All right, welcome listeners to episode 105 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sittman, your podcast co-host. I'm here as always with my great friend, Sam Heatherbell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. Hi, Sam. I just want to say by the time listeners hear this, it'll be Thanksgiving probably or maybe the day after. If they have a life, you know, don't listen right away. But of course, I'm grateful for you and grateful for everyone who keeps listening to us. And I'm sure listeners will be...
grateful for the different guests we have this episode than our last one, perhaps. Yeah, be grateful. We had on my old friend, Luke Mayville, who's the co-founder and executive director of Reclaim Idaho, which is a grassroots... organization in that very red state that, among other things, as you'll hear, championed the ballot referendum for Medicaid expansion in the state. And they won. So about 100,000 people in Idaho have health care.
of Reclaim Idaho. So that's Luke's main gig and why we want to talk to him. But he and I go way back and he is a fellow, not perma ABD like me, but he actually finished his PhD in political theory. So that's how I initially... knew Luke. We were both political theorists.
Yeah, I was going to say, Luke could not be a more appropriate Know Your Enemy guest, not only because of his long friendship with you, but also because of your Catholic connection, because of the political theory connection. And then he's out in Idaho doing economically populist organizations. organizing in rural America, the Venn diagram of all kinds of things we're interested in.
on this podcast, Intersect at Luke Mayville. Yes, that's true. We were very glad to have Luke on. And we don't really need to say too much more about this conversation other than even though, you know, we couldn't avoid talking about the election and having this turn.
into something of a postmortem. It's not exactly that, or at least we try to resist it, especially at the start. And just talk about what Luke has seen on the ground there, you know, traveling all over the state in a state where, again, it's very Republican, very red. But initiatives like the Medicaid expansion have won there.
And they've done things like defend funding for public schools there, too. Those kinds of things can win in red states. So what does that mean for people like us on the left, for Democrats, for our politics? It's complicated. And I don't think we offer. false hope. Certainly not for the Democrats. Yes, certainly not for the Democrats by the time we get to the end of this episode. But it's a great episode and we're very grateful that Luke...
took so much time to talk with us. Yeah, I would just say as one other thing, I'm finding these kinds of conversations where you talk kind of concretely about what kind of organizing is still possible, given all the structural disadvantages for...
progressive politics in this country and the general right-wing winds that are certainly blowing across the country in the Trump 2.0 era, I'm really inclined and interested in having these kinds of conversations that are really about what kind of organizing we can do. to protect each other, but also to push forward egalitarian values in an era that seems particularly hostile to them. And there's some work to be done.
Well, should we get some housekeeping items? Let's. As always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent. One thing they do is they sponsor the podcast, and among other things, that means they offer a free digital subscription if you subscribe to Know Your Enemy on our Patreon for $10. a month you can do that at patreon.com slash know your enemy and also now of course if you subscribe at that ten dollar
per month amount, you get access to the Know Your Enemy Discord. We've had at least one really great chat there with listeners before the election. I'm sure we'll do another one in the weeks ahead. So please consider signing up for that. We're really loading on the benefits at that $10.
a month level. Free digital subscription to Descent and the Discord. And of course, for $5 a month, you get access to all of our bonus episodes, which there's a lot of good ones in the can you can already listen to and a lot of great ones that will be coming up. And as always, we want to thank Jesse Brenneman, our intrepid producer, as well as Will Epstein, who does the lovely music for the podcast. Yes. Well, shall we get to it, Samuel? Yeah, let's.
Here's our episode with Luke Mayville of Reclaim Idaho about red state rural politics. Enjoy. Happy Thanksgiving. All right. Well, it's a real pleasure to introduce to the podcast an old friend of mine, Luke Mayville.
Welcome to the podcast. So good to be here with you all. It's so great to meet you, Luke. This podcast has been in the works for a long time. I was saying to Matt yesterday that it's been years and years that Matt goes, you know, we should really get my friend Luke to come on the podcast. He'd be so good. And I always said, yeah, let's do it. Sure, let's do it. But it really wasn't until preparing for this that I read a bunch of your writing and about all the work you're doing.
And I realized how right he was. So I'm so excited for this conversation. Yes. For listeners, just a little background. Luke, you're training this as a political theorist. And so we had that in common. Someone said we should meet each other. And it was right when you started teaching at Columbia University on a postdoc, and I had started as an editor at Commonweal. And of course, I really wanted you to write for me. And then independently, when I became Catholic.
It turns out the priest I talked to... was your priest. So you were my sponsor when I became Catholic. Yes. And I'll point out another big commonality, which is that we weren't just political theorists. We were in the conservative political theory world to some degree, because I studied... founding era and wrote about the political ideas of John Adams and even though I didn't write about
those ideas in a conservative way. When you think and write about the founding era, you tend to get thrown in all kinds of retreats and conferences and things with very conservative. intellectuals. So we share a common lineage there as well. You guys have both benefited for a time from the conservative gravy train. of intellectual spending. Me far more than Luke. And Luke, one more little anecdote. I was thinking too, you know...
When your dissertation on John Adams was published, John Adams and the Fear of Oligarchy. John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy. Yes. As I mentioned, I was an editor at Commonweal, and so I wanted to try to get the book reviewed. And I sent it to Gary Wills. And he liked the book, but he declined to review it. But that was the first time I sent an email to Gary Wills. So you're kind of in an indirect way.
part of me being wills pilled and then inflicting that on all of our listeners. So thank you for that. I will take full credit for listeners who dislike. The amount of Catholicism and the amount of Gary Wills on this podcast, you have Luke Mayville to blame. Well, Luke, we wanted to have you on because I first met you in New York City. But for a number of years now, when did you move to Idaho? There, I gave away the punchline. Well, I grew up in North Idaho outside of a town called Sandpoint.
and then went off to college and grad school and things. And then my wife and I, and then we had a kid right around the same time as well, we moved back right at the end of 2019 and really settled in. And have been here since working and organizing and just continuing what we started. Yes. So your work in Idaho.
