economic despair amongst the folks who I live around is palpable. Having some way to show that change, and then recognizing that a lot of those policies, whether they’re antitrust policies or changes to the for-profit healthcare system, passing those policies are going to require coming up against powerful interests.

And for those policies to become reality, there’s going to need to be some fight. And the folks who I talked to around here, especially farmers, for example, they really understand the way the economic system works. And they really understand how economic power works, how the companies that they buy their fertilizer and seed from have pretty much monopolized that sector or the companies they sell their grain to, they can’t go around and try to get the best price for their grain because there’s only one or two buyers in the area. They understand this, and so they know when a policy is proposed, well, there needs to be a fight because there’s significant economic power surrounding them and surrounding the communities that they live in.

Zach Silk:

There’s this horrible perception driven by elite media and folks who are living in urban environments that somehow rural people are naive to power. People who live in rural America have a more sophisticated understanding of power arrangements than anybody I’ve ever spent time with in cities. And part of that is exactly what you just said, which is they understand it at this very personal level, like how it affects their crops, how it affects what they’re trying to get to market, how the international markets affect the price for what they’re producing. And then if you’re not a farmer, there’s also the dynamic of, if you own a business in a small town, you know directly what it meant when Walmart came in.

Bill Hogseth:

I agree. And I would add to that, just that a lot of the local town boards and a lot of the school boards, people in the communities where I live in, experience these really direct face-to-face relationships when it comes to government in their lives. And they often know the people who are their town chair and who are the president of their school board and see them at the grocery store and talk with them at the coffee shop. And I think that adds to the perception of how power and resources work. And I would just add also to that when it comes to the understanding of power, I think there’s this overwhelming feeling amongst my neighbors, that a lot of the decisions that affect their life are made somewhere else. Culture happens somewhere else, capital flows somewhere else, decisions are made somewhere else.

And when you think about this idea of resentment, I think that’s where a lot of this comes from that we’re not in control of our own destinies here. And I think this goes both ways in the rural, urban divide that stereotypes are alive and well of rural people. And I think also of urban people, stereotypes held by rural folks because there’s not the cross-pollination and the opportunities for those communities to go experience one another enough. There’s this often stereotype that everybody in rural America is a farmer, well it’s certainly not the case. You get political organizations wanting to develop a rural message and they often have a picture of a farmer in there, and it becomes a caricature of itself. I just appreciate you just mentioning that a lot of our perceptions of rural and urban can be based on those stereotypes. But to the experience of just living in rural America, I grew up in Eau Claire-Chippewa Falls, which are very close to here.

I chose to raise a family here and I’m 40 years old. One of the things that for me, and I think it’s common amongst other of my neighbors is that we often choose to spend our lives here. And we are not as mobile as I think other folks in the country are, or at least that I know of. It’s interesting to have this 40 year time lapse video of my life, where I have seen my community change over those decades. And having the memories of those barns that I see that are now empty and rotten, and the roofs are collapsed. Knowing that those barns, when I was a kid we had 30 or 40 cows in the bottom stalls and we’re supporting a small family business, and it was part of this network of small farms that were really holding up the rural communities around here, and then to be able to fast forward now to myself as an adult.

And I’m driving in the town, empty barn, after empty barn, and then starting to see these large dairies that have 2000 cows in them now, when you live here your whole life you experience the story and you experience that change visually. And it’s this feeling that you get back to that things are changing without our voices being part of that process.

I was talking to a dairy farmer last year, and I don’t know if his stats were right, but he’s a smart dude. And he said, in Dane County in 1972, there were 1100 dairy farms just in our County. And then as of last year, he said there were 150 dairy farms. And so this whole feeling that all these small businesses are blinking off the landscape, businesses that you could actually raise a family with, and then you see these visual reminders of these empty barns, it reminds you that the economy has changed and that it’s harder and harder to get by around here. And also when you’re someone like me, a lot of my friends have left this area. I see more people having left than people having stayed. And so that’s another feeling like, well, the people who you grew up with are all gone because there’s nothing to stay here for.

Zach Silk:

Sadly, I’m one of those people.

Bill Hogseth:

And that’s okay.

Zach Silk:

I know, [crosstalk 00:16:31]

Bill Hogseth:

The opportunities are elsewhere.

