From Mother Jones: "Barbara Kingsolver Gets Why Rural Voters Love Trump" in Those Public Entries

By Stephanie Mencimer

On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara Kingsolver is headlining a fundraiser for the Harris Victory Fund. She’ll join actress Ashley Judd and former Kentucky poet laureate Silas House for a “virtual conversation” about perspectives from rural Appalachia. The event coincides with a recent push by Vice President Kamala Harris to reach out to rural voters, who overwhelmingly support former President Donald Trump.

Kingsolver is an obvious Democratic counterweight to vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The Ohio senator came to fame through his book Hillbilly Elegy, which chronicled his dysfunctional family history that had roots in rural Kentucky. The Trump campaign has touted his appeal to working-class and rural white voters. Unlike Vance, who was raised in suburban Ohio, Kingsolver actually grew up in rural Kentucky and still lives in Appalachian Virginia. She won the Pulitzer for a novel set in the very places Vance claims to speak for.

“I live among Trump supporters in a county that’s probably 80 percent for Trump,” she told me when I interviewed her in May. “When I go to the grocery store, I’m going to Trump rally. When I drive to town, I go past gigantic Trump 2024 signs. This is where I live.”

Impoverished rural areas represent some of Trump’s strongest base. He won 65 percent of the country’s rural voters in 2020, and the totals were even higher in many parts of Appalachia. The Harris campaign has been trying to make inroads in many of these oft-forgotten places, particularly in swing states, in an effort to narrow Trump’s margins. In 2020, for instance, Trump won Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, 62–36 percent. But Harris made an appearance there last Thursday. And former President Bill Clinton has been deployed to the rural South in an attempt to also strengthen her appeal with these voters.

“We got to turn out folks, obviously, in base Democratic areas, but we also need to persuade a lot of people,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’ battleground states director, told CNN last week. “Shaving margins where you can, in counties that maybe Trump won 70-30, but if we can lose them 60-40 or 65-35, that makes a big difference over dozens of counties in a state.”

Kingsolver’s prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, is a Dickensian coming-of- age tale set in the hollows of Appalachia where young Demon struggles through addiction, foster care, family disintegration, and the general failures of the American social welfare system all while trying to remain rooted in the hill country he loves. It’s an empathetic portrayal of the people Vance mostly scorned in his memoir. It’s no surprise, then, that the Harris campaign might see Kingsolver as a useful campaign surrogate who could help bridge the gap between the California coastal liberal and rural voters who overwhelmingly support Trump.

The young protagonist of Demon Copperhead is born in Lee County, Virginia, a real place where 45 percent of the children live below the poverty line. The disability rates among adults in Lee County are twice the national average—nearly 50 percent of the elderly residents have a disability. Trump also won nearly 85 percent of the vote there in 2020. Kingsolver thinks the dismal state of infrastructure, health care, and education opportunities in rural America leaves its residents vulnerable to someone like Trump, who claims to see them.

“He channels their rage,” she told me, even if his agenda will do little to help their material condition. “What they have in common is that they feel like the government has failed them. Any other attempt to sort of reduce Trump voters to a monoculture is really very bigoted.”

There’s a moment in Demon Copperhead where Demon is talking to his friend Tommy, who recently started working at a local newspaper where he has discovered for the first time how the rest of the world views Appalachia. “Blight on the nation” read the headline of one story that crosses his desk. Demon tries to explain how the world is organized to Tommy, and the way everyone needs someone to dump on—much like a kid kicking a dog after getting yelled at by his mom, who got smacked by his stepfather. “We’re the dog of America,” he explains. Demon thinks his friend spent high school in the library, instead of watching the “hillbilly-hater marathon: Hunter’s Blood, Lunch Meat, Redneck Zombies” that a local station had aired for a month.