That's at least one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you, because, you know, one of the kind of aspects of the postmortems on the election, one of the areas where it's identified Democrats have really struggled in more recent. years than they had for a long time is with the rural vote. You know, one of the kind of top line statistics from the 2024 election, based on the AP vote cast, it's that 62%
of rural voters voted for Trump and 36% for Kamala Harris. So Trump cleaned up with them. We can tag, I suppose, on the definition of rural. Sometimes it's used in the discourse in ways that don't match technical definitions. But we wanted to have you on because this is a major topic. You are in a very, very red state, Idaho.
doing really important grassroots work. You were very involved with Medicaid expansion there, getting it on the ballot as an initiative. Maybe you could tell us about what that campaign was and kind of how you went about organizing it.
organizing that effort because the results were different in Idaho than a lot of other places that also expanded Medicaid. You did very well, even in the rural counties. Sometimes, you know, overperforming places that went against Hillary Clinton by 40 points or something. Right. So could you tell us about the Medicaid expansion campaign and how you went about organizing that effort?
Well, a few old friends of mine, Emily and Garrett Strezic, a married couple, we got together and started this organization, Reclaim Idaho. And our first big project was... the Medicaid expansion. And an important part of the story is, you know, we were people who followed politics closely. And in my case, you know, I came with this background in political science and political.
but we were very much amateurs in politics. I had some amount of experience mainly just doing volunteer work, but beyond that, no professional political work whatsoever. And that meant early on that we had no credible case to make to any donors or anything like that, that we were going to be able to actually get a serious statewide campaign.
off the ground. And that put us in a really hard position where without any money, to really get something going and without being able to just hire a lot of people, especially when you have to get something on the ballot, you have to put together a massive signature drive. to get the signatures, to put it on the ballot. So how to do that with no money. So what we turned to is the little bit we knew about organizing.
and theories of grassroots organizing. And what we were really motivated by early on was this idea of distributed organizing where you could go around and find people in different local communities all across. the geography, so in this case, all across the state of Idaho, and you could build local teams of volunteers who would work together in support of a common cause.
And it's this old idea, and this is something that I wrote about for Commonweal a few years ago, this idea that there are people scattered all over the place, all over the country and in any given community. who are out there who really want to get engaged in politics, and they want to do something big and even monumental. They want to really work hard on something. They don't just want to be asked to send an email.
chip in $10. They actually want to be part of some big positive change. And the challenge of organizing is you've got to get out there and find those people and then you have to make the right type of ask of them. and set in front of them the right type of strategy. And a big breakthrough for us was we came up with this idea of touring around the state in an old green camper. It was a 1978.
Dodge Ranger RV and we spray painted it bright green and we put the slogan Medicaid for Idaho across the side of it. And we toured around and some organizers have called this barnstorming as a kind of tactic. You show up in a town, you try to get as many people to at least show up to your event, at least get their foot in the door. Or in our case, you know, maybe it was just meeting in.
parking lot or a park right around our RV and just show up. And then by the time they leave, you want them to be committed at some level to continuing to be involved in the effort. So we did that and we were able to build. These local teams around the state that ultimately powered a signature drive that enabled us to get it on the ballot. And then once we had an extraordinary amount of momentum.
We were able to build a whole coalition of organizations that wouldn't have taken us seriously and in many cases didn't take us seriously at all when we started. But by the end of it, we had something closer to an actual professional. coalition campaign combined with this unique grassroots campaign. And I do credit that combination with how we were able to drive up the vote share so much, especially in all of these far flung. small towns and rural areas in the state.
And Luke, before we go any further, what's the timeline here? Well, that's an incredibly important question because it was 2017. So it was in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. So we're very much part of that groundswell, that national groundswell. coming out and wanting to do something and you know like some people have called it huddling people just coming together in living rooms trying to figure out what they're going to do
After the 2016 election and feels a little bit different at the moment. I'm not sure what's going to happen this time around. Fewer huddles. But back then it was certainly happening in a major way.
I think a really successful tactic that we had is that we would bring people together in these organizing meetings. And something I used to do is you know if you had a circle of people i would go around ask them to introduce themselves and say something about what motivated them to show up here today and after the first like one or two of those
I realized that if you're not careful, like half the people or more will just launch into talking about how much they hate Trump. So what I started doing is saying. You know, introduce yourself, say something about what motivates you to be here today. And please, if you can, if you were going to mention the president, don't. And it's okay. It's okay if that is the immediate thing that motivated you. But try to dig deeper and actually ask yourself, what is it?
about my values at some level or my commitments, my deeper commitments that Trump offends. And just talk about those things. Take the president and the parties, the political parties out of it. Make it about those deeper values that you have that are being offended in this moment and talk about that. And that was, I think, a really important shift because that actually gave us something really constructive to then build on. I want to talk more about the texture of that organizing.
to give listeners a feel for what it was like to do it, both the signature gathering and then the campaign. But before we do, I feel like we may have jumped the gun a little bit for listeners who may not... remember the history of Medicaid expansion. So, you know, Obamacare passed and the biggest part of it, the most important part of it, the part that really actually helped the most people was the Medicaid expansion. It just raised the threshold to...
what is it, double the poverty line? And that meant that... Many, many, many, many, many, many more people who fell in a crack, who didn't have health insurance, could get it through Medicaid. Conservatives didn't like that. And was it a court that decided that? Yeah, so the big showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020.
2012, the court was considering whether to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act. And the big headline was, you know, John Roberts upholds the ACA, right? That was the big headline. But tucked within that story was a real tragedy, which is the court said, Well, the Medicaid expansion part is optional for states. So the federal government can't simply expand Medicaid programs in all 50 states. They have to leave it up to the local politicians to determine. And when they did that, it broke.
