Can Tim Walz Help the Democrats Win Back Rural America?

Garner, the veteran actress who most recently appeared in this summer’s Hollywood blockbuster Deadpool vs. Wolverine, grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. In previous campaigns, she’s raised funds for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. This year, she brought her star power to an August 6 “Rural Americans for Harris” Zoom call.

The two-hour online session, which drew over 2,000 participants and raised some $20,000, did not have the high profile of other affinity groups that have emerged in recent weeks to back Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president in the 2024 election. Initiatives like “Win with Black Women,” “Black Men for Harris,” “White Women Answer the Call” and “White Dudes for Harris” have attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters and added millions to campaign coffers.

But rural Democrats insist the party can’t afford to bypass their communities, which account for 15-to-20% of the U.S. electorate, or some 25 to 30 million voters. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Donald Trump won a whopping 59% of the vote in rural areas in 2016, and he did even better in 2020 with 65%. Joe Biden won in 2020 by flipping the script in the suburbs. Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton among suburban voters in 2016; Biden won them by an 11-point margin in 2020.

Opportunity knocks

Still, there are rich opportunities outside of cities and suburbs say leaders like Jane Kleeb, who is chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and one of the organizers of the “Rural Americans” call. Her husband is a cattle rancher and she’s delighted with the choice of Tim Walz; he grew up in rural Nebraska and taught high school in Mankato, a small city in Minnesota. But Democrats first have to break what she calls “the cycle of mutual neglect.”

“We neglect to invest in rural America,” says Kleeb. “So [rural Americans] don’t hear our message, they don’t see our faces, they don’t know our platform. So they don’t vote for us—so we don’t invest in rural America.”

Walz was scheduled to headline Tuesday’s event but was named as Harris’s running mate that same day and made his first public appearance as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee with Harris at a rally in Philadelphia. In his stead was Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who could take over for Walz as the state’s governor if he is elected in November.

During the Zoom session, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat and chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who is retiring this year, pointed to her party’s record of accomplishments for rural America. She ticked off increased broadband access, funds to support rural hospitals and nursing homes, and “the largest investment in rural electricity since the New Deal,” to back renewable energy projects.

The Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to an email query from Barn Raiser for information about Republican priorities for rural America. The GOP platform, approved at the party’s July convention, includes “Protect American Workers and Farmers from Unfair Trade” as a chapter heading—but the bullet points beneath make no mention of either farmers or rural communities.

Voting for values

By itself, a list of policy priorities or legislative accomplishments is not likely to move the needle for rural voters, says Dan Shea, professor of government at Colby College in Maine. He is the co-author, with fellow Colby faculty member Nicholas Jacobs, of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. The book is based on a 200-question survey completed by more than 10,000 rural residents, the largest and most detailed research ever conducted among this population.

Rural residents, he says, are looking for empathy from political leaders, and a sense of shared values. “A common assumption,” Shea says, “is that rural communities are withering away, a wasteland of alienation. We find the opposite: Rural Americans are proud of their communities. They are connected and they want to stay in the community.”

Rural communities, he says, are typically more economically integrated than suburbs or cities, with well-to-do families living nearby those who are less well off, often attending the same schools and churches. As a result, although rural residents have a strong belief in hard work and self-reliance, they are also highly attuned to how well—or how badly—their community is doing as a whole.

Over the past decades, rural families have suffered severe economic shocks, first from the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, then from manufacturing job loss connected to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and unrestricted imports from China. As more family farms disappeared, rural factory jobs became an important source of income—until they weren’t.

“In many communities,” Shea observes, “there was just one factory, and it defined the identity of the town.” When that plant closed “NAFTA ghost towns” were left behind.

Even prior to the collapse of rural manufacturing, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory in 1980, the prairie populists who could once win over the heartland electorate began to lose steam. Democratic senators like Idaho’s Frank Church, Iowa’s John Culver and South Dakota’s George McGovern lost their seats, and rural voters are now “overwhelmingly conservative.”

His students are shocked, says Shea, when he tells them that probably the most liberal Democratic presidential nominee ever—McGovern—was from South Dakota.

“My best guess,” he says, “is that the worry and anxiety that all Americans have about the future is dramatically heightened in rural parts. Rural Americans are anxious for something different.” He’s not surprised to see the Harris-Walz ticket focused on a forward-looking message. “It’s by design they’re saying, ‘We’re not going back.’ ”

Neighbor-to-neighbor

Several speakers on the “Rural Americans for Harris” Zoom event warmly remembered time-tested values of mutual support that are still a source of strength for rural communities. Jennifer Garner recalled how her mother, a schoolteacher, was often not around when she came home from school.

“I would go right down the street to Marge,” she said, “and I would know that she would have a key for me. And Mrs. Moore would have a snack for me, and I knew I was taken care of in my community.”

Trae Crowder, a comedian from Celina, Tennessee, and co-author of The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Outta the Dark,” remembered what happened after the death of his father 10 years ago. “I had two babies, and I was living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “After the funeral is over, I go back to the office to check how am I going make these payments. And the guy goes, ‘Oh you don’t owe us anything. Everybody in town chipped in … so it’s covered.’ ”

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat who represents northern New Mexico in Congress, talked about the irrigation channels—acequias—that are vital to farmers in her district. The acequias “make sure that the snow that falls on the mountains in the winter can flow down to nourish our fields in the summer.”

Shared ownership of a vital resource, she explained, is a unique feature of this centuries-old system. “The farmers each own a little share of the water,” she said, “and we protect and take care of those ditches together because without them we would not survive.”

“The acequias are older than America,” said Fernandez, “but there is something American about them, that shared belief and commitment to something that’s bigger than each of us.”

Tough losses, tough fights ahead

Several speakers acknowledged that running for office as a Democrat in rural communities—and in states with a significant rural population—isn’t easy.

Brandon Presley, who is the cousin of Elvis Presley, nearly pulled off an upset during a run for Mississippi governor in 2023, winning 47% of the vote. Mandela Barnes lost a U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin in 2022 by just 26,000 votes. Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, pointed out that Biden lost North Carolina by 74,000 votes—“42 votes for every precinct in every county in the state of North Carolina.”

Rural Democrats are also focused on the need to run candidates in as many races as possible. One goal is to erase GOP supermajorities in all-red state legislatures, which allows the party to write its most extreme policy planks into law. And in swing states, said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the pro-democracy activist group Indivisible, down ballot races can make a big difference.

“I know some of you are thinking, hey Ezra I’m in the heart of Trump country we can’t elect a dog catcher,” he said. “That might be true. You might not be able to elect a dog catcher. But you sure as hell can run a dog catcher; you sure as hell can get votes out for that dog catcher, and get votes out for the state rep, state senator, U.S. rep, city council person.”

“You can get votes out for those candidates. They might win, they might not win. But regardless they’re going to get votes out for themselves and the top of the ticket for Harris for Walz, for Democrats running statewide. We need those votes.”

“When I ran [for state legislator] in 2022, 40% of the seats in Missouri were uncontested,” says Jess Piper, a teacher with a large social media following, and currently chair of Blue Missouri. “Because of all the work we’ve been doing, 18% of the seats are going uncontested. So we are making progress.”

“I was running in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat in 32 years,” Piper said. “Because I was raising money, that Republican had to stay in his district. I forced him to talk about abortion bans and the fact that we don’t have shoulders on our roads and that 30 percent of the schools in Missouri are on a four-day week. I forced him to talk about that when he was wanting to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

“The road to democracy,” Piper said, “is going right through rural America.”

Roger Kerson

Roger Kerson is a Michigan-based writer and media strategist for labor unions, environmental groups and nonprofit organizations.