Where Now Rural Progressives? The Harris Campaign’s Rural Outreach Director Has Answers

Hildreth grew up on a farm in South Dakota and got involved in politics in 2007, as Barack Obama’s campaign was building out its groundbreaking rural operation ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

In 2011, Hildreth moved back to his family’s ancestral home in Larchwood, Lyon County, Iowa, about 20 miles east of Sioux Falls, and a year later started Rural Organizing. In a few years, the group’s email list swelled to 600,000, and in 2018 Hildreth shifted to a full-time job as its executive director.

Rural Organizing has since grown to encompass a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on advocacy and subverting rural stereotypes, a 501(c)(4) that lobbies for progressive policies and a super PAC that spends money on elections.

Ahead of the Democratic National Committee’s selection of a new chair on February 1, Hildreth spoke with Barn Raiser about the lessons from the 2024 campaign, and what comes next.

The Kamala Harris campaign hired you in September 2024 as her rural engagement director, just after Labor Day in an already rushed campaign. How was your experience?

The experience overall was fantastic. The Harris-Walz team was really committed.

I spent a lot of time in central Pennsylvania and some in the Appalachian parts of Pennsylvania. I’d go to these remote, rural county offices, and the campaign staff and the county chairs would all be saying: “We’ve never seen so many volunteers. We’re knocking on doors we haven’t knocked since 2008.” That was inspiring.

Everybody knew there was not enough time for the campaign that needed to be run. But there was a lot of grit despite so many things we could not control in terms of timeline and the bigger picture.

That piece is lost in the punditry. The historians and the pundits and political scientists are looking at the big trends, the 30,000-foot level. Inside the campaign it’s very different. You know the names of the people who are staying up until 3 a.m. for 20 days in a row to make sure every county chair has as many yard signs as they can distribute.

The Harris-Walz team was never really ahead. Coming out of the race, for a lot of people it felt like a shock to see that Trump won, but the polling was actually right. It was the disconnect between the polling and the analysis on the polling that threw people for a loop.

I’m coming out of the election more hopeful than most because I don’t feel there was a massive national shift in the electorate. Our country has always been split. We knew this was going to be the closest election of our lifetime, and we had, what, 80 days? I was there for 65 or 66 days, and we tried to run a presidential race in the time between the Democratic National Convention and Election Day. Of course that wasn’t going to work. It took me two weeks to get an email address set up, because the IT department was so slammed with not only trying to run a campaign, but getting everybody’s email addresses switched over from joebiden.com to kamalaharris.com. Specific things need to happen when you shift from one campaign to another.

External things happened that made it impossible. The biggest being the fact that the donor class held back their money until the last minute trying to get Joe Biden to step down. It’s true that a billion dollars was spent on the campaign, but most of that was spent after August, and it doesn’t matter if you have billions of dollars. Spending that money late really has no impact.

There are communities—central Pennsylvania, parts of Appalachia, western North Carolina, the area around Traverse City, Michigan—that moved a little bit bluer compared to 2020. That’s the result of specific people on the ground, like county chairs, who have a specific strategy and it’s working.

National strategists, the pundits, can be so disconnected from those places. They’re not learning from them. The assumption is somebody’s going to write some breakthrough op-ed in the New York Times, and all of a sudden it’s going to change things. The fact of the matter is a county chair setting up a weekly pancake breakfast is going to change more in that county than any New York Times op-ed.

Many people saw Tim Walz’s nomination as an indication the Democratic Party was serious about engaging rural America. Did that translate into reality on the ground?

Gov. Walz was a game changer for small towns and rural communities everywhere we went. Even though we lost, his nomination still changed the Democratic Party in a way that we’re still getting our heads around.