Joke along partisan lines where states run by Republicans refuse to accept this massive expansion of health care in their own states. Federal money that was just sitting there. And that's just that's a really important setup for this story because. The places where these kinds of initiatives were taking place on ballots were in red states because they were the states where governors or state legislators decided, no, we don't want to help the poor people here.
And that's why people like you were in this position of having to organize on this terrain that people thought of. as hostile to this kind of expansion of the welfare state, even though, of course, many red states...
have a very, very high number of people who are not on health insurance and very, very high number of people who are poor. That's the situation. I just wanted to say that that is the situation. So many places ended up doing it this way, right, by getting it on the ballot and then letting people vote. But they were in red states. where this took place. Yes, and there were some as the years went on after that US Supreme Court decision.
There were a few exceptions where maybe relatively moderate Republican governors would come forward and say, OK, the game's up. Like, we've got to accept this money, like John Kasich in Ohio. for example, came forward and said, we can't afford to just turn down hundreds of millions, or in the case of Ohio, probably billions of federal dollars every year.
And so they accepted it, but they were the exception. And most states run by Republicans refused to accept it. And thus getting on the ballot was a kind of end around these intransigent Republican governors. You could just put it on the ballot and let the people vote or not to expand Medicaid. Yes. And when we started, we didn't have any polling. It was Idaho specific, but we were looking at national polling. on the popularity of medicare and medicaid generally and noticing that
50 to 60 percent of Republicans nationwide have a favorable view, at least back then and probably still today, a favorable view of both Medicare and Medicaid. And they don't even necessarily see Medicaid differently. which was a little bit surprising to me when I first learned that because in some of the political discourse, people think, oh, Medicaid is poor people and that kind of thing. And that became really clear to me when I first started.
traveling around Idaho and seeing, oh, everyone can name one or two people or more in their immediate network who depend on Medicaid for basic services. So it's just very... embedded in communities all across the country. But anyway, we were seeing that polling early on that majorities of Republicans nationwide have a favorable view. And we had this hunch that...
Yeah, that anti-Medicaid politics that's leading all these governors and legislatures to reject the Medicaid expansion might be a little bit more of an elite Republican or a certain kind of narrow view among Republicans. and might not be shared by the majority of people out there. And then right around that time, the state of Maine, they put it on the ballot. And that was a signal to us when we were thinking about our own organizing strategy.
oh, wow, that's something that can be done. You can put this on the ballot. So we started then and there on looking into how we could build the type of... grassroots signature drive we would need to put that into effect in Idaho. And there's one other thing I want to put on the table here to set the scene, which is that there was something really distinctive about your campaign, even compared to other red states.
that put Medicaid on the ballot and managed to expand it, getting a majority of the vote in an election, which is that... In most of the places that did this, the vast majority of the votes came from a small number of densely populated and urban and suburban areas. So in your piece that you wrote for Matt at Commonweal in September 2020... There was a bunch of examples of this. In Nebraska, it passed with only 8 of 93.
counties, with seven of 77 counties in Oklahoma. In Montana, five of 56 counties. In Utah, nine of 29. So that means that, as we know in this country, people are concentrated in cities, and then there's less populated rural areas. And the way that... this was working in most states was that the campaigns were targeting people for the most part, probably in the urban communities, but that's also where they thought the votes were for getting the expansion passed.
Idaho is an outlier. You were able to get 35 of 44 counties to vote for the expansion. You won with 61% of the statewide vote, but it was spread out all over the state in a way that was unique. relative to other states. That's right. In those other states you mentioned, the layout of the votes across geography resembled the partisan divide to some degree.
It still resembled the basic pattern of an urban-rural divide, whereas Idaho was very unique in that respect, where we were just winning counties, including the five counties with the least population. all voted in favor. And there wasn't a county in the whole state that went below 40%. So that was remarkable as well. And we can't say with certainty, but the biggest difference in the way that our campaign was structured was this distributed.
organizing strategy where there were local leaders and local teams actually in communities engaging in often face-to-face persuasion, local volunteers showing up on
radio programs and writing letters to the editor and the local paper and knocking doors in their town and all of that. And we do think that really... made a big difference it's not a magic fix with any initiative and we've learned that since because we've also lost campaigns and that's something you know that worth reflecting on but in this case
You know, compared to especially one major campaign that we recently lost around the issue of electoral reform, Medicaid expansion was a bread and butter issue where you're appealing directly. to people's interests or at least the interests of their immediate neighbors and friends. And when you're able to do that, at least this is our going theory, when you're able to do that in this very local way where you're drawing out the voices of people in those communities.
And they become local advocates in addition to whatever TV advertisements and other things that you're able to do. That's a powerful formula. I wanted to just lift up one county here that you mentioned in your piece, just as an example for listeners to get a sense of how kind of extraordinary this accomplishment was in Bear Lake County in Idaho, which has a population of under 6,000 people.
It gave Hillary Clinton just 8.7% of the vote in 2016. And two years later, when you guys had Medicaid expansion on the ballot, it won a majority of the county's votes and outperformed Clinton by over 40 points. That's unbelievable. Let's talk about how this happened. Yes. I mean, Luke, one thing I wanted to ask is you mentioned your specific strategy here of local people, the distributed organizing. Before we go too much further.
What would have been, say, the way a political consultant might have told you to run this campaign? Did you have any discussions with donors, people in Washington, people maybe in the Democratic Party or nonprofits? Would they have told you to do it this way? Well, the conventional wisdom...
out there is that it really is all about money and advertising. And early on, I was talking with a consultant when we first were getting the campaign off the ground who basically told us what you really need to do. is bring together whatever network of donors you have, even if it's really small and you need to focus on fundraising, raise enough to put a poll out in the field that shows that it's a viable idea.
