Here’s How We Can Break the GOP’s Grip on Rural America

During its winter meeting from January 30 to February 1, the Democratic National Committee, the governing body of the Democratic Party, will meet in National Harbor, Maryland, and choose its next chair and other officers. That chair—along with the next president of the Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC), who will be chosen on February 2—will be in a unique position to shift the party to a county-based reform agenda.

Some see the contest for party leadership as primarily about better messaging. But it also presents an opportunity for real change, starting with a focus on the 57 state and territory parties and organizing in each of our nation’s 3,244 counties and county equivalents.

It is not enough to say that the Democratic Party must be focused on the working class. The sad fact is that most of the nation’s counties, primarily rural, have little or no party organization or structure. We cannot, therefore, expect business-as-usual Democratic Party building in rural counties to produce significant results. With few exceptions, Republicans have been winning up and down the ballot in rural counties. The 2024 election once again showed that the loss of rural voters has been fatal to the Democratic Party as well as the hopes of uniting Black, Brown and white voters around a popular, multiracial working-class political program that many of us dream of.

In 2016 and 2020, when I was campaigning for Bernie Sanders in the Iowa caucuses, unaffiliated and even some Republican voters told me that if they went to the Democratic Caucus they would be with Bernie. Today it is even clearer that building such a broad coalition in rural counties is essential—one that must also include family farmers, small business owners and others who support issues like public education, rural and women’s health care, living wages and a clean environment.

There are signs this is already possible. In the 2024 election, such issues passed in referendum voting in rural states including Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and South Dakota. In fact, one exit poll from November’s presidential election showed that self-identified independents accounted for a larger share of voters than Democrats and were tied with Republicans. Currently, enough unaffiliated independent voters side with Republicans to swing most elections in rural areas, despite the fact that unaffiliated voters generally support popular progressive referendum issues. But what if Democrats actively pursued party building, and worked with unaffiliated voters around campaigns based on these same issues?

Imagine Democrats endorsing independent, unaffiliated voters as candidates. Sanders in Vermont and Angus King in Maine have chosen a similar path at the U.S. Senate level. Both King and Sanders have perennially ran as Independents but sought the Democrats’ endorsement to avoid a three-way general election, and then caucused with the Senate Ds, often providing key votes in committees and on legislation. 

Endorsement by the state party, and acceptance of that endorsement by the unaffiliated candidate, are key elements in creating a hybrid alliance that can win. That was not the case last year in Nebraska when independent candidate for U.S. Senate Dan Osborn ran against Deb Fischer, the Republican incumbent. Osborn refused the Democratic endorsement after it was too late for Democrats to nominate a party candidate, believing that he would appeal to more voters as an independent and benefit from the absence of a Democrat on the ticket. Fischer won 53% to 47%, despite polls indicating a much closer outcome. Yet Osborn well outpaced Vice President Kamala Harris’s 39% in the state. Even if true in his case, in the future, Nebraska Democrats and those in other states should require an acceptance of their party’s endorsement, as well as other commitments before the deadline to nominate their own candidate has passed.

The Osborn campaign indicates the potential for electoral alliances between unaffiliated and Democratic Party voters. This kind of alliance could provide state Democratic Parties with an explicit county-by-county organizing strategy to counter the right-wing, especially in rural counties where no Democratic Party structure currently exists.  

The basis of organizing should be the issues winning in referendum voting, from women’s health to popular economic issues minimum wage and paid family leave. Benchmarking party registration and voter turnout are starting points. But in most rural counties, the organizing should be much broader than registering Democrats, and instead mount campaigns that bring together broader coalitions based on issues like rural health care, public education or clean water.

Just as state Democratic Parties in Vermont and Maine endorse independents for the U.S. Senate, new coalition party building can include county-based organizations with new names like “X” county farmer labor party, or ”X” county independent coalition. Currently state parties in Minnesota and North Dakota have unique names dating back to mid 20^th century mergers with independent political organizations. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and the North Dakota Democratic Non-Partisan League both emerged at a time when it was in the interests of both the independent parties in those states as well as the state Democratic Parties to merge and with a unique name.

Experiments are needed. Issue-based political coalitions, mobilizing voters—whether Democratic or not—to support candidates, even if unaffiliated, and building the Democratic Party base is clearly complicated. But it just might work.

In November, voters in Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska adopted paid sick leave proposals. Similarly In Alaska and Missouri minimum wage increases were approved. Alaska also banned captive audience meetings when workers are organizing. Missouri, Colorado, Montana and Nevada all adopted referenda supporting abortion rights. There must be some potential in these and other rural states to continue organizing around those issues, county by county, and build electoral as well as legislate power. 

Nearly 60% of Alaska voters are either independent or unaffiliated, the largest proportionally in the nation, while only 12% are Democrats. In Iowa, unaffiliated voters (36%) outnumber Democrats (29%) and Republicans (32%). Missouri, the state that passed the most progressive referenda in 2024, counts Democrats at 36%, Republicans at 42% and unaffiliated at 20%. Similar counts prevail across many rural states, and given the issue referenda results in 2024, we need to pick a few states, and counties within those states, where we can test the possibility of building a rural popular movement with unaffiliated, independent and Democratic voters joining together with issue-based campaigns.

This is not a project aimed at flipping U.S. Senate seats in 2026. Organizing means starting from the ground up and recruiting new leaders, county by county and tracking the results. We might have a clean water county-based party organization on the ground in Iowa, parties for fair pay in a few counties in Missouri or Alaska, or workers’ rights parties in industrial towns across the Rust Belt.

We can’t depend on national messaging that invests huge amounts in television advertising to build a new rural base. Just as with workplace organizing, we need to work from the inside out, and in different ways in different places.

This may not excite much of the donor class, or most political operatives whose careers are devoted to carving out a slice of campaign media budgets. But at a time when progressives need new organizing and new answers, this might be one part of it.

Larry CohenMore by this author →

Larry Cohen is Board Chair of Our Revolution, past president of the Communications Workers of America, and, since 2005, a member of the Democratic National Committee.