Can ‘Good Neighbor’ Politics Win in Rural America?

“I got this farm 10 years ago, and the cattle got out onto the road in the first week,” she says. “It was terrifying, but my neighbors helped out and I had a group of friends right away.”

As the political director of Rural GroundGame (RGG), a grassroots organization supporting Democratic candidates in Virginia, Thorne says Republican policies are antithetical to this neighborly ethos. Like many other Democratic organizers, she and RGG are placing Project 2025 front and center in their outreach efforts. Rockingham County’s school board has banned more than 50 books in 2024, which she sees as a sign that the anti-public education aspects of Project 2025 are already underway in Virginia.

When she points out specific Project 2025 policies like book bans, “People say, ‘of course that’s bad, that’s not who we are,’” she says. “It’s a distraction from what people really care about and the need to make their communities better.”

Appealing to rural America by invoking its idealized image of farmlands, main streets and tight-knit communities, is all part of the theater of campaigning in national politics, as evidenced by vice-presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz touting their rural roots. But for the Democratic Party, its connection to rural America has been steadily dropping—Bill Clinton won about 1,100 rural counties in 1996, Barack Obama won 455 in 2008, and Joe Biden won only 200 in 2020.

And while the Democrats’ presence in rural America has declined the challenges faced by rural communities has escalated. People in rural communities are 25% more likely to live in poverty than the average American. Of the 100 most disadvantaged communities in the United States, 91 are rural. And economic challenges resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and inflation are felt most acutely in rural America.

Unlike their urban counterparts, Democratic candidates in rural areas face long distances for door knocking and a more hostile political environment that can discourage prospective candidates. What’s more, Democratic expenditures in rural areas account for about 3% of party funding. The numbers are even more stark in non-battleground rural areas.

Rural GroundGame was founded in 2019 to address the decline of the Democratic Party in rural areas of Virginia by offering campaign support to Democratic nominees, committees and organizations across a state where rural areas receive only 1.6% of party funding. Its team of three full-time staff and 18 part-time staff pools resources like shared campaigning and communications tools critical for reaching untapped rural voters.           

In 2023, Thorne says RGG contributed nearly $128,000 to 144 campaigns and made 2.2 million direct voter contacts across the state. It is headquartered in Virginia’s 6th Congressional District, which includes most of the western part of the state, from the Shenandoah Valley to the state’s northern and western border with West Virginia. Shenandoah is home to one of America’s most scenic byways, Skyline Drive, natural caves, Civil War battlefields and, less famously, more than 300,000 registered voters who have not voted in at least three years, many of whom hear little, if anything, from the Democratic Party. In six of the past 12 U.S. congressional campaigns, for example, Republicans ran unopposed or against boot-strapping third-party candidates.

While a handful of Democratic leaders in Virginia like Sen. Tim Kain, Rep. Jennifer McClellan and Rep. Gerry Connolly have supported RGG’s efforts, it can seem as if the party has largely given up on trying to win races in rural Virginia.

“Investing in this work is not seen as ‘strategic,’ ” Thorne says. “You might get a pat on the back and a ‘bless your heart,’ but not much more.”

She has noticed a slow cultural shift against this trend—that it’s no longer acceptable to overlook or malign rural communities—but Democratic organizers here still face an uphill battle. 

“We need to convert that cultural shift into meaningful implementation of resources and partnerships,” she says. RGG and the candidates they support are seeing promising signs throughout rural Virginia. Jade Harris, a 26-year-old native of Rockbridge County in the Shenandoah Valley, has run for both the Virginia House of Delegates (2022) and State Senate (2023).

While she ultimately lost both races, her campaigns engaged new voters, motivated donors, and built momentum for the Democratic policy in southwestern Virginia. In her 2020 campaign for the Virginia House—a special election in which she only had three weeks to raise funds and turn out voters—Harris outperformed President Joe Biden by 10 points across District 24—and by 20 points in her home county of Rockbridge.

“Nobody should go to the polls and only see one name on their ballot. That’s not how democracy should work,” she says.

In total across the two campaigns, Harris says that she raised nearly $54,000.

