CENTRAL CASTING.(congressional elections)

An enduring predicament of the Democratic Party was revealed one day in August, 2004, when John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, and John Edwards, the nominee for Vice-President, visited a soybean-and-cattle farm outside Smithville, Missouri. The announced purpose was to speak about alternative energy sources (soybeans are an important source of biodiesel), but the goal was to express solidarity with rural white voters, who have been abandoning the Democratic Party in disquieting numbers. About a hundred and twenty-five people, mostly farmers, sat on hay bales in an orchard near the farmhouse. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri state auditor, was there, too; she was running for governor and was eager to appraise the two Senators, whose names would be on the ballot with hers.

Kerry reminisced about clearing fields on a Massachusetts farm and promised to side with small farmers in their struggles against agribusiness. Teresa Heinz Kerry handed her husband a note, and then stood up to speak, recalling a visit to an organic hog farm in Iowa. "It's really inspiring to see the work that they did," she said, and encouraged her audience to consider organic farming. "It can be done. It's economical, and there is a huge market in America."

At that point, Winston Simpson, a hog farmer from Clarence, Missouri, stood up and interrupted. "I said, 'Mrs. Kerry, you've got to understand that hog farmers just freak out when they hear people telling them to go organic,' " Simpson recalled recently. "She looked kind of surprised. I was just there helping out, making a crowd, but I've got an adrenaline problem, and when someone pisses me off I jump up and tell them."

Simpson is a grower-finisher; four thousand or so hogs come to him at forty pounds and leave their pens for slaughter two hundred and fifty pounds later. "I'd go broke if we switched to organic farming," he said. His public advice was informed by tactical, rather than ideological, concerns. "I don't have a problem with people raising food organically. If people want to eat that way, fine, but she shouldn't have been pushing that as a solution to the farm problem. A lot of farmers think of those organics as some kind of elitist lunatic-fringe thing." For some, Mrs. Kerry's performance recalled other moments of Democratic campaign obliviousness, like Michael Dukakis's endorsement of Belgian endive as an alternative crop for Iowa farmers.

Simpson described himself as a loyal Democrat who would have preferred to attend a better-orchestrated Kerry rally. "I'm even pro-choice--that's how much of a Democrat I am," he said. He came to that position, he explained, through his knowledge of animal husbandry. "If you've ever seen a young heifer get bred too soon, you know what a fiasco that is, which is why I think teen-agers should have access to abortion. But I'm out of the mainstream on this." He continued, "I always tell people who are running for office that if they want to get elected in Missouri, when someone asks them for their feelings about Roe v. Wade don't give some long scientific talk. Just say, 'I'm against abortion,' and move on quick."

Simpson, whose son, a former marine, served in Iraq, wishes that Kerry had won in 2004. "Kerry couldn't connect with people," he said. "It's too bad, because just think if they got elected--maybe they could have turned this whole thing around in Iraq. Maybe we would be better off today. But they never took the lesson that you shouldn't give the Republicans things that they could use against you."

Claire McCaskill lost her 2004 race for governor, but the contest was close--fifty-one per cent to forty-eight. Kerry lost Missouri to George W. Bush by a slightly wider margin, fifty-three per cent to forty-six. This year, McCaskill is running for the U.S. Senate. Polls show that the race is a statistical tie, and analysts from both parties consider McCaskill to be one of the two or three strongest Democratic challengers in the country. McCaskill says she is a centrist. She is one of many Democrats--Hillary Clinton being the most visible, and the most diligent--who are trying to establish themselves with middle-class moderates. These candidates see an uncommon opportunity this November--and in November of 2008--to win back many "Reagan Democrats," the voters whom the Party lost to Ronald Reagan a quarter century ago: the white working class, suburbanites, and Catholics. The collapse of President Bush's popularity--brought on most directly by his detached performance during Hurricane Katrina, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals, and public displeasure with the mismanaged war in Iraq--is working to the Democrats' advantage. Polls show that even on national security--the issue that has favored Republicans since George McGovern's candidacy, in 1972--Republicans are now no more credible than Democrats.