The reason I went to work on the campaign was because Gov. Walz was selected as the vice president. At Rural Organizing, we have been talking about being boldly progressive, proudly rural since 2012. This apparent contraction, that you can be rural and progressive, is is something that Democrats have not been fully able to comprehend. Sherrod Brown had it, Jon Tester had it as well as those Democrats that held on who had this pro-labor prairie populist progressivism and fully embraced their rural identity. That’s something Gov. Walz did and does. People need to see it. You have to show and not just tell. Seeing it in Gov. Walz, how he talked to people and how he embraced those values, was very evident.

There was a great event in October at the third-generation Telesz farm in Lawrence County in western Pennsylvania. We released the rural plan, Gov. Walz’s team and the Harris policy team were directly involved in crafting it. It was all about cutting ambulance deserts in half. It started with the acknowledgement that healthcare and emergency services in rural America are in decline. To get EMTs and doctors into rural America, you can do debt forgiveness for their college loans. You can create housing initiatives through the Department of Agriculture for health care workers. You can promote independent pharmacies. It was one of the better plans I’ve seen from a campaign. It wasn’t just a plan that took campaign talking points and put “rural” in front of voters. It was a plan written by rural experts with rural-specific solutions to rural-specific challenges.

I don’t think that would have happened without Gov. Walz, and yet, we all had three months to try and run that campaign. If Gov. Walz had started in January, we’d have been in a different place. Even still, the numbers in rural counties shifted less than they did in other areas. Gov. Walz was part of that. Everywhere you went, people said, “I have a Tim Walz in my community. I know Tim Walz because he reminds me of a teacher or coach in my town.” That representation matters.

Did you encounter anything on the campaign trail that surprised you or that you have been thinking about ever since?

The number one thing is we have to address is civic deserts. There is a fundamental difference in communities where there is a more robust civic life. We always use this term, “community organizing,” and so often we’re focused on the organizing piece but forget about the community piece.

In a lot of places, the fabric of the community is deteriorating, not just in one area of the community, but in the entire community. In a lot of places you have people running the county Democratic Party who have been running the county Democratic Party for 65 years, and they would love to figure out how to not be the one in charge anymore. They don’t want to give up on it because they’ve put so many years into it, but they don’t know how to get the next generation involved.

Campaigns are run with the assumption there is an underlying community to organize. I’m not sure that’s happening as much as people realize. There’s a lot of focus on media, rightfully so. There’s a lot of focus on social networks, rightfully so. But I don’t think from a small “d” democracy perspective, we can ignore these civic deserts. It’s a lot easier for disinformation online and a lot easier for the media environment at the national level to take over the perspectives of people living in these civic deserts. They’re not talking to each other. They’re more likely to believe some stranger on the internet than their neighbor when it comes to facts.

One of the things that I learned from this campaign is the need to focus on civic skill building in rural America. And with a specific focus on millennials and Gen Z because we have to get those people involved. Even if they’re Republicans in the county Republican Party, that’s better for democracy than no community connection. We have to build that skillset, because otherwise we’re in a position of spending billions and billions of dollars on TV ads that have nothing to do with people’s day-to-day experiences.

How can the Democratic Party better engage and represent rural Americans?

I have a new motto that I started during the campaign: “Get visible, get vocal, get votes.”

Rural Organizing did a call on the Thursday after the election to pull together everybody across the county we knew who lives in a county that went bluer this cycle. We asked, “What is working? How did you do it?” They said, visibility events. It all comes down to not just doing door knocks, not just going to people at their doors. We have to create opportunities for people to see us in the community.

People are finding success doing things like morning coffee, or weekly get-togethers in public spaces, or doing local fundraisers through the Democrat Party and donating it to a food pantry.

It’s this idea of showing people that you can be a Democrat and you live here in small towns and rural communities. That’s not something a consultant inside the Beltway can do. That’s not something the next chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) can do. It comes down to people living in rural communities who are trying to decide, “Do I give up or do I re-engage?”

Sometimes that’s really scary. But people have to see you in the community. That’s not going to all of a sudden get you votes, but what it’s going to do is start building a community.