Because then you need to take that poll and use that as a fundraising instrument to go to larger donors and raise money from them because you need to get at least a million dollars or more to be able to launch a signature drive. like not even to win the vote, but just to launch a signature drive. And then hopefully once you launch a signature drive by hiring paid signature gatherers, right? you would then turn and have to raise millions more to fund an aggressive paid advertising campaign.
and just putting really large amounts of money directly into paid advertising with the idea that that is overwhelmingly the main. persuasion tactic that moves people. I would say in all of my experience, that's something like a conventional view. And we haven't entirely...
you know, upended that because whenever possible, we have tried to combine the two. We don't want to leave votes on the table by not getting advertisements out there and informing voters about the benefits of the initiative that we're putting forward. But we have believed that it's very important to actually...
organize people at the local level. And then even more importantly, it's part of a long-term mission that we have where we're not just trying to win one ballot initiative campaign at a time. We're also... really using these campaigns to get people organized. And that type of organization is beneficial for so many other reasons beyond just any one campaign. So let's zoom in.
for a minute on this stuff like you've painted your camper green you're on the road what were some of the first encounters you had were the first leaders you identified How did those people make themselves known to you? And what kinds of qualities did they evince? Like, give me some scenes or a sense of... when you thought, okay, holy shit, this might actually work? Well, one thing that we would do that led us to believe that it would really work is if we showed up in a town...
And hardly anyone showed up to meet us or no one showed up to meet us. We would just go to a grocery store parking lot and we would talk to people. and do you know what people call list building so we'd have like a clipboard and we would just try to meet people who were interested in the idea and get them to sign up to hear from us you know over email and this was before we even launched a signature drive And we would actually a little tactic we use that was successful is we would have Sharpies.
And the first ask we would make of them is to sign the actual camper itself. So they would sign the camper and put their town. And that turned out to be amazing because by the end of it, You had this bright green camper and the green was still really clear, but it was also the whole thing is just covered in Sharpie signatures with all the towns of Idaho represented. So it kind of represented this statewide. demand for this policy.
And then, by the way, we would after right after they signed it, we'd then say, oh, and by the way, could you sign up to hear more from us? Well, you have a nice signature. Could you put it here as well? Yeah, that's right. But in the lead up to that, we just often approach people with the simple. you know, question and say something like, hey, we came down from Sandpoint and we're driving this camper around talking to people about health care in Idaho.
Could you tell us what you think of what it's like to try to get health care in Idaho? Do you have issues with it? Do you think it works well? And people were really receptive to the question. I mean, of course, in any organizing you ever do, and everyone needs to know this, especially if you haven't done much of it.
A lot of people will just ignore you and just keep walking and you have to be ready for that. So it's really about can you at least get a decent percentage of people to stop and talk to you. And it really did work in that. Like people were stopping. That's when it really hit home to me how many people really depend on Medicaid or at least know someone who depends on it. And people would also just share stories about. Medicare, you know, they get into all these dire stories about their
healthcare situation and maybe they were, you know, 59 years old and they're just looking to that moment when they qualify for Medicare is like holding off on things they probably need to do right away. They're just desperately, longingly looking. forward to that moment when they're finally going to get on Medicare. And I remember just hearing people say something like that over and over again.
Just thinking, wow, no wonder Medicare is such a third rail in American politics. Because if there's a politician who appears to be threatening Medicare, that really scares people. It's not just the people on it. It's the people who are... desperately waiting to get on it so they can actually get some fucking health care. That's right. I remember going to a part of Idaho I'd never been to because it was on the far other side of where I grew up.
I grew up in far north and we were in the southeast town called Blackfoot. And this woman comes up. We had just parked at a park and there were a few people who came out because they heard we're coming to town. And we were talking with them. And then a woman walks up who I think had just seen us across the way. And she comes up just with this. anxious, but excited kind of look on her face. And she thinks that we're providing healthcare. And then she tells us a story about how
She was so desperately in need of health care to address some chronic issues that she had. And she went in to consult with a health care provider and they told. or that she can't qualify for Medicaid because her family makes slightly too much, even though they're barely making anything. But... she could qualify if she got a divorce. Because if she got a divorce, then she would be put into a different income eligibility.
Thanks a lot, pro-family conservatives. And then she tells us that she got the divorce, that she actually did it. you know, telling the story, she was clearly not comfortable telling us, but wanted us to know the truth. And I just remember my friend Emily, she just gives Emily this big hug afterwards. I was just very grateful for what we were trying to do. But we came away from that original tour around the state with the sense that there's just widespread despair around healthcare.
but also a lot of hope, really, especially among those who weren't necessarily in any dire need of health care themselves, but who were looking for... something to do and looking for a big issue to take on. And when we met with them, even if they hadn't necessarily thought that Medicaid expansion was their big thing, when we met with them in that tumultuous moment of 2017.
following the 2016 election. And we were able to map out a strategy for how we could actually do something that would secure healthcare coverage for nearly 100,000 people. That was really motivating. There were some people who would just really light up about that and for whom it was very clear they were looking for something like that to be a part of. And then at that moment, you're able to really...
there's a real opportunity to ask people to take on leadership. And they don't necessarily do it all at once, but there's at least a seed of their willingness to really, you know, be the person in the local community who becomes the hub of... Anyone else who wants to get involved, they then help organize those people and take on that local leadership. Luke, I want to ask you kind of another question that...
I think follows from what has been hinted at, Sam, your comment about the pro-family conservatives. Forcing women to get divorced so that they can get health care. Right. You know, we don't want to... turn this into like a democratic messaging episode at all it's more like i'm wondering how did this issue of health care and medicaid expansion in particular As you traveled around the state, how did those issues seem to fit into the broader political consciousness?
of the people you were talking to, because obviously it's Idaho. It's a very red state. Statistically, most of the people you're talking to are not progressives, not Democrats. They're probably Republicans. But beyond that, what was your sense of people in this part of the country, in not very populated rural areas, these counties with maybe 6,000 people in them, how did this issue, when you talked about it with them,
seem to relate to everything else, right? Or how did their problems that they would tell you about with accessing healthcare, having decent healthcare... How did that fit into their broader worldview or sense of what was happening in the country and why this was happening to them? I think with the issue of Medicaid and the same thing would apply to Medicare or Social Security.