“And the comedy shows, even worse,” Demon adds, “with these guys acting like we’re all on the same side, but just wait. I dated a Kentucky girl once, but she was always lying through her tooth. Ha ha ha ha.” Tommy, dismayed, wonders why the people of Appalachia had to be the ones who got kicked around. “Just bad luck, I reckon,” Demon replies. “God made us the butt of the joke universe.”

When I read this section, I thought it could easily describe the way the media often portrays Trump supporters. “As Demon says in the book, ‘We can see you. We have cable,’” Kingsolver told me. “You act like you’re making these jokes behind our backs. We see it. I wrote the whole book just to write that part.”

Earlier this year, I had been struggling (and failing) to write a sympathetic story about Trump’s most hardcore supporters and the way they tend to be ridiculed—often for good reason—by liberals and in the media. Frustrated, I called Kingsolver to see if she could offer some guidance in understanding and writing about these complicated Americans who are so easily caricatured. She summed up the stereotypes succinctly: “We’re just backward hillbillies that don’t have ambition or drive because if we did, we would all be JD Vance, vying to be Vice President right now.”

Indeed, she is infuriated by the way rural voters are dismissed so casually by liberals, even as she is both a rural voter and a liberal. “It really galls me that people are ready to write off 50 percent of the population as crazy, stupid, uninformed, whatever. That’s so elitist.” She understands why Trump’s rural supporters are so angry—and why they like him so much.

Kingsolver spent some of her childhood in Congo, where her parents worked as public health missionaries. (Her father was a doctor.) She lived there when the country won its independence from Belgium in 1960. “When Belgium pulled out abruptly, and there were no educated Congolese, the whole social service network was handled by volunteers and missionaries,” she said. “Well, that’s kind of what’s going on here. So many of the services are handled by nonprofits like RAM [Remote Area Medical]. It’s like Doctors Without Borders, who come to rural Tennessee.” She adds, “It’s a very normal thing for kids here, like for a 13-year-old child never to have been to the dentist.” The RAM clinics, she said, are “like Coachella, except not as happy…with hundreds and hundreds of people with their kids trying to get seen by a doctor. It’s like the Congo. We’re depending on missionaries for what the government should be doing here.”

Then there is language used in public conversations to describe Trump’s rural supporters, which she insists would never be acceptable for other marginalized communities. “Progressive people will really bend over backward not to laugh at someone who has faced other kinds of prejudice, to give people the benefit of the doubt and say, Okay, structural racism has left this poor woman not very well informed,” she told me. “We will try hard to meet her in the middle. You’re not doing the same thing for people who are suffering from structural classism, and from sort of rural oppression.” Not to mention a host of “rural stereotypes, from educated, informed, progressive, well-meaning people.” She recalled a recent book tour for Demon where “the first question of a live radio interview was, ‘Why do you choose to write about degenerate people?’ Degenerate?”

And yet, there are good reasons why liberals are often so quick to disparage Trump supporters. It’s not hard to find them outside a Trump rally, for instance, offering up insane political beliefs and conspiracy theories. I told her about some of the ones I have met this year, almost all of whom believe Trump won the 2020 election.

“It’s not literally insane for people to believe that, when every news source available to them, including the leader of their church, is telling them that,” she countered. “We all rely on the sources we trust. I think it would be crazy for some people not to think that when it’s absolutely what everybody around them says.” Kingsolver continued. “What progressive people say about gender sounds crazy to a lot of my neighbors and a lot of my family—the idea of like, you’re not born with a gender, you decide on your gender. That sounds insane to a lot of people. When you talk between these silos, everybody sounds crazy.”

Despite her roots in Appalachia, Kingsolver has feet in two worlds. In July 2023, first lady Jill Biden was seen reading Demon Copperhead on the beach in Delaware. When I talked to Kingsolver in May, she told me she had been trying to get the Biden campaign to do an event in Bristol, Virginia, to reach out to rural voters. Less than two weeks later, she attended a state dinner at the White House for William Ruto, president of Kenya.