The second part is you get vocal. Once you build the community, you have to start talking to people. Democrats spent millions and millions trying to predict who is a persuadable voter, but local folks know better than any computer algorithm or predictive analytics who is persuadable. We need that local community of Democrats having those intentional conversations year-round.

The last part is getting votes. Once you have that community, once you have people talking, you can start door knocking, you can start doing all the traditional get-out-the-vote stuff. But if all we ever do is GOTV and that’s it, it’s not connecting. It really does start local. It starts from bottom up.

That being said, the DNC has a responsibility here. There are a lot of good people who have been pushing the DNC to be more rural-focused.

A lot of people, even those working closely with the DNC, don’t feel like the leadership has figured it out. Based on my experience with the campaign, I think there needs to be a committee at the DNC made up of the rural caucus chairs.

Most states have a Democratic rural caucus. Those chairs should be pulled together into a committee, and get something like $500,000 for a training budget. The rural caucus chairs should outline the curriculum. They should be the ones to decide and hire the person to run training. There needs to be a pot of money specifically for rural engagement and that money needs to be managed by people in the states who are dealing with this on a day-to-day basis. I think the rural caucus chairs are probably best positioned to do that.

How should Democrats address the hot button cultural issues around gender and sexuality that the GOP made so much of?

When it comes to any issue, there needs to be a both/and approach. You have to mobilize the base and you have to win over persuadable voters. Too often Democrats are in a position where they’re trying to pick one or the other, and it just doesn’t work. If you look at numbers on any of the “hot button” issues—immigration, transgender rights—support for that progressive policy outperforms support for Democrats. If all we do in rural America is go from winning 33% of the vote to winning 40%, that would be a massive win for Democrats. Almost every “hot button issue,”  even amongst rural voters, is performing above 40% for voters, even banning assault weapons. We have to disentangle people who don’t like Democrats versus people who don’t like progressive policies. Progressive policies are always more popular than the Democratic brand. We have to figure that out.

That said, people running in rural-specific districts need to distinguish themselves from the national brand of the Democratic Party that’s being promoted on Fox News. Most voters in rural America probably don’t know a vocal Democrat in their community, so it’s not like they’re hearing from Democrats what the Democrat position is, and thinking about it and making a decision about whether they support that. What they do is watch Fox News, see a strawman characterization of the Democratic Party, and make their decision. We have to disentangle that. But when you look at the most popular message in rural America, it’s, “We must end the corruption in Washington, D.C.”

Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” message is in my opinion why he was president in 2016 and why he’s president again now. The idea that Donald Trump is ending corruption in Washington, D.C., is laughable. But the way it’s presented on Fox News and in right-wing media is that he’s this populist anti-corruption crusader working to end the deep state and drain the swamp.

Democrats can get so focused on social issues that we don’t listen to what people are saying. What they’re saying is they want to see increases to their paychecks. They want to see decreases on their grocery bill. They want to see the local quality of life improve. And they think the reason why it’s not happening is because D.C. is corrupt, and they think that Democrats are perpetuating that corruption, and Donald Trump is trying to change it.

By the way, I do believe we have to end corruption in Washington, D.C. I do believe that lobbyists have too much control over our democracy. I do believe that billionaires have corrupted our civic life. I think a lot of Trump voters would agree with that. Who we blame and what do we do about it is where we disagree.

We have to show people how social issues are being used to divide and distract us from the billionaire ruling class, who for a long time were Democrats, and now they’ve all mysteriously shifted to be Republican.

Those billionaires are benefitting and creating the widest wealth gap we’ve seen in multiple generations, and we’re bickering with each other about something we saw on Facebook or Fox News.

Fox News could turn their voters against people who butter their toast. It doesn’t matter what the issue is for Fox News. They will always find an issue. They will always find a reason to trash Democrats, so the more you go down the path trying to find a Fox News-friendly message, it’s not going to work. It will always get turned against you.