These are programs that people have a consciousness of that is somewhat separate from however they're thinking about politics. It's such a bread and butter quality of life issue. that these programs are there for people when they need them, that it really does transcend partisan politics. And I do think, and this is part of what gives me hope for this type of organizing, I do think that a lot of people out there... in red states, in rural areas, really do want government to actively
work to make people's lives better and improve the lives of working people, people who are struggling to get by. And if anything, part of the urban-rural divide when we look at partisan politics is that people in... red states and rural communities have come to the conclusion that that's not really what Democrats are about. And I want to just immediately add the caveat that In Idaho, at least, local Democrats aren't to blame for that. I think oftentimes...
Local Democrats have gone out and defended programs like Medicaid expansion, a more fair tax system, strong public schools, these types of things. But they're always working against a major headwind. of voters just not really associating the Democratic Party anymore with the needs of working people. So that's part of what I've seen out there is that there is still a basic desire.
among people for government to actually meet these basic needs. And that's what we saw where some people just simply... weren't aware that like during that campaign, when we first got it off the ground in 2017, the national Republican party was trying to repeal the entire affordable care act and.
eliminate the possibility of Medicaid expansion and then, you know, eliminate coverage for preexisting conditions and all these other things. Some people just weren't following that. Other people, I think, are, you know, making a kind of complicated calculation in their mind where they're. thinking, okay, I want strong Medicaid program. And I might know that Republicans aren't great on that issue.
And that, you know, they're even voting against it and things. But then on the other hand, I have all these other reasons why I don't like Democrats. And those reasons are even stronger and motivator for how I vote. So I'm still going to vote for the Republican candidates, but I'm also going to vote for this Medicaid initiative. So you see that complexity out there. But regardless of all that, there is.
A deep interest and commitment in just maintaining these basic programs, which people understand from their daily lives, you know, how important they are. And this sort of follows from part of what you're describing, Luke, that, you know, one of the reasons that... people.
in rural areas may not find the Democrats pitch very credible is because, you know, if they're having a bad time and the government isn't helping them, it's not unreasonable for them to say, well, I don't think government's going to help. It hasn't ever helped me yet. You know, there's a kind of logic. that but there's also a part of this that i was just thinking about the question that kind of sets this whole thing up
which is like, why did rural voters abandon the Democrats? In your piece, you mentioned from Pew that rural voters were nearly as likely to identify as Democrats as Republicans from 1994 all the way through 2008, when Obama captured 45% of the rural vote nationally. And I don't know what the trend lines are over the course of the 20th century, but I would imagine they trend in this direction, the direction where we wound up. And I think it could be some of the answer for why.
Democrats cease to succeed in rural areas can be discerned from what worked in your campaign. You know, this is kind of like...
There's a bit of the Robert Putnam bowling alone thesis in here, you know, that communities used to have more organic connections to each other. There were more places and networks where... people might find out that their neighbors are suffering in the same way that they are, and where they might therefore begin to have a conversation about what it would look like to change it in a collective way, democratically, instead of suffering alone, instead of resenting other people.
And those connections build trust and goodwill, whereas the absence of those sorts of connection breeds just suspicion and anger or envy or... And what your campaign did was in miniature kind of recreate some of those connections that have been lost or hollowed out by bigger trends in American history and in rural. You tapped into that capacity for community that is innate in people.
but that has very few outlets in our social order, and especially where people don't live around a lot of people. You know, these sort of structures and patterns of life that are atomizing. I'm wondering if this is tracking with you or if you've thought about the way in which what worked about your campaign might be part of the diagnosis of what's wrong. I do think there's a lot to that idea of civic associations and...
associational life and, of course, labor unions maybe being the biggest example in the region I grew up in, North Idaho. You know, as recently as the 1990s, the region leaned democratic. You know, Bill Clinton won it in 1992. And in the decades since, the swing has been something like 50 or 60 points towards. Republicans. And one story that you can have a entire conversation about is in the West, in kind of the inland Western states, there's a massive movement.
of very conservative voters from California and the coast moving to Idaho and Wyoming and Montana and things. But an even bigger structural change, I think, was just the decline of unionized timber and mining. as being really at the center of economic life in that region. And you can see that in the shift of what it means to be on the left in politics in that region and really across the state.
different ways. I think even if we were able to recreate some of those connections and some of those associations, there would still be major headwinds coming from the national level when it comes to restoring a competitive party system. And I really attribute that especially to the major shift that's taken place where
There's just been a major clustering of highly educated, quote unquote, knowledge economy workers in major metropolitan areas. And it's not just that they clustered there and that they left small towns and things. It's that the Democratic Party really followed them. And the Democratic Party brand really did shift starting in the 90s away from a brand that is closely aligned with working class interests.
towards a brand that's more aligned with the sensibilities and to some extent the interests of a highly educated urban population. City slickers like me and Matt. Yeah, and oftentimes relatively... you know, decent income city slickers because the Democratic Party, at least outside of the South, right, for most of the 20th century was rooted in cities, but it was also so much rooted in the urban working class.
that it still had a working class brand to it. And that's a major shift. And in some ways it was a structural shift, but I do believe the story that it was also conscious. decision. You can see it in the sort of Clintonian Democratic Party consciously moving the party in that direction. And that becomes a party that
A lot of working class people in small towns, rural communities across the country don't see themselves in as much. And then, of course, when you have 2016 come along and Trump and the Republican Party actively. drive that wedge in and start to directly appeal to those voters. It just deepens that divide even more. There's one thing.
