Jess Piper’s Blueprint for a Progressive Heartland

Blue Missouri was founded in 2017 by Michelle Hornish after Trump’s initial 2016 win. It funds down-ballot state candidates in Missouri from donations it describes as a kind of crowdfunding. According to the group, since 2017, it has raised and distributed $570,000 to state legislative candidates.

Before going into politics, Piper taught high school English for 16 years. She lives on a small farm among the corn and soybean fields of northwest Missouri, near Hopkins, a town of 472.

Her Substack, The View from Rural Missouri, has more than 93,000 subscribers. Her TikTok, JessPiperMo, has more than 330,000 followers.

In your work with Blue Missouri you support candidates for the state legislature. Why that mission?

When I ran, I assumed if you’re a Republican or you’re Democrat that the party would support you. I found out real quick, that’s not at all how it works. I needed to raise money.

For me, that was pretty easy because I’m outspoken and I can use social media. I was able to raise more money in my race than any other state-level candidate in Missouri, which is crazy because I was running in a district that hasn’t elected a Democrat in 32 years and never elected a woman.

Through this experience, I found that it is very difficult for people in rural, red spaces to raise any money. The Missouri Democratic Party looks at a race like mine and says, “Hey, we don’t really want to spend any money up there. There’s no point. You’re not going to flip this.” There are three or four, maybe five seats in Missouri that people consider flippable every year and the rest just go unfunded or underfunded.

And I thought, how would you know who could win when we’re not contesting half the seats anyway? And how can you judge when we don’t have candidates in these spaces, and they’re not in these spaces because they can’t do the fundraising? So that got me thinking about how we fund races.

Have you seen success in the idea that even though a candidate lost the first time, you’re building something in rural Missouri?

Yes. We’re seeing people run over and over again. I tell people who are running that we have to reassess what a win is. A win is having a candidate. A win is giving someone a choice. A win is people being able to see someone that could represent their values on the ballot.

In my case, I got 25% of the vote which seems like a gut punch. People are like, oh my gosh, you lost so badly. Yeah. But here’s the thing, friends. We have left 25% of the voters on the table every single cycle. We say, well, it’s only 25%. Are you kidding me? 25% is a massive part of the vote. And even if you can’t flip a seat, what are you doing? You’re driving those votes to the top of the ticket. So you could elect, say, a Democratic governor. You could elect a Democratic congressperson. Even if those people that are running for state legislature and state senate don’t flip seats.

And by the way, how do you flip a seat that has been gone for 30 years? You have to claw your way back. And that’s by having candidates on every single ballot, every single race, every single state. No seat uncontested.

We overturned an abortion ban. We raised the minimum wage. We gave people sick time that, by the way, they undid with a vote. But the point of the matter is getting people to the ballot makes things better.

And that’s what happens when you fund every single race.

Exactly. Here in Iowa, we’re seeing the same thing. If you give up and don’t contest it at all, a lot of Democrats will just stay home. Is there a disconnect with the way you see the Democratic Party approaching rural America?

There has been a disconnect. And I know there’s issues with Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin right now. That autopsy ended up being a pile of flaming dog poop. But I will tell you, Ken is really following that 50-state strategy that Howard Dean implemented back in 2005, by sending money to state campaigns. Before the DNC, they’re like, “I’m not spending money in Iowa. There’s no reason to spend money in Iowa.” Well, of course there is. We know what Iowa used to be. And I know what Iowa is.

I know why pollster Ann Selzer, in 2024, said, “I think Iowa will flip.” She was roasted and ran out of town for it. But I see what she saw and you probably do, too.

I’m going to all these rural spaces. I went to a little town just north of me in Iowa called Nodaway, Iowa. The population is 78 people. I spoke to a room of over 78 people.

People are showing up because they’re sick and tired with their water quality, with data centers coming in, with the price of fertilizer, with what’s going on with defunding schools and sending our tax money to private religious schools that our kids don’t have access to.

People are furious, right? I attended a town hall in Maryville, Missouri, two days ago in my own county with my representative and my state senator. This is a very red place. There were 100 people there. I had to park three blocks away. It was packed. And I’m telling you, they weren’t happy.

There weren’t people excited to hear what our representatives have been doing. They were angry. They were carrying protest signs—things we haven’t seen for a long time. But if we remember our roots, we remember who we are. Where do progressives come from? From the prairies. From the farms. We knew what good government looked like and we needed it, right? People are starting to go back to their roots.

We seem to be on the verge of giving people an opportunity to say, “OK, maybe Trump wasn’t the answer. Maybe we do share more values than we thought we did.”

But the forces are so strong against us. There’s rural-urban. There’s Right and Left. There’s so much to fuel either side. And people are making money off of that, right? There’s a lot less money spent bringing people together.

Do you see the mainstream media covering this kind of nuanced change in rural America or not?

Not so much. And it’s because they’re not here.

I have a big audience on Substack, and it’s not because my writing skills are the best in the West. It’s because people aren’t hearing the stories of where we’re from, of the people who I’m talking to, of what’s going on on the ground.