“The electoral results and fundraising achievements alone are a massive boon to the case that rural candidates need resources. It doesn’t take a million dollars to perform well here and give people options,” says Harris.

In a new part-time role with RGG, Harris is helping other rural candidates access resources and mobilize rural voters. She was one of the 119 delegates from Virginia at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an event that energized her before the busiest stretch of the campaign season.

Thorne thinks that the Democrats’ core message—good neighbors fixing roads and feeding kids with good policy—can still resonate, if only the party would give its rural organizers more resources and support.       

In September we meet Thorne and Harris in the college town of Lexington at the Rockbridge Area Democrats office, where Harris launched her political career with a speech that won her the party’s nomination in the 2022 special election for the Virginia House. Thorne digs through a closet and fishes out a box of RGG yard signs that she helped design: “Good Neighbors Feed Kids, Fix Roads. Vote Harris-Walz,” it reads, emblazoned in John Deere yellow and green.

These signs are part of RGG’s newest get out the vote efforts, which has been met with a groundswell of support from rural Democratic leaders according to Thorne. A network of more than 150 volunteers is getting out the vote for Harris-Walz, distributing materials on Project 2025, passing out Harris-Walz good neighbor signs, and connecting one on one with rural voters from the Shenandoah Valley to the Eastern Shore.

One of those leaders familiar with the efforts that go into rural campaigning is Stephanie Clark, a former city council member in Covington, a town of 6,000 about 40 miles west of Lexington. In 2023, Clark, a pastor at New Vision Baptist Church, ran as a Democrat for the Virginia House in District 37.    

“Rural GroundGame brings so much understanding, teaching, and resources to rural Democratic candidates. Every person that runs in this area of the state needs a solid support system, and Rural GroundGame was that for me,” says Clark.

Clark got her start in politics as a school administrator where she developed a passion for listening and finding solutions to her neighbors’ challenges, like how to get a new stop sign to slow traffic near a school bus stop. Clark takes a stake in her neighbor’s challenges and wellbeing. She and her husband regularly welcome community members to share stories on their front porch—neighbor to neighbor. These days, she stays active distributing RGG Harris-Walz literature and capturing stories as part of RGG’s Storyteller Project.     

The Storyteller Project, taking a page from Clark’s book, aims to capture stories from voters on why they’re supporting Democrats. These stories are then presented in short videos—“scrappy, not scripted,” Thorne says—and shared via paid campaigns on social media to reach a wider audience. The Virginia-based Video Activists Academy trains volunteers, who receive equipment including a smartphone, tripod, microphone and lights to record videos in their communities.

Over key lime pie and sweet tea at Family TreeT’s restaurant in Low Moor, Clark, Harris and Thorne recall the recent Labor Day parade in nearby Buena Vista, widely seen as the unofficial start to campaign season. 

Their excitement is fueled not only by the lively debates from aspiring candidates and active politicians from both sides of the aisle, including Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and Sen. Tim Kaine, but also by this symbolic shift. Buena Vista was once a strong union town and used to swing Democratic but has been leaning Republican in recent years. Now more and more Democratic candidates, like Harris and Clark, are getting airtime to advocate for solutions to the challenges their communities face.

The owner of Family TreeT’s stops by the table to catch up with Clark, telling her that the town council needs to offer more support to small businesses like hers. “If I can do all this with a few thousand dollars,” she says, gesturing at the space, which is busy on a weekday afternoon, “imagine what else I could do.” Clark, Thorne and Harris all nod in agreement.

“Have you ever thought about serving on the Town Council?” Clark counters. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” the owner says. Says Thorne: “We should talk.”

Alli O'Connell

Alli O'Connell is a steward of social and environmental impact through social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and storytelling. Alli is from rural North Carolina and has worked in Latin America and operates a social enterprise supporting women artisans in Guatemala. She studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kip Dooley

Kip Dooley is a writer and photographer of Irish, English, French and German settler heritage. His writing has appeared in The Wisconsin Idea, DCist, CityPages, US Lacrosse Magazine, and he is at work on a book with his mom, food writer Beth Dooley, for Milkweed Editions.