This is reminding me of that I've been thinking about a lot lately. And I'm kind of getting it from things that we've talked about on the podcast with our friend Gabe Winant. Also things that Adam Tooze has talked about a lot about the professional managerial class. We haven't used that word, but that also.
So as a descriptor of the kind of highly educated knowledge worker, mostly urban, you know, the base of the Democratic Party at this point. And what the like structural role of the PMC of the managers, a professional managerial class is. in our economic life, is to interact with poorer working class people, but in the role of, frankly, like...
doctors, teachers, librarians, social workers. If people have contact with the members of that class who have come to be associated with liberalism and with the Democratic Party, it might not be a particularly good relationship. They might think of those as people who scold them. You know, they might just think of them as like teachers. And a lot of people love their teachers, but a lot of people think of them as somebody who tells them what to do. Trump, of course.
comes along and people talk about him being an aspirational figure in that he's... a poor person's idea of what a rich person is. But they don't talk as much about how what's aspirational about him is that he doesn't have to listen to any of those people. Those people look down on him like they look down on them. But he gets to say fuck you to the managers, to the...
teachers, to the people who tell you what's good for you and what's bad for you, the people who tell you what you have to do in order to get your government benefits, the people who tell you that your insurance isn't good enough. And that's also an aspirational thing. Some more crass material sense, people in Trump's class are responsible for a lot of the suffering at the lower end of our economic structure.
They don't have any contact with Trump. They have contact with these PMC people who seem to always act like they know best, and they have to listen to them. And it's just very satisfying to see Trump out there not having to listen to them. And in fact... saying the sorts of things to them, to the PMCs, to the managers that a lot of his voters would like to be able to say, but couldn't because they would lose their job or get in trouble or not be able to get.
the benefits they need or whatever you know that's a different sort of material analysis but it has more to do with like the intimate way in which the classes interact in this society and I think it's I think that is really an important part of what drives at an affective level the appeal of Trump. Yeah, I would add it's the affective level, but you can also see it coming out in certain policies, like the way that Trump talks about tariffs.
for example. That's in some ways an issue that's perfectly aligned with what you're saying, Sam, because tariffs are just on the face of it. seen by the experts who we're all supposed to respect is just a bad policy that you don't do. It's going to drive up prices. It's going to damage our economy. Yet Trump is willing to completely disregard that and actually propose.
this policy as a direct response to what is ailing people in struggling communities across the country. That just strikes me as an especially potent. example of what you're talking about, because people don't necessarily see a direct response coming from the other side to globalization and things. No, except for that we know what's best. We know what's best. That's basically...
The only message the Democrats, I mean, this is I'm being, you know, a little facetious and overstating the case, but that's the main message of the Democratic Party. We know best. And when the alternative is somebody saying, first of all, they don't know best. You know best. You know best. You're smart. And the policies that they're proposing.
have a instinctive logic. And then when you say, I actually think what he's saying sounds good. The only thing the Democrats can respond with is, well, you're wrong. You don't understand. Or maybe, you know, 39 Nobel laureates all agree that this is a bad. idea or something you know something which you know that might convince me it's a bad idea i don't know i'd have to look into it but the deeper point is an appeal to expertise yes yes
I mean, when we started this conversation, we began kind of in that immediate post-Trump era, 2017. You talk about the energy people had, you know, to resist Trump. I mean, since you've been in Idaho since that immediate post-2016 moment through now the pandemic and, you know, now Trump's re-election, the kind of dynamics that have alienated...
rural voters from the Democratic Party, as Sam was describing. The last few years, have you seen that get worse? Like the reactions kind of deepen on the ground in a place like Idaho? What have you seen across that particular period of time? I would say the main thing reflecting on these last eight years, the thing that stands out the most is that the negative associations and feelings that voters have with the Democratic.
Party, the national brand of the Democratic Party, just have not budged and they've even gotten deeper. And that was something that I, you know, I never made any predictions on that. But looking back to 2017. I think many of us, including on the ground in Idaho, believe that we're in an era where everything's up for grabs, like all the old rules have been thrown out.
in politics because that's what that presidential election felt like. Just everything was upended and who knows what's going to happen. And there might be, you know, entire realignments of the parties. In the time since, I've just noticed, including with our Medicaid expansion victory in November 2018, there was a little bit of gloom in the days afterwards among some of us when we looked at how...
In all these districts across Idaho, there were Democrats who championed Medicaid expansion but still lost by 20 or 30 points and didn't seem to win any votes based on that wave of support. for Medicaid expansion. And immediately a whole lot of people were saying things like, you know, why don't voters connect the dots? What would it take to get them to connect the dots? And that trend has only continued and even deepened.
there being a real misalignment in a way of how voters might support these bread and butter issues when they're put right in front of them while still supporting a party that's actively working. to dismantle these healthcare programs or these other institutions. And the overall impression that's left me with is that there's something very deep and intractable happening when it comes to the national.
democratic brand and how people perceive it in red states and rural communities across the country. Yeah. I mean, Luke, it's kind of, I think, a pretty common refrain on the left that, okay, look in these states. You know, Medicaid expansion wins. School vouchers are defeated.
at the ballot. Minimum wage increases get approved by voters. Look at all these discrete issues that when they're put on the ballot, they win. Voters are on our side. So therefore, we're running the wrong kind of Democrats. The Democrats of the
messaging, they're centering the wrong policy, something like that. What do you make of that kind of argument? One concern I have is that when you look at how Democrats have performed over the last several years across the country and places I've observed in Idaho where local Democrats really do go out there and advocate for these bread and butter issues and still are not.
rewarded for it by voters, it really leads me to the conclusion that something much bigger is happening at the national level. And, you know, and I'm referring to the national brand of the party, the basic identity, how people communities across the country think about what the party is and what it stands for and which people it's most closely associated with. You know, the image of who the Democrats are in our era.
