Liberals Are Celebrating a New Book on Rural Trump Voters That Falls Apart Under the

This past week, Maine Democratic state Sen. Chloe Maxmin has received glowing media attention for a new book about how to woo rural Donald Trump supporters. Maxmin, a 29-year-old first-term state senator and former member of Maine’s House of Representatives, and her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, argue in their book “Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It” that the Democratic Party has “abandoned rural communities” and given up on trying to persuade people who disagree with them. Their book tour, which has stretched from the pages of the New York Times and Teen Vogue to the studio of Bill Maher, has focused on the insights she says she gleaned in flipping a rural state Senate district.

Their recent New York Times op-ed “What Democrats Don’t Understand About Rural America” describes how Maxmin — a progressive, small-town politician — stood up to party bosses, rejected standard Democratic Party dogma, and flipped solid Trump voting districts blue by having 20,000 face-to-face conversations with Trump voters over two election cycles. In a recent appearance on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” Maxmin lays out her argument this way:

I grew up in a House district and a Senate district in Maine that voted for Trump, and we just went out and started talking to folks and listening to people who did vote for Trump and try and have more of an honest conversation about what was happening. And we won in both of those seats. There were Trump signs next to Chloe signs, and we discovered all of this common ground with folks we usually write off. … It was so sad to see my community left behind by the Democratic Party, but also so hopeful at all of this space that we can build relationships for durable political power.

This is the kind of hopeful path forward in red America that Democrats in blue areas have been craving: that because she focused her campaign on engaging so many conservative voters, she was able to defeat a popular Republican incumbent in a Trump voting district. The possibility that Maxmin and her young team had cracked the “Make America Great Again” code is intoxicating. And it meant that Maxmin had no difficulty getting air and print space.

I share Maxmin’s concern that the national Democratic Party needs to do a better job of winning back rural voters. As a former state Representative who also defeated a Republican incumbent in a similar rural district up the coast, I also firmly believe in the mantra of knocking on doors and engaging with and listening to as many voters as possible. Like other Maine Democratic candidates, I was also able to get a few Republicans to put my lawn signs next to their signs for Republican Governor Paul LePage. But many of Maxmin’s claims about Senate District 13 and the nature of local Democratic campaigns in Maine are distortions and exaggerations.

Ironically, Maxmin accurately recognizes that liberals in New York and Los Angeles have a surface-level understanding of rural America which hampers their ability to connect. Instead of correcting those misperceptions, however, Maxmin deftly exploits the ignorance to spin tales that readers of the New York Times want to hear. Fact-checking her claims can’t be done with a single Google search but instead requires tabulating vote totals and taking a closer look at the district she actually represents. Here’s what that closer look reveals.

The most glaring problem with her story of flipping a Trump district is that, running for state Senate, Maxmin did not actually flip any towns that voted for Trump.

Senate District 13 includes all but one town in wealthy, coastal Lincoln County with the addition of two neighboring conservative towns. Trump narrowly won Senate District 13 over Hillary Clinton by only 11 votes in 2016. In 2020, Maxmin lost all seven towns Trump won. Instead, Maxmin won her race with big enough margins in the wealthy areas to compensate for the Trump areas. In fact, Maxmin did not perform as well as Joe Biden, who won the whole district that year with 13,034 votes to Maxmin’s 12,806. And progressive U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree outperformed them both in District 13 — bringing into question how unique Maxmin’s win really was. (Republican Sen. Susan Collins did also win District 13, but she won in 14 out of 16 counties in Maine.)

Maxmin also claims in her book that Lincoln County is trending red, writing that “deeply ingrained frustration with Washington helps explain the phenomenon of so many counties across the country, including Lincoln County, Maine, that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016.” In fact, Lincoln County has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate since 2004 — including for Clinton in 2016. That’s not surprising, given that Lincoln County has a substantial population of middle- and upper-class retirees and transplants who reliably vote Democratic. And with more out-of-state liberal leaning voters moving here, it is trending even bluer.

Maxmin also writes, “Democrats only flipped one seat in the Maine State Senate — ours.” That’s incorrect. Democratic state Sen. Joe Rafferty also flipped a more conservative district in southern Maine that was previously held by Republicans.

And while it’s true that Maxmin flipped a state House seat in 2018, it was an open seat that she won as part of a large blue wave in the state. Her claim in her book that she is the first Democratic candidate to win in that district — House District 88 — is also misleading because the district has only existed since 2014. Before the lines were redrawn, a more conservative area including much of District 88 was also represented by Democrat Lisa Miller for three terms.

Maxmin deserves credit for her boundless energy; there’s no question that having tens of thousands of conversations with voters through both phone and door canvassing during her Senate campaign helped Maxmin against a popular incumbent, former Senate Minority Leader Dana Dow. Dow is a well-known, respected, and charismatic Republican who served Senate terms from 2004 to 2008 and 2016 to 2020. But Maxmin isn’t the first Democrat to defeat Dow. Former Sen. Chris Johnson, who served two terms representing Senate District 13, beat Dow in 2012 and served there until Dow defeated him in a rematch in 2016. Other Democrats represented Lincoln County from the mid-1990s until 2004. (Maxmin claims that Dow never lost a “general election,” and in fact Johnson beat Dow in a special election — which may be the distinction Maxmin is resting on to make her claim.)

Maxmin’s district has been trending blue for a long time, and the majority of the population of the county is represented by Democrats and one progressive independent in the State House. So if Maxmin is doing something unique, the result — a Democrat winning a rural district in Maine — is not.

There are also a lot of reasons why Maxmin’s strategy can’t translate easily to the rest of the country, which Maxmin and Woodward acknowledge in their op-ed. Just how unique Maine is may need a little emphasis for a national audience: Maine has a very large legislature for the size of its population of 1.36 million. With 151 House seats and 35 Senate seats, Maine House districts represent about 9,000 people and Senate districts have roughly 39,000 people. This structure allows for more face-to-face interactions and makes legislators much more accessible. Many lawmakers even put their cellphone numbers on their literature and websites.

For candidates in other states, Maxmin’s method would be incredibly difficult if not impossible to replicate. For instance, in West Virginia, a small state with similar demographics, state senators represent 54,500 residents on average. Maine also has a “Clean Elections” public financing system that allows candidates like Maxmin to focus less on fundraising and more on campaigning.

Maine also has a part-time citizen legislature where lawmakers earn about $25,000 salary for a two-year term, plus health care and very modest per diems for gas, food, and lodging. Incumbents struggle to balance campaigning with family responsibilities and earning enough income to survive. Half of Maine’s state legislators are self-employed or run a business, which allows for more flexibility than if they had to work a 9-to-5 job. Maine is the nation’s oldest state by median age, and more than a quarter of our lawmakers are retired because they have the time to devote to the job. When I ran for…