Pulitzer Prize–winning author Barbara KingsolverEvan Kafka/Barbara Kingsolver
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.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are having a beach day at Rehoboth Beach. The first lady is reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which won a Pulitzer Prize. Photo by CNN’s @JayMcMichaelCNN pic.twitter.com/05Fzl6s3Ou
— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) July 30, 2023
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!”