The people who are successful and the candidates who outperform the national Democratic brand are the people able to talk to voters about the core concerns they have about their paychecks and their grocery bills and their local quality of life, and explain to them how they are on the voters’ side.

What are you looking for from the candidates to chair the Democratic National Committee? What changes should the DNC make so far as how it approaches rural communities?

I’m always skeptical of a top-down approach. The idea that one person can come in and fix what is happening is a mistake. The DNC is not structured to do much more than elect the president.

For the past 30 years, county Democratic Parties have been in decline. Oftentimes campaigns are too quick to dismiss the county party infrastructure. If you’re running a campaign, you say, “We’re going to hire our own staff to do our own thing. We don’t want to mess with local county parties because they all have their own politics, and some of them are effective and other ones are not. It’s a waste of time to go through that county party infrastructure.”

I don’t know if there’s somebody at the DNC who is focused on outreach to Democratic county chairs, big or small. But we absolutely need a DNC chair that understands the value of the county parties and is willing to put money into building up those efforts.

What I’ve been saying is we need to plant perennials. By that, I mean we need to invest in efforts that come back year after year after year, regardless of whether we fund them. Think about ecological succession, what happens after a wildfire. There’s a certain process that comes out of that. First the small grasses come back, and the small plants and the shrubs, and it takes years to get back to a mature forest. We can learn from that process.

We have to get the county parties in a place where they are able to self-sustain, where they are able to run local candidates on their own and fund themselves. In some places that might be impossible, but in a lot of places, they just need a little help to get pointed in the right direction. They just need some tools to recruit new members who are younger. They need some support to figure out how they can fundraise $50,000 a year.

I grew up in South Dakota and remember that the South Dakota Democratic Party couldn’t even afford an office building. Part of the problem is the DNC sending out emails to everybody, raising money and pulling money out of these communities. If all the DNC did was help people raise money locally rather than trying to take the money out of communities, that would be enough.

It will help to have a party chair who understands the value of the county parties and understands how to navigate the influence of high-dollar donors who want to drive the party in the direction they want to go, versus the county party chairs that are the foundation of the Democratic Party.

The other thing is, NGP VAN, the tool we use to manage the voter file, is owned by a private equity firm in London. It’s the tool everybody uses to plan and promote their events. I am very skeptical of a profit motivation when it comes to technology. If your goal is to increase profits for shareholders, that oftentimes comes in conflict with your goal to create the best platform and tools for voters engaging their neighbors.

We have to figure out a way to improve our voter file. The voter file is a disaster. We get the data from the secretary of state or the county auditor, and then we get the addresses of where all the registered Democrats are, and then we try and contact the people in that house.

A better strategy is focus on people first. Today, if you live in a city, you have a certain score in terms of your partisanship, and then if you move to a rural area, your partisan score automatically goes down because they assume that you are less likely to vote as a Democrat. When that kind of stuff is happening in our data, it’s a disaster. That technology was state of the art in 2012, but it is getting more and more disconnected from the people who want to use it. The DNC chair could figure that out.

A number of candidates for DNC chair have bemoaned the power and influence of campaign consultants and the corporations that hire them. Are reforms needed in how the Party relates to them?

The easy answer is yes. The populist answer is yes.

The thing I will say, though, is that it sucks to work on a campaign. Right now, I know 50 people who are underemployed because they left their job to go work on the Harris-Walz campaign.

This work never pays year-round. It never pays cycle to cycle. You’re constantly moving around. You’re constantly finding a new job. I wish there was a way you could be a full-time employee and paid year-round with a salary and benefits through the Democratic Party, and you’re unionized and all the things.

There’s no way I can picture how that will happen with how campaigns work. You have no money at the start, you raise a little bit of money, then you hire staff, then you raise more money, then you run your campaign and then on Election Day, your campaign’s over and your money dries up. That’s the way campaigns are run. You need to figure out how to build a workforce that’s ready when you need them, but who also have jobs in other places.

