Jan. 20, 2025 marked the second inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. It follows the first election since 2004 in which the Republicans secured the popular vote. Though only by a margin of 1.5%, it marks unfamiliar territory for the Democratic party. Attempts to consolidate a larger voter base didn’t resonate. It didn’t seem to matter how big the tent got, it wasn’t enough. Highlighting the early struggle was the Harris’ campaigns efforts to nominate a Vice President. For weeks, speculation on her pick went on and on. Would it be Pennslyvannia’s Andy Shapiro? Kentucky’s popular Andy Beshear? No, it would be Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota.
Initially an outlier, Walz’s more progressive politics were ideal for counterbalancing the Harris’ ticket ties to the Biden Administration. He proved to be by and large the most popular pick on either side.
He was frank and straightforward during his time on the campaign trail, notably trading blows with the Republicans. Rather than the Obama-era approach of taking the moral high ground, he actively participated in the traditional mudslinging elections are known for, be it calling Vance “weird” or openly using curse words on the campaign trail. Despite his widespread popularity, Walz wasn’t used effectively by the campaign. Rather than using him as a way to embrace issues facing more moderate or traditionally conservative aligned voters, the Democrats instead sought the endorsement of disillusioned Republicans. Among the most notable: former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney and her father, former vice president Dick Cheney. Seeking and receiving this support, if anything, diluted what base had been slowly constructed for the Democratic effort. The tent got too big. For what they hoped to make up in the moderate vote, they lost in the progressive vote.
So was born the question: what now? How do the Democrats either recapture the progressives or shift towards a wider, less flighty base in moderates?
Recently, the Trump administration opened just the right doorway needed for a perfect realignment effort of the Democratic party. In a memo by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, all funding for agencies grants, loans and other financial aid programs were scheduled to be paused temporarily starting Jan. 28 at 5:00 p.m.
Though the memo largely remarked about it being a move to avoid any further funding of any “marxism,” “transgenderism,” alongside Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. It also did something much more interesting: it intentionally or unintentionally put a temporary pause on federal farming subsidies when the memo went out.
It was only hours later, just after the pause was scheduled, that clarification arrived that it was not a universal freeze, alongside a federal judge blocking the order, but the damage was already done.
Medicaid programs across the country reported issues accessing their systems, Congress stirred into a fervor over what was clearly a bypass of their constitutional control of the purse and the media had already bitten onto the story.
If it’s had any direct impact on farmers yet is unknown, but it remains a massive party foul against what by and large was his greatest voting base. Farm subsidies, once a controversial ideal among Republicans, became a heavily normalized practice in the aftermath of the Great Depression and New Deal.
No individual better exemplifies the approach Democrats took to rural communities than the late Vice President and former Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Agard Wallace.
Originally a Republican of the Progressive stripe and from a family of notable reputation within agricultural circles, Wallace was rather unassuming. Yet, during his time in Washington, the man, a newly found Democrat, was nothing short of rural America’s number one advocate. Selected by FDR to serve as Secretary of Agriculture, Wallace would oversee the implementation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The AAA’s would introduce concepts like subsidies for acreage reduction, introduced parity pricing and added soil conservation subsidies to avoid erosion.
By all means, it was a wide reaching piece of legislation, stopping nothing short of fully reforming American agriculture from the ground up. It took ideas from the failed McNary-Haugen bill of the Coolidge administration and gave them steroids. Without Wallace’s involvement, alongside his ties to the rural communities it affected, it likely would have failed.
Additional amendments had to be considered in order to more or less bribe congressmen and senators into supporting it and it was his advertising of it to the American people that gave it the needed groundswell of support.
It benefited farmers in incredible ways. Ten years after the first AAA passed in 1933, farmers’ purchasing parity had climbed to 115% and farming income had increased by 150%. Unthinkable given the economic depression the nation had only just recovered from.
This in all regards was a form of populism. Wallace knew farmers had and were struggling, at home and abroad. He knew they’d been wronged and he called it out readily. Though it can be a bit of a dirty word within politics, it’s the best option the Democrats have.
Even DNC chair candidate Ben Wikler has acknowledged such indirectly, advocating that each individual state needs its own unique election efforts. A national, “big tent” party can very seldom offer understanding to a single individual. The party needs to plan around each community and seek to actually understand them.
Trump’s unsteady leadership within the first weeks of his administration provides the exact type of uncertainty that makes people search for a better answer. A better candidate. Regardless of whether it’s a Democrat or just a more amicable (and less eccentric) Republican, the one who’s going to win is the one who can truly empathize with the everyday American.
Working to better protect the interests of farmers is a fantastic starting point, but all Americans need the chance to feel they are truly understood by a party. From the humble blue-collar labourer, to those crammed in cubicles, this century, as Wallace aptly put it, “can be and must be the century of the common man.”
Whether or not politicians will take that hint, though, is yet to be seen.