Zach Silk:

I wrestle with it myself as you might imagine, but it had almost everything to do with opportunity. There used to be, you could stick around, you could become a manager of a store, you could inherit your family’s business, you could inherit your family’s farm. There were reasons to stay. And you could be successful. And if you were ambitious, there was absolutely nothing wrong with sticking around and making that happen. And that carried generation after generation. There’s bunches of us that we saw opportunities elsewhere because we didn’t feel like there were opportunities there. When I was younger, I didn’t really understand what that meant, but as I’ve gotten older, I realized that this didn’t happen by accident. This happened because people made choices. Policymakers made choices that got us into this mess and policy makers can make choices to get us out of this mess. And that to me is one of the things you’re alluding to that, there’s no reason that rural America shouldn’t have as ample opportunities as it once did.

We made choices that basically treated rural America as a place to exploit rather than a place to invest in and celebrate. And that plays out in farms and plays out in small businesses and small towns. And one of the things I think that’s really important for everybody listening to understand is that one of the big choices that was made is, is we let people, companies, concentrate, gather up power. As they concentrated economic power, they concentrated political power, which fed more concentration of economic power. In your piece, you talk about its time to fight for rural people. Democrats want to win. They need to fight for rural people again, and for their interests. And really that to me is what matters most. We used to win rural America. Wasn’t a mystery how we did it.

FDR had a new deal where he delivered massive investments in infrastructure in your community. Electrification, helped with farming, helped with infrastructure and road building and other things that were going to allow you to get your goods to market. And of course he gave people resources. He helped with unemployment. He helped with retirement. And then the final and most important thing of course is he fought concentration. He fought the robber barons, the previous generation of concentrated trust power and that all helped rural America thrive. And I think that to me is what we have to return to is this idea of fighting for rural America. But I don’t know about you, I run into a lot of people whenever I ask people about how they want to start fighting for rural America again, and I hear a lot of warmed over trickled down economics, only if we give more big tax breaks to big businesses. If only people learned how to code, they could get their way out of this. Do you hear a lot of that?

Bill Hogseth:

I do hear a lot of that. I actually had a reply from someone after my article went, that literally said the only challenge facing rural areas is that they aren’t urbanizing. And the person provided a lot of rationale to support their argument, but it was all lost on me. It really smacked of some of the misconceptions about rural prosperity. But to your point, what does it look like to fight from a policy standpoint for rural America that isn’t one of these stereotyped, something that’s based off a stereotype. A great example, you mentioned, FDR’s new deal. And one of the gifts from the new deal was supply management of agricultural products and the price supports that were in there to make sure supply and demand were balanced, and that would make sure that small farmers had ability to get a fair price for the milk they were making, or the meat they were making.

And in 1996, when I was a sophomore in high school, that farm bill, which was signed by Bill Clinton, ended those price supports. And I think it led away to the dairy crisis that we’re in right now, where we’re losing hundreds of dairy farms a year in a state that’s called the dairy state. That’s an example, supply management and price stabilization for dairy farmers is something that could be brought up and that could be championed by the Biden administration. Now I’m not hopeful because Tom Vilsack has been appointed as the Ag secretary and his background on supply management is not a favorable one, but it’s those types of policies that I think could, getting back to that question of people’s lives, just stabilizing prices so that the price of a hundred weight of milk is not below the break even point for someone who’s running a dairy farm. For dairy farmers to operate for year, after year, after year, below the break even point.

I asked people, what would it be like for you to go to your job month, after month, after month, and not collect a paycheck? Would you be mad at the arrangement that you’re in? Would you feel trapped? And I think everyone would say yes, that they would think that there was some injustice there. And I think that’s how a lot of farmers have, who I talked to at least have felt during this time of crazy, crazy low commodity prices for the products that they’re producing everyday.

Zach Silk:

The other thing I wanted to make sure that hit on, something like 50% of the jobs in rural America now are tied to corporate America. And what we ought to be doing is holding those large companies to much higher standards. And right now they’re paying, most places they’re paying well below $15 an hour, of course, but often as little as the federal minimum wage. And that just means that these jobs that potentially at one time were the types of jobs where you could be a manager at your local diner and be able to lead a good stable life. Now you’re working for a fast food chain and you’re a manager and you’re working 60 hours a week making minimum wage, or just above it.