The Bristol event didn’t materialize before Biden dropped out of the presidential race. But Harris seems to have picked up where Biden left off by deploying Kingsolver for Friday’s fundraiser, where the top-tier ticket costs $6,600. (Kingsolver fans can still tune in for the conversation for $25.) Kingsolver won’t be on the campaign trail jousting with Vance. Friday’s fundraiser is her only Harris event. “I’m actually terrible at knocking on doors or making phone calls,” she says. “I am a writer. So when I saw an announcement for the first of this series of ‘Writers for Harris events, I immediately wanted to sign on. This is what I can do!”

As someone who grew up in Northeast Ohio, lived in Indianapolis for seventeen years, went to college and now lives and works full-time in Vermont, I am so, so grateful for Barbara Kingsolver’s perspective on why rural Midwestern and Southern/Appalachian voters turn out so much for the Orange Shitgibbon. Because it’s why NE Ohio turned out for him, too.

See, NE Ohio is part of what’s known as the Rust Belt: A string of states, primarily in the upper Midwest, that used to be the steel capital of the world. But the steel mills closed in the 1960s and 1970s; no one in the area was unaffected by it, even if they, themselves, didn’t work in the mills. Everyone living in the Rust Belt knew people who were steel workers. Everyone living in the Rust Belt knew someone who woke up one morning and went to the mill, only to find it closed. Everyone living in the Rust Belt knows someone whose life was destroyed by the closure of the steel mills.

And since then, literally nothing has been done to revitalize these areas. Detroit, Youngstown, Akron, Cleveland, even Pittsburgh (to a lesser degree) have all been gutted by the collapse of the American steel industry. And remember, the last of the Youngstown steel mills closed in 1984, four years before I was born. For a while, the Lordstown GM plant kept some people employed, but it was bought by Foxconn in 2022, and I don’t know that it’s operational yet.

Not only is there no industry in these areas, but like Kingsolver pointed out in Demon Copperhead, these impoverished areas are constantly made the butt of jokes by “educated” liberals and progressives. D’you know how many “progressives” I’ve seen on Threads, saying “no great loss” or “who needs Florida anyway?” in response to both hurricanes Helene and Milton? Or saying “that’s what happens when you vote Republican!” Too fuckin’ many. One so-called “progressive” making that kind of joke is too many.

People often don’t get a say in where they live. Moving is expensive, and if you don’t have the money in the first place, you have to stay where you are. If your family is there, you’re getting support that you won’t get, or have easy access to, if you move. If you’re living on a fixed income (from unemployment, disability, welfare, SNAP/EBT, whatever), you have to stay where that money covers your living expenses. You can’t live in California on $30,000 a year; the taxes alone would make you homeless in less than a year. But you could, conceivably, scrape by in Florida on $30,000 a year, and definitely in Mississippi and Kentucky and Ohio.

Being able to choose where you live is a privilege, and it’s time so-called “progressives” started accepting that fact. And keep in mind, I chose to live in Vermont. Vermont’s COL is higher than Indiana’s, by a significant amount. I make just over $49,000 a year, and I promise you, that’s not much to live on in this part of the country. $49,000 a year goes a lot further in Indiana, even in Indianapolis, than it does in rural, small-town Vermont. The fact that I’m able and have the energy/spoons/forks/whatever we’re calling them now to cook several meals a day from scratch, that I’m able to afford groceries whenever I want to buy them, and that I’m in the habit of wearing my clothes until they quite literally fall apart, is probably the only reason I can afford to live on that little and not feel poor.

I chose to move from Indianapolis, where my family is, to a state where I knew no one, had to make my own connections, pay more for taxes and basic life-sustaining necessities, and have had to deal with several small crises on my own. To be able to do what I’ve done, and to have been mostly successful at it, is a privilege, and a rare, easily lost one, at that. If I had kids, if I had a significant physical disability, if I didn’t have a driver’s license and a car, I wouldn’t have had this privilege, and I’d still be living in Indianapolis, rotting mentally and probably physically as well.