About the rural-urban divide. If rural and urban people came together—because basically we’re suffering from the same exact problems—we would be unstoppable. We both have defunded schools. We don’t have access to medical care. We’re in child care deserts. We’re in food deserts. We’re suffering from the same thing. It just looks a little different.

And let’s talk about gun violence. We have gun violence in rural spaces. But it comes with people who are harming themselves at their own hands versus someone else harming them. It all stems from this overabundance of guns, everyone having access to guns. And trust me, I’m a gun owner. My entire inheritance from my dad was guns, so I’m not anti-gun. But this is problematic.

If we think about our problems that way and how much we’re more similar than different, we really can accomplish a lot.

We surveyed Barn Raiser readers in 2025, and one thing we saw was that fear of talking about progressive politics in the rural area is very high. Our readers are also much more concerned about Christian Nationalism, about threats to democracy, about authoritarianism.

Yet we had a No Kings rally in Tipton, Iowa, and had 50, 60 people. We posted a picture on the residents Facebook page. We got all kinds of hate in the comments, but we got 1,400 likes and loves compared to 400 of the laughing and derision.

You made it easier for people to show up. You made it easier for people to see that people like them that are standing on the corners against authoritarianism, against Christian Nationalism.

So absolutely, I see that. I go down and protest all the time with a group called Persisterhood in St. Joseph, Missouri. It’s about an hour south of me. And when they first started showing up, there were 10 or 15 people. And then there were 200 and at their last No Kings, there almost a thousand people there. It just gets bigger and bigger because people realize, “I’m not by myself.”

When I was running, I heard Democratic strategists say, “Don’t worry about signs. It’s a waste of money. Signs don’t vote.” No. You need signs, especially in places like this, because the signs don’t vote, but the people who drive by my little farm see that it’s okay to be pro-choice, pro-education, pro-democracy, anti-Christian Nationalism, anti-authoritarianism. They know it’s okay and they feel okay in this space. That’s how we bring in our community.

I would knock on doors and people would come to the door and they’d say, “Well, I’m a Democrat, but I’m the only one.” And I’m like, “Friend, I just knocked a door, two doors down and they were a Democrat.” But they didn’t even know that because they’re both scared.

I’ll give you a little bit of hope of how things are changing. Four years ago, when I first started speaking, and I didn’t mean to speak, to do this for a living, it was just that there was no one in the space. There’s no one talking to rural progressives, rural Democrats.

Back then, I was asked to go to Cameron, Missouri, which is a town about 8,000 north of Kansas City. I met with about 12 people about book bans and that sort of thing. They met in the church basement because they were scared. They didn’t even park their cars out in front. I went again less than a month ago, and there were so many people in this room that it was standing room only. There was over 100 people in that same little town four years later that are showing up for a random rally to meet candidates.

And by the way, they have candidates to vote for. There are people on the ballot. When I ran in 2022, 40% of the seats in Missouri were uncontested. This year, 2%.

There’s no quick way around this. We didn’t lose our democracy overnight and we’re not coming back overnight, but it’s worth the fight. It’s worth the money. It’s worth the work.

Tell me about your worst day doing all this.

The worst day was my husband losing his job because I was running for office. We were both teachers. We worked at the same school and I was tenured and he was not. I was the only member of National Education Association in the entire building. Everybody else was MSTA [Missouri State Teachers Association], which is not a union, it’s a teachers’ organization. But that’s what rural people think is a union until they find out that it’s not.

So we were going back in August 2020 after Covid with no mitigations, and NEA [National Education Association] protested down in Kansas City. And I went down there and ended up being on the nightly news. My superintendent saw me protesting and she knew that I had filed to run for office. Two days later, they called my husband in and told him his services were no longer needed, which they could do because he was an at-will employee and this is Missouri.

That was a really dark time. I’m used to getting flack. I’m used to people saying terrible, awful things to me. It is what it is. But when it reaches into your family. That was his career. He did end up getting another teaching job. He’s actually a head football coach and he’s tenured. So now, I’m a little louder.

And that’s another thing that people need to understand when they’re like, “Well why don’t these rural folks run?” Well, you or your spouse can very well lose your livelihood, your children could lose their friends. You could lose your church home. You could lose your family members, your community and your friends. That’s what happens when you stand up for what’s right in a place where no one’s been standing up for a long time.

I get the fear. I helped run a campaign against a major Republican in the statehouse here. His daddy’s the head of the state GOP and the son’s a very vindictive man. After we lost that campaign, I bought a new gun and security cameras because we’re out here all by ourselves. And there’s absolutely nothing stopping—not him, but his MAGA friends—from coming out and scaring the bejesus out of us. I’m not sure people who don’t live in rural areas get that.

What’s something you can really hang on to when you get out of bed in the mornings?

It’s more and more people showing up and listening to what’s going on.  A lot of my readers are people living in cities who are fascinated to find out that we exist. And by the way, we’re not even unicorns. There’s quite a few of us. It’s the young people that I see showing up now.

