Jamie Ager and the promise of the new Country Democrat

North Carolina Governor Mike Easley once crashed a racecar into a wall. He had talked NASCAR executives into letting him take a stockcar for a test run, and the experiment ended in hilarity. But the farce served its purpose: Easley had shown rural, culturally conservative white voters that he had an affinity for them.

Two decades later, as the Woke wave crested and crashed, Democrats would have been unlikely to appear at a NASCAR race. Their preferred sports league was the NBA, a mostly blue-state league that was explicitly progressive. Sports are political. Politicians and parties use the imagery and cultural associations of big-time sports to signal where they stand in the culture wars. But deserting “NASCAR dads” was just a minor and quirky part of the Democratic Party’s departure from cultural triangulation. They largely stopped trying to appeal to downscale, culturally “red” voters and embraced cultural cosmopolitanism as their avenue to a majority.

The politics of the late 2000s and 2010s made it appear that the Democrats had made a good decision. Barack Obama built a multicultural coalition based upon demographics that were growing as a share of the electorate and marshalled their support to win two presidential elections. The electoral math seemed to show that a new Democratic majority was emerging. The implication of this good fortune seemed to be to embrace cultural cosmopolitanism and maximize the impact of the party’s growing demographic strength.

The power of the Democrats’ emerging coalition seemed to have set a new baseline for American politics. Democrats were confident. Even Republicans, in their famous “Autopsy” of the 2012 election, accepted the basic premise that the country was moving left and that the nation’s coming political battles would feature an effort by the parties to win Black, brown, and Millennial Obama voters.

Hello, Donald Trump.

The crude, boorish racist from New York dynamited the political elite’s consensus. It is hard to imagine a candidate more determined to smash the Republican Party’s demographic outreach than Donald Trump. He announced his candidacy with a crazed, rambling diatribe about Mexican “rapists” and Chinese people ransacking the American heartland. Both elites and most minority voters recoiled from his bigotry. And most observers—myself included—thought Trump was dragging the Republican Party into an historic electoral debacle. But his populist appeal electrified white rural America. It brought millions of blue-collar whites to the polls to elect their idol president. Trump made a mockery of the Democratic Party’s confidence that demographics were moving the country inexorably to the left.

After the party’s devastating loss to Trump, some Democrats have reconsidered the wisdom of defenestrating the party’s culturally red wing. Whereas Barack Obama won 25% of the rural counties in America, Joe Biden won only 9%. In the (supposedly competitive) Southern state of Texas, the talented Democrat Beto O’Rourke seldom managed to garner more than 30% of the vote in the state’s vast rural outback. The party made a mistake by retreating from competitiveness in culturally red districts. And after several cycles of punishing defeat, culturally moderate Democrats are making a comeback.

Call them the New Country Democrats. These people are materially closer to the cultural values of red-state and rural working-class voters. Many of them have been endorsed by the Congressional Blue Dog caucus. But unlike the earlier Blue Dogs, who largely ceased to exist after the 2010 Republican wave, the New Country Democrats are not direct descendants of the conservative Democrats who dominated the South during segregation and lingered in office for decades afterward out of public familiarity. New Country Democrats are part of the party’s broadly pro-equality liberalism. But they present a notably different image than the social progressives who dominated the party almost completely in the Woke era—and who lost almost uniformly in red districts.

The most prominent New Country Democrat may be James Talarico of Texas. Openly religious and cautious in his political positioning, Talarico appears to be running a campaign that may be strong enough to win in Texas, the stronghold of Red America. But the best example of the New Country style is Jamie Ager in North Carolina. Ager is a Democrat as true to his district as a purple mountain sunset. He is a farmer and a Western North Carolina native. His family has built decades of prominence and trust in the region. And he seems to have the elusive, hard-to-define but crucial quality of political horse sense. He breathes the air of his district’s politics.

Most importantly, Jamie Ager’s localism is not merely cosmetic. I respect Tim Walz. But national Democrats oversold biographical details like Walz’s hunting hobby when the man was clearly a creature of the social-justice left. Ager is a progressive in the broad, North Carolina way. He supports universal healthcare and conservation. He even supports comprehensive immigration reform! (Mountain Democrat Heath Shuler advocated “self-deportation.”) But Ager is careful to emphasize his political moderation, to nod to the individualism and self-reliance that his districts prefers over the influence of a powerful central government. He is firmly centrist and rooted in the Mountains. He is the best example of the promise of the New Country Democrat.