That’s a bigger challenge for our democracy than people realize. We’re seeing a mass exodus right now of people with experience within the government, very highly qualified people trying to find work. It doesn’t matter if you’re the secretary of the USDA, you’re looking for a job right now. It makes sense for people to be consultants and pick up work here and there to maintain institutional knowledge. The problem is when you have a consultant-based workforce, you don’t have the ability to vet and have an annual review like you would as a staff.

Maybe there are simple things, like banning no-bid contracts with the DNC. Maybe there’s ways to reform that. But which consultants get hired, who gets blacklisted, whose friends get the money—that is a big problem.

We need to acknowledge that some people are donating to the Democratic Party because they believe in the Democratic Party’s values, and because they believe in the Democratic Party candidates. Others donate to the Democratic Party to influence it. We have not fully processed who is donating as an actual gift, and who is investing to bring the Democratic Party more in line with their profit motives. I’m not sure I’ve heard any real strong vision for how you do that and keep the Democratic Party centered on voters.

Through Rural Organizing, you have helped start a number of organization that take different approaches to engaging rural Americans, from electioneering to policy. What’s the game plan for the next four years of the Trump administration?

This year Rural Organizing is going to launch a Rural 2050 initiative, setting a 25-year agenda from 2025 to 2050. We have to get out of the day-to-day, breaking news, MSNBC media environment. We have to ask, “Where do we want to be? What is it we want? And who are the people that are going to get us there?”

If you look at it right now, the people who will be running the most important civic organizations in rural America by 2050 are currently entering the workforce. I will be retiring. But Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be stepping into those leadership roles. We need to prepare those folks to lead in a way this last generation has not led. That’s regardless of their party affiliation or anything like that.

What does civic life look like for the TikTok generation, and how is the TikTok generation prepared to step into those leadership roles? We are taking an approach that’s 40% responding to the threats and chaos of the day, and 60% focused on building that long term vision and the people that can get us there.

Who are the people that are going to do this work? We find the messenger matters more than the message. There’s all this effort on the message and none on the messenger. That’s also true when it comes to deeper civic life. The assumption is the next generation is coming in with civic skills that they may need to get us there. That civic skill building amongst millennials for now, Gen Z and Gen Alpha for the future, is something we’re thinking a lot about at Rural Organizing.

What would you say to people who want to run for office in rural areas, but won’t consider stepping up because they think Democrats can’t win?

First, I would say reach out to Rural Organizing because we’ll have your back in any way that we can. Second, is probably a harder thing, which is, before we can win, we have to lose strategically. There are plenty of examples of people running for office and losing and taking the email and donor lists they collect from running, and using it to build perennial investments that come back year after year regardless of that initial capital needed.

I’d also recommend people start by running in nonpartisan races. Run for township trustee, or school board if it’s nonpartisan. People need to know who you are first, and they need to know they like you first, and then find out that you’re a Democrat, and then find out that you’re a candidate. If the first time most people hear of you is in the contact of you running for office in a local rural area, you’re probably not going to win.

It comes down to candidate recruitment as well. Look at Gov. Walz, who first considered running after he attended a candidate recruitment training meeting. We need to find those future Gov. Walzes within our communities, and we have to support them.

We’ve done polling that shows if you put a D next to your name, it could cost you 35 points, at least among battleground rural voters. In some places, there’s no way to overcome it. Maybe run as an independent in those places, maybe run for a nonpartisan office, but at some point we have to figure out how to improve the brand. And I don’t know how we do it, other than getting a bunch of future Tim Walzes to run.

Mason AdamsMore by this author →

Mason has covered Appalachian communities since 2001 for zines, alt-weeklies, community and metro newspapers, magazines, digital media and public radio. He hosts West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and writes the weekday Southeast Energy News for Energy News Network. Mason's work has appeared in Southerly, Daily Yonder, Mother Jones, In These Times, New Republic, Vice and elsewhere. Mason lives with his family in Floyd County, Virginia.