tends to be something more like the urban professional, right? And as long as that brand isn't fundamentally realigned somehow, that's where it seems to me like in spite of... the most noble attempts of local Democrats to run on these same types of bread and butter issues that are winning at the ballot, they're going to face really tough headwinds. When you think about what kind of realignment would be necessary to change that, it brings me back to some of the reading I've done.
economist Jonathan Rodden, who writes about a lot of these political economic trends. And it's really fascinating. I don't think just from reading him and listening to him that he's a big Bernie Sanders supporter. I could be wrong. But one point he's made. is things could have been very different had 2016 gone differently. Because what Bernie Sanders was attempting to do in that campaign was just come out.
swinging with a very different political economic message. And not only a message, but really identifying his campaign with issues around things like trade and a critique of globalization and the way that the Democratic Party had dealt with globalization, not to mention a whole range of other issues around welfare reform. reviving a commitment to universal health care. And what Jonathan Rodden has pointed out is you can imagine, what if the protectionist tariff supporting Trump had lost?
the primary, but Bernie Sanders, the great critic of NAFTA and champion of universal healthcare had won the democratic primary. That could have been the type of realignment that would have been dramatic enough to shift the identity of the party and how people think about it. Like Bernie versus Jeb Bush. Right. An alternative 2016 presidential scenario, right? That's right. Because Luke, I am, listeners to this podcast will know I do kind of share that view.
that 2016, that moment, even though it was terrible that Trump won, there was a sense that, wow, we just lived through an election that defied the way things are supposed to go. And I do think there was a bunch of... voters who were up in the air. You know, maybe the last vote they cast for a Democrat was for Bernie in the 2016 primary.
you know, and ever since have been voting, you know, for Trump and the Republicans. That's an argument you could have. But that sense that there was a moment where, especially... working class voters could go either way. Like there was something afoot in the country that Trump surge in the Republican primary and Bernie's in the Democrats, both of those candidates. Trump won and Bernie damn near did. Like there was something going on. And so I...
do think there's something to Rodden's theory that you were floating there. And my overall sense of it is that... It would take something like that type of dramatic realignment at the national level. And when I say realignment, I'm mainly just thinking in terms of how ordinary people out there across the country think about. the Democrat party and what it stands for. I was just, you know, watching
The other day, the whole back and forth where Bernie is saying Democrats abandon the working class and then Nancy Pelosi is criticizing him for that and saying that's not true. And then I was really struck by the way Bernie responded when he was asked. What do you say back to Nancy Pelosi? And he said, you know, sure, there were major.
pro-worker policies passed in the Biden administration and that can't be denied. But when people across the country see the Democratic Party at the national level, they don't think the party is going to the mat for them. That's what I have in mind when I'm thinking about the brand of the party. Is it really putting working class interests front and center and really convincing people that that is the case?
That just that hasn't been true. And that's where I just want to appreciate like whenever local Democrats do go to the mat and attempt to. make up for it at the local level and actually champion these issues, they're still dragged down by that national brand. And that puts us in a difficult situation. Well, can I remind you both something about Bernie Sanders? He's not a Democrat.
He's an independent. I mean, I'm being glib, but there's something very important about that, which is that in a very real sense, in a sense that everyone could understand and see about him, he wasn't just running against the Republican Party. He was running against the Democrats.
Just as Trump didn't just run against the Democrats, he ran against the Republican Party. He recognized on some... however, Fox-like instinctive level, that people weren't satisfied with the basic policy profile of the Republican Party and thought of the Republican Party as also kind of an elite self-dealing.
oligarchy and so you know the important thing is not just that you got to run on these policies and show that you're serious about it there's a sense in which people want to feel like you get that nothing's been working, that everything's bad, that you need to have that credible anti-establishment part of your identity and brand, I think, in order to win over some of these voters that we have in mind. Trump obviously did that. Bernie did that. And I don't think that can be underscored enough.
I mean, one question that follows from this, I mean, I agree with your comments about the National Democratic Party's brand, so to speak. But I'm wondering, you know, when you're talking to voters in Idaho. How is their impression of... the National Democratic Party formed. I mean, obviously, there are the choices made by Democrats themselves, policy-wise, candidate-wise, and so on. But how is that transmitted to them? Is it just Fox News and TV? Is it...
reading the newspaper? Is it what they hear from their pastor on a Sunday morning at church? How do you perceive like where they're getting information and how that kind of shapes their perception? I would say it's all of the above minus the newspaper. But the important point I would make there is it is overwhelmingly national. At the level of most voters, it's not a...
evaluation of what's happening at the local level, you know, between local Democrats and local Republicans. It's overwhelmingly, whether on social media or... Fox or the other channels. It's just the 24-7 national political media, which is a major structural factor, I think, in everything we're talking about, because I believe this argument that many have put out there that...
It's much harder than it used to be, Democrat or Republican, to separate yourself from the national brand of your party because there is just a constant stream of information out there. where there's deliberate work being done to nationalize everything. And if you're in the media on the right, you have an implied strategy and sometimes an overt strategy.
of tying any democrat no matter what their agenda is to the most feared or hated parts of the national democratic brand or agenda so in that media environment It's really difficult as a candidate to get voters to think of you as proposing some type of local program that can be separated from, you know, their impressions of the national party.
sort of promised ourselves we wouldn't do too much of exactly what we've been doing, talking about what's wrong with the Democrats, because we always end up doing that. But to get us away from that as we close out, Luke, I mean, I have the impression... from some of the exchanges we had before we started recording that...
Although it's clear from this conversation, you have a lot of very interesting and good ideas about how the Democrats might do a better job at appealing to the voters whose needs they... might be better suited to meet economically than at least you know really libertarian conservatives while you do have good ideas about that
I had the sense that where your thinking is going and what you want to put your organizing energy into is kind of like not bothering with that. And doing this kind of work that reaches deeper down into people's values that... somehow, hopefully, isn't in every instance mediated by their relationship.
to a party brand, but that has something more to do with their relationship to, say, the people around them, their community, their neighbors, people in their church, whatever. And that those kinds of... Connections can be the foundation for progressive policy, you know, more populist and egalitarian and caring and kind policy, but hopefully not mediated by the Democrats or even the Republicans' partisanship.