You know, there’s a lot of truth to the idea that if you hear something often enough, you start to believe it. If you hear something often enough that you start to believe it, and if your context is limited to just that authority saying that thing, then everything else sounds like quackery. And if the people in charge are calling you “deplorables,” “degenerates,” laughing at your physical appearance, mocking your lack of access to health care (health care in the US is a privilege; how dare “progressives” laugh at anyone for not having it?!), calling you stupid, uneducated, worthless, and gleefully wishing death on you during natural disasters…

And then one guy who wants to be a leader comes along, doesn’t openly mock you (behind closed doors, he does, but it’s almost impossible to prove a negative, as anyone who’s studied conspiracy theories knows only too well), doesn’t make fun of your physical appearance, calls the people who do mock you “elites” and denigrates them the way they (and he, honestly) have denigrated you for years…

Aren’t you going to cling to that guy, like the lonely, bullied kid clings to the only kid who’s ever been even passively nice to them?

I mean, Kingsolver really did hit the nail on the head, here: “Progressive people will really bend over backward not to laugh at someone who has faced other kinds of prejudice, to give people the benefit of the doubt and say, Okay, structural racism has left this poor woman not very well informed,” […] “We will try hard to meet her in the middle. You’re not doing the same thing for people who are suffering from structural classism, and from sort of rural oppression.”

Would you like to know how many “progressives” get that look on their faces -you know the one- when they crack a joke about how “Midwesterners/Southerners are all uneducated hicks”, only for me to say, “I grew up in Ohio, and no, we’re not all or even mostly uneducated hicks, we’re victims of structural and class inequality,” before they tell me, “Oh, well, of course you’re not! You’re not like other Midwesterners!” All of them. Every single fucking one. And it’s infuriating.

Put it this way: I don’t know what it’s like to be Black, and I never will, but I do know what it’s like to be someone’s token Midwestern/Jewish(ish)/neurodivergent friend. It’s not just uncomfortable, it genuinely hurts, because you know their opinion of you rides completely on you acting the way they want you to, that makes them feel better about the fact that they’re projecting their preconceived notions onto you. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, and I try not to do it to my friends, either.

Not only that, but to be a progressive, a leftist, LGBTQIA+, nonwhite, or even a liberal in these states is a level of hard that coastal residents will never, ever experience. Oh, you’re uncomfortable when someone in your blue state displays a Trump/Vance sign in their yard? That’s valid. Now, try to imagine being legitimately terrified for someone’s life when you see a Harris/Walz sign in their yard, or being so afraid of being attacked if you put that sign in your yard, that you don’t. Imagine having a Harris/Walz bumper sticker on your car, and people taking that as an invitation to tailgate you, try to run you off the road, follow you home, and wave guns at you, just because of that bumper sticker. Imagine having to stay ten steps ahead of the KKK and local “civilian militias” to hold your DSA meetings, because if they catch wind of that, y’all are gonna be on the news that evening.

And yet, there are progressives in these states. There are communities of color in these states. There are LGBTQIA+ people in these states. There are people in these states who work through the fear, handle the very real threats to their physical safety and their lives, and keep fighting for progress. Who go out door-knocking and canvassing and caucasing for Democratic and further left candidates. Who escort patients at Planned Parenthood, or stand guard at libraries that hold drag queen story hours, who show up to public school forums and defend books from the Republican fearmongers who want them banned. Who start underground libraries full of those banned books and distribute them to anyone who wants to read them. Who are stops on the abortion/gender affirming Underground Railroad that is being built in these states. Who form unions at their workplace and demand better pay, insurance, and conditions.

If you’ve never done that under the very real threat that someone will stick a gun in your face and shoot you while screaming about “the [n-words] in the gub’mint is transin’ our kids!”, congratulations, you live in a place where people have the privilege of employment, health care, and actual civil conversation. Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up about “deplorables” and “hillbillies” and “rednecks.” Until you’ve actually lived, worked, and loved people in these states, you have no idea how deep those still waters actually run.