Friends, acquaintances and comrades

It’s frigid here in northwest Michigan but I ventured out the other evening to a local Democratic event. Oceana County has always been conservative but like most Right leaning places it has gone wackjob Right, so I have to find my people.

The event was a holiday gathering. I sat with a couple from Chicago who retired here and a local landowner/farmer. We had two speakers – one a young woman who is running for State Senate and the other the woman who runs The Lakeshore Food Club, which she describes as a “nonprofit grocery store”. It’s a neat idea, really. Anyone who is under 200% of the poverty level (about 64k for a family of four) can purchase a membership in The Food Club for 12 dollars a month. In return they can shop as often as they want for that month. The 12 dollars a month = hundreds of dollars in food and personal care items for lower income families. I kept thinking about the national freak out over Mamdani’s public grocery stores and smiled – The Food Club has been serving white, rural, lower income Midwesterners for a decade and there hasn’t been a single think piece in the NY Times accusing them of communism.

We’ve talked quite a bit here about the political ramifications of data centers and Michigan could be Ground Zero of the resistance judging by the energy at this event. This area of the country on the shores of Lake Michigan is just flat-out beautiful (while still being probably undervalued as property so affordable further from the lake) and locals are very, very attached to it. They are pissed about the data centers and it gets louder every week. There’s now a statewide org that is organizing people in every Michigan county.

We’ve also talked quite a bit about here about white rural voters and what it might take to get back to our old 45 D-55R margins instead of 25D-75R and I think we have to be honest with ourselves about what a heavy lift that might be. While it is true that white rural voters in the Great Lakes region prefer liberal economic policies, when one gets involved in an issue campaign with them one starts to see why it is so hard to go from those liberal economic policies to a real liberal Democrat/conservative Democrat alliance.

Data centers are a good example. White rural Democrats (and probably lots of Republicans) object to data centers for a lot of good reasons – they use up our drinking water, they use massive amounts of energy which causes our bills to go up, and no one outside of tech bros (and tech bro curious men) sees any productive or positive use to AI. AI was presented to people as “sure, we’ll destroy your potable water and raise your energy bills and not pay any taxes and we’re all asshole antidemocratic billionaires but look at the bright side – we’ll also make sure you never have another job”.

The problem is that in order to create an issue coalition around data centers, we have to accept that many rural white Democrats also oppose wind and solar. They object to the sale of open ground to put up solar arrays and wind turbines.  This kind of conundrum has happened every single time I have tried this alliance. I tried working with a group who opposed mega farms in my home county in Ohio but then the group expanded to include Right leaning Dems and Republicans and all of a sudden we had Ron Paul devotees insisting we could all homestead on an acre, just going on and fucking on about how I had to drive 11 miles to buy a carton of eggs from The Egg Lady after work. They like “our issues”, sure, but they also bring their own.

This trickles down to the personal level too. I had a good conversation with the farmer – he must spend a lot of time alone because he seemed eager to talk. He’s (actually) wealthy just based on the acreage he owns and where it is located. He has one 80 acre parcel that has been in his family for a hundred years, they never farmed it and it’s old growth forest. It’s also very close to the Lake Michigan shoreline. That parcel alone means he and his heirs will be just fine, no matter what happens to the asparagus market (that’s what he grows). He refers to Mexicans who come here to harvest asparagus and cherries as “illegals” and wanted to tell me all about the “white trash” who go to food banks. “Problematic” as the kids say. He’s the reality in these places, in my home county of Ohio just like rural Michigan and we can’t romanticize it or paper it over.

We just need to be brutally honest with ourselves that my friends in DSA are not exactly clear-eyed about the challenges of a true working coalition that focuses just “on issues” because liberal Democrats don’t actually agree with rural Right leaning Democrats on a lot of “issues” and that will eventually surface. It always does.

Still, opposition to data centers might be good for us politically. Trump is absolutely 100% in bed with them and horrible people like Sinema are lobbying for them on Fox News. Good luck with that.

Good luck with that. I cannot remember an issue that has generated as much “ordinary people” resistance as this - these monstrosities are WILDLY unpopular and with unpopular spokespeople like Trump, Sinema and the loathsome billionaire tech bros, that opposition isn’t going anywhere but up.