Yeah. And I'll just say on the partisan divide, I have experienced both sides of it. So in 2018, with Medicaid expansion, we were able to appeal directly to people in spite of the best efforts of our opponents. You know, they put out flyers saying, you know.
Nancy Pelosi endorses this policy and all these things, we were still able to effectively break through and win a majority. But then on the other hand, in the recent cycle, we tried a really ambitious electoral reform taking after the model that... Alaska has successfully done. And we fell into the partisan divide in spite of our best efforts to avoid it. Voters did really align our initiative with Democrats and with the idea of somehow.
turning Idaho blue and all these things. And the final vote ended up falling directly along party lines. So we've been on both sides of that. And that has put me in a mood lately of thinking more about what the roots of our success has been and what the promise of this work can really be. And I don't believe that the promise of waging these issue-based campaigns is primarily about somehow realigning the parties or changing the balance of power between the parties.
I've really come to believe that the greatest promise of it is getting people organized around an alternative vision for how things could be and the role of government. Because what we've seen across Idaho is given the lack of a competitive party system. A real hopelessness can sink in and there aren't a lot of opportunities for people to boldly go out and advocate for a different vision, an alternative to the far right, because there's a sense that there's just not a way to.
get organized in such a way that their communities will actually be receptive to the message. These initiative campaigns have really provided a space for that. The type of distributed organizing that we've talked about earlier where people can form local teams advocating for... Whether it's expanding health care or building support for funding for public schools, people can really come together, go out, engage people in their community.
and find common ground with people who may or may not vote the same way as them in the upcoming presidential election. And giving people a way to get organized is in and of itself such a valuable thing, especially when you consider that all across red states and rural communities all across the country.
there are major battles taking place that don't really have all that much to do with the battle that gets the most attention, which is between Democrats and Republicans. The biggest example on my mind lately... is this high stakes battle over the privatization of public schools. So in states all across the country, communities are actively considering major transformative school voucher programs.
that would divert public funds out of public education to support private school tuition and we have a whole lot of evidence that over time These types of programs do an enormous amount of damage to the integrity of the public school system. And that's a battle that's unfolding. And it's a huge mistake that is often made, I think, when people kind of at the national level look out.
across red states and rural communities and they just see the way people are voting in terms of partisanship and people who lean progressive therefore conclude that These places are sort of a lost cause, you know, because the rural urban partisan divide seems so intractable. What's missed in that story is these very much alive battles that are happening over something as fundamental as the future.
And those are often battles that take place among Republicans. We've seen in states across the country, including Idaho, you know, major showdowns in legislative committees where. Republicans representing rural communities will vote against voucher programs because they correctly identify that, you know, there's no private schools in these rural communities.
And you're draining funds out of their local school districts that will go directly to urban and suburban communities and oftentimes go towards supporting tuition for families that already have their children in private schools. to begin with. And to go back around to the bigger point here, that's how I've come to view the promise of this issue-based organizing. It makes a huge difference in these fights, like the fight over school vouchers, whether people are organized.
And we've seen the fruits of that. The past two years in Idaho, attempts to pass school vouchers in the legislature have failed, in part because many of the same people who got organized around Medicaid expansion came out to oppose. school vouchers. And the same thing is true when you look across all these different issues that are unfolding in communities around public libraries, around the integrity of public lands.
Public health care programs, you know, there's all kinds of a threat in states across the country that Medicaid expansion programs will be repealed in coming years. In every single one of these fights, whether or not people are organized at the local level. has huge consequences. So huddle up. Go find a huddle. Yes. In the midst of lots of reasons not to be hopeful.
a relatively hopeful admonition to end on. The work has importance beyond what it might mean for the fortunes of a presidential candidate or the National Democratic Party. And I could just close with just a quick little anecdote. Something that I'll never forget was back in 2023 in the Idaho legislature. Reporters were all anticipating that this was going to be the year of school choice, they called it, where.
For the first time, Idaho is going to adopt school vouchers. And there was a general narrative out there being pushed by, including by a lot of national organizations and some local that. that there is just this groundswell of public demand among parents to have school choice options for their children. And, you know, there's all kinds of discontent with the pandemic and what parents saw.
the public schools doing during the pandemic. And this was the great moment when the parents were going to stand up and demand the privatization of public schools. And there was a big showdown in the Senate Education Committee. in Idaho when the universal school vouchers bill was introduced. And I went to the committee hearing and we had done a lot of organizing in advance of it.
And the proposer of the bill, you know, presented the bill and then they opened up to public testimony. And it quickly became apparent that there were far more people in the room. who were opposed to school vouchers. And then pretty early on in the testimony, they opened up, the best part was they opened up to remote testimony where they turned on a screen that all the legislators could see. And one person after another, it was people in small towns speaking against school vouchers.
And it was apparent to everyone in the room, including the media, that the real grassroots groundswell was against privatizing public education, not in favor of it. And for me, it was deeply satisfying to notice that so many of those people all across the state from small towns in every region, those people calling in were people who had started organizing with us around Medicaid expansion.
and had really grown into these skills of really advocating for things they believe in and built up a confidence to be someone who could. call in and give a bold testimony in support of their local public schools. That's really just a moment that drove home for me the promise of this type of organizing, even in... an extremely difficult national political environment yeah that's something
Luke Mayville, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and insights. We mentioned a few of the pieces you wrote for Commonweal. We will have those in the show notes and we'll also have links to, you know, Reclaim Idaho. and ways for people to learn more about the work you're doing. Thanks so much, Matt. Thanks, Sam. Till next time. Yeah, this is so fun. Thanks, Luke. Catch you next time, listeners. Bye-bye.