Bill Hogseth:

Hallelujah to that. I was just up in a town North of me called Colfax, and drove by the Dollar General and drove by the Cenex gas station that actually just got its name changed because it just experienced some consolidation. It’s now Synergy in the local subway and all these corporations that are now the businesses in these small towns. I agree with you. Another thing that I’ve also been thinking about that I think has some promise is this idea of revitalizing the U.S. Postal Service to start delivering postal banking and providing just basic financial services to the small towns around us, that aren’t serviced by banks. There’s 14 million Americans that basically don’t have access to those personal checking accounts, or small loans, or things like that. And I think that could be a way to, there’s 31,000 post offices in the country that reach into all corners of the country. And if you want to provide a living example to someone of the good that government can do in their life, I think the postal service offers us a really amazing opportunity to do that.

Zach Silk:

Did you have anything you wanted to hit that we have not had a chance to talk about?

Bill Hogseth:

Yeah, I’ll just say one thing that for me as I talked to other rural folks who live around me, and work around me and they ask me questions about different ways to organize the economy so that it can actually lift up the community rather than extract from the community. And I think there’s just such an amazing power in having a vibrant example of what that looks like. And one way I’ve been able to communicate that better here in Wisconsin is that one of our most enduring institutions that everyone loves in this state is really an example of what a progressive institution is, which is the Green Bay Packers. And it’s an organization that came out of the progressive era. And when Wisconsin was a leader in that movement, you mentioned minimum wage, we were the first state to pass a minimum wage law six years before the Packers were founded.

That team would not exist if the community hadn’t taken ownership of it. It would have fallen into bankruptcy. And then even if it hadn’t fallen into bankruptcy, it would have been moved. If there was some billionaire owner, it would be now the Los Angeles Packers or whatever. And there’s a reason that we’re still Lambeau field and we’re not [inaudible 00:25:35] field. We’re not some corporate stadium. I like examples. And I point to the Packers to help people understand that when you have an organization, a firm that is owned by the community and it’s giving back to the community, its profits are shared and recycled back into the community, into the player facilities, and the decisions are made by the community, it’s really an awesome example to help people understand that things don’t have to look the way they currently look in terms of giant corporations making all the decisions in the economy.

Zach Silk:

For people who didn’t grow up in Wisconsin, there’s church and football on Sundays, and it’s really a special thing. And I love that example. Let me just ask one final thing or two, I have two quick things. One, if somebody was elected leader came to you today and said, I want to win rural America back for Democrats. What would you broadly tell them? What would your simple message be to them?

Bill Hogseth:

Simple message would be, the policies are important. And many of the policies we talked earlier in the show, I would point them towards antitrust enforcement or supply management or revitalizing the U.S. Postal Service. But I would say perhaps even more important is, tell the story because when people are in a situation where their lives and the lives of the people who they love are not going well, people look around and try to find an explanation that makes sense to them, for why that’s happening to them and stories are the way human beings make sense of their reality. And if no one’s telling them a story from the progressive side of things, they’re going to reach for other stories. And that was, I think, what happened with Donald Trump. Donald Trump, told them a story that villainized other working people, as being one another’s enemies and promoted that scarcity mindset that we’re all fighting for smaller and smaller pieces of the pie. So you better get yours.

And I think Progressive’s fail to tell a story that resonates with the rural experience. And I would also say importantly, every story has a plot, every story has a moral, but also every story has a villain. And it’s really important to name that villain and put a face on the villain. And the villain is the system that enables the economic plundering of these places that we love and that we call home and the soil that the crops grow out of, and there’s specific people who benefit from the status quo and the way things are right now. And we just need to name who they are. To the extent to that we don’t tell that story, we leave this huge opening for other people to tell a different story, and that’s pretty dangerous. Campaign slogans, talking points, and well-produced TV ads, don’t supplement for a good story that resonates with people’s experiences.

Zach Silk:

That’s awesome. Something we ask all our guests is, why do you do this work?

Bill Hogseth:

Why do I do this work? I do this work for two reasons. The first is because I have children and I feel a responsibility to them, not just to make sure that they’ve got a decent world that I’m going to send them out into when they’re grown men. But also I want to provide an example to them of what it looks like to be an engaged citizen and somebody who is taking responsibility for the world they live in and not just letting things happen to them.

The other reason I do this work is because I really truly believe in the dignity of every human being and want everybody to have what they need to survive and prosper. And even my neighbors down the street who disagree with me politically, I would go snow blow their driveway, or pull their truck out of the ditch if they needed help. And I will fight for a world where they can get healthcare if they need it and make sure that if they’re farmers, they get fair prices in the marketplace.

Zach Silk:

Hey Bill, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Bill Hogseth:

Zach, it was great talking. Glad we had a chance to meet and hope to hear from you again soon.

Zach Silk:

Go Pack!

Speaker 3:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.