There’s a data center that’s proposed. They say it’s proposed, but it’s already named. So I was like, wait a minute, you named a data center that’s just proposed and we found out about it last week?

A couple things are absolutely nonpartisan, that’s a data centers and school funding. So, it’s seeing these issues coming forth.

And its and seeing the anger at the regime, at the Iran war. I mean, I’m a military mom. When I saw that Trump was trying to raise money off 13 dead soldiers, six or seven from Iowa, I lost it. I’m from MAGA family. My mom and dad were MAGA. My sister. They’re all MAGA. And I ask, “Do you think this is okay?” “No, I don’t.” “Do you think that Jesus meme was okay? Because you’re all Christians, right?” “No, I don’t.” “Alright. We’ve got to do better. We can’t do this anymore.”

Something that is not so much hopeful, but we’re all fighting against is redistricting and these gerrymandered maps. They cannot win if they don’t cheat. I’m on the ground. I see what’s going on.

We can beat these maps, if we can tell people, you can beat a gerrymander. All you got to do is vote for the Democrat. You can put me in whatever district you want, but I’m not voting for you. Just remind people, they are trying to lessen the votes of our Black communities.

Wherever you are, vote against the people that are harming you. We’ve got to fight this for a while, but it gets better.

I take issue with the Democratic Party and others who say in rural America, we just need to lose a little less worse. I don’t find that a very good rallying cry. While it may be true, those of us in rural America are fighting to win. It might take might take more than one race, but we’re going win.

Right. I’m married to a football coach and I cannot imagine him ever saying, “I want to lose by less.” No, he’s like, “I want to win!”

I want to win every single time and if that’s how we go into it—not thinking we’re going to lose—that could be massive.

At Barn Raiser, we cover the Christian right and the role it’s playing in the nation’s politics. What are you seeing about how people of faith are addressing these issues in in your neck of the woods?

I’m disappointed in the faith I was born and raised in, which was Southern Baptist. I’m disappointed that 80% of evangelicals supported Trump, who is very clearly not at all a man of the Bible.

Rural Democrats used to come together and be around each other in union halls, at church, at school at events in town. And then as our culture and everything changed, people aren’t doing those things as much anymore.

But you can bet that three times a week, evangelical Christians are going to church. They hear things like, “You can’t vote for a Democrat and be a Christian.”

And how do I know that? When I was campaigning I heard it at a door, over and over and over again. I would knock. We would talk about schools and roads and hospitals and libraries and all the things that were important. And before I would leave the door, they’d say, “Well, are you a Republican or a Democrat?” And I’d say, “I’m a Democrat.” And they’d say, “Oh, I can’t vote for you because I’m a Christian.”

The first time I heard it, I didn’t know what to do with myself. But you hear it a dozen or 20 times, you’re like, well, this is what it is. The Christianity I grew up with is not what I’m looking at now. This is Christian Nationalism, which is this weird patriotism, Jesus and John Wayne stuff, this masculinity thing that’s going on in these communities.

A lot of these folks I’ve known for a long time, they weren’t Christians. They didn’t go to church. It’s like Trump has become their church. They have literal alters. I have a family member that has this little shelf with all this MAGA gear on. I mean, they make golden statues of him. Like the golden calf in the Old Testament.

People are caught up in this faux faith that’s really not about Christianity at all. It’s about what the Republicans started in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and wedge issues that have finally permeated all the way up to where we have Trump.

Do you have advice for other organizers? How can they be effective?

Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of people doing community service and that sort of thing, but I don’t think we’re going to change a whole lot of minds by people picking up trash on the side of the road.

It’s truly being there, in your community. People know where I live and they know who I am because they can see my signs. I’m still part of the community.

I like to tell this story. A couple of years ago, we had a couple of cows that got out because of an insane bull. And we come home and our neighbors, who are flag-waving Trump folks, have the cows in their pen. Because they’re still my neighbors.

When we’re in our communities, people recognize us. We don’t have horns. We’re not eating babies. I don’t even have blue hair. And that’s why I say, “Run every race. Run for county commission. Run for the city council. Run for school board. And then run for the things that are going to make a big a big difference in your state.”

All politics is local. And so really being within a community makes a huge difference for organizers. And if that’s not you, if you’re new to a community, find the person that has been there forever.

In Missouri, the local Democratic clubs have been broken for so long that a lot of these counties don’t have anybody working.

I met with a club the other day and they hadn’t been together since 2017. They came back together and had over 100 people. People want to belong and want to be able to talk with others who are like-minded. Find those people and then fan out into your communities.

I’m not going to church anymore, but all the ladies I hang out with at Persisterhood are. So, we each have our own thing. I know a lot about education. They know a lot about health care or roads or infrastructure. It’s coming together with the people and really working.

Suzan EremMore by this author →

Suzan Erem is a fruit and nut farmer, working writer and community organizer in rural Cedar County, Iowa. Her Substack is Postcards from the Heartland. Her farm can be found at DracoHill.org.