How Democrats Can Win By Organizing from the County Up

In her new role, Kleeb automatically becomes a DNC vice-chair at Martin’s side, part of a leadership team that says it will move the party in a bolder direction. In a December 19 Barn Raiser op-ed, Kleeb explained why she was supporting Martin for chair of the DNC and running for President of the ASDC. She wrote in part:

Not many of our national party leaders live in rural or small town America, which means the voices of a third of Americans are not being heard as budgets get made, strategies get developed and messages are created.

Politics is in Kleeb’s blood. Kleeb grew up in south Florida, where her mother was head of Broward County Right to Life. Kleeb, who is 51, left the Republican Party after college, and from 2003-2007 served as the executive director of the Young Democrats of America, which is affiliated with but not part of the Democratic National Committee.

In 2006, through her work with the Young Dems, she met her husband Scott, then a 31-year-old ranch hand running as a Democratic in Nebraska’s 3rd Congressional District seat. Today, Kleeb, Scott and the couple’s three daughters live in the small rural town of Hastings, in central Nebraska near the Kansas border.

In 2010, Kleeb founded Bold Alliance (formerly Bold Nebraska) in an effort to remake Nebraska’s political landscape. With a grassroots coalition of farmers, ranchers and Native communities, she helped lead the state’s opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline.

Kleeb is founding board member of Our Revolution, the nonprofit organization formed from Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. She also sits on the board of the Rural Democracy Initiative, which works with and helps fund 150 rural-focused nonprofits in more than 20 states (including Barn Raiser). She is the author of Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America.

After the 2024 election, the Nebraska Democratic Party web page posted a call to action to “Fight Back Against Trump,” including a link to Kleeb’s Bluesky social media account, where she offers 10 suggestions for what progressives should do—and not do.

Barn Raiser spoke to Kleeb on March 21 about her plans to help lead the Democratic Party between now and 2029.

What has been the priority for Ken Martin and you since you were both elected to DNC leadership at the end of January?

We’re listening to our members. As the person who’s in charge of the state party association, I’m doing constant check-ins with our state parties across all states and territories. And we’re listening to our staff that we have on board.

Right now, the DNC has a staff of about 120. At the height of its activity, the DNC can have anywhere from 600-700 employees.

Normally when a chair of the DNC and president of the Association of State Democratic Committees get elected, there’s a three month transition period. But this time there was no transition period.

We got elected and the next day baton was handed to us. So we’re literally transitioning all the internal stuff that we have to do, while at the same time having to present an external message, which is a very tricky balance, as you can imagine, especially in the world of Trump.

What have you been hearing from folks on the ground?

It is so clear. Whether you’re a grassroots volunteer, a voter or a local party leader, folks want there to be a much brighter and stronger line of opposition between us and the Republicans. In previous Republican administrations, we could see common ground and we could work together for all Americans. Even this second time that Trump got elected, some Democrats thought that was true. You saw that in the early days of with Democratic senators voting for some of his nominees.

Now it’s very clear that Democrats and Republicans have two very different worldviews of not only how the government should be run, but of America itself. That’s the clearest message from any and every demographic that we speak to.

The second message is that people want to see action, which is why Ken and I have prioritized doing the People’s Town Halls.

We’ve challenged every state party to host a town hall in a Republican-led district because the vast majority of Republicans are not holding town halls. And if they are, they’re announcing them at the last minute and usually in a place where there’s not a lot of people living or that’s inaccessible to the majority of people. So what the state parties and the DNC are getting behind is hosting these town halls with some of our rock stars like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as well as other elected officials and going into those Republican-led districts.

As chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party for the last eight years, what has the Nebraska State Party accomplished that could serve as a model for other state parties?

One of the first things that I did as chair was to assess how many Democrats we have elected in Nebraska. You would have thought that would be one of the things that the state party would be tracking.

In my role working with state parties over the last six to seven years, I’ve realized that Democrats don’t have that list in many states. So that is a priority for me as the president of the state party association.

Early on as Nebraska chair, I figured out that we had 504 Democrats elected statewide. We now have 1,025 Democrats elected statewide. And that’s not by sheer luck.

In Nebraska, we’ve implemented strong programs that I hope to bring to other state parties. One of those is our Block Captain program. Voters were clearly telling us that being a Precinct Captain was too big of a job. They were responsible for 2,000 voters for things like voter registration and building long-term relationships.

Our Block Captain program broke that down to 50 voters. Our Block Captains are responsible for talking to those 50 voters three times during the year—not just during the election cycle. And we give them materials and training for each voter contact.

For example, one of the voter contacts over last summer was to deliver our new newspaper, Democrats Deliver. It gave a recap of what the Democrats and our legislators had been working on that year.

Our second thing that we implemented was a voter guide. A lot of races in many states, not just Nebraska, are nonpartisan. And so a lot of our Democrats were getting left behind because Democratic voters didn’t know who the Democrats were because those candidates didn’t have a D next to their name on the ballot.

So we created a voter guide for every single county that lists all of the Democrats running from the federal statewide races on top all the way down to races like the state Natural Resources District. The guide also identified where we have recruitment gaps.

The third program that has helped us get more Democrats elected and build out county-level party infrastructure is our vote by mail program.

We have a very strong vote by mail program where we send vote by mail applications that are postage paid. We call and text those people saying get your application back. And then we chase those ballots once the ballots get mailed to those voters voting by home.

About 15-20% of Democrats were leaving their ballots on their kitchen table. We’ve gotten that down to 3%with our program.

These are the kind of nuts-and-bolts programs that every state party should be doing.

No. 1 on your list of actions to “Fight back against Trump” is: “Attend your local party meeting. It might be boring, folks might be old. Bring your energy, ideas and mutual respect. Folks have been holding the line and we need everyone.” Why is it important for people to get involved with their party at the local level?

As progressives and populists, as Democrats we have these mantras of “eat local,” “drink local,” “shop local.” And I’m trying to bring this culture of vote local and be engaged locally with government.

Your local county party is the infrastructure where we can recruit candidates, train candidates, get those folks elected and create a brand for our party at all the cultural events that happen in your community.

For example, in my community in Hastings, Nebraska, the Adams County Democratic Party has an annual Kool-Aid Days because Hastings is the birthplace of Kool-Aid.

Our county party has a float every year and has people walking in that parade. It’s important to show our visual pride and connection to the community. County parties are where we show up locally in important cultural events like rodeos, fairs and parades, as well as recruit, train and elect Democrats.

The other thing that county parties do are the nuts-and-bolts work of supporting state party infrastructure. For instance, that means electing people to the state convention every two or four years. It means electing people to go to the Democratic National Convention. That all happens at the county level.

Sometimes our county meetings aren’t as welcoming as they could be. Older folks, our elders of the party, have been holding down many county parties for years. Sometimes they can get territorial because they’re very protective of the party.

My advice to younger or new Democrats who run into this is: Keep on going. It’s your party too. Suggest ways to make those meetings more exciting. Change needs to come from within the local party, rather than people just complaining about it on social media.

Some progressives think that the Democratic Party establishment is heeding the advice of political consultant James Carville, who on February 12 advised Democrats to “play possum” and let Republicans “self-destruct.” How do you build a new vision for the Democratic Party when party leaders don’t lead?

You basically have two paths to take when you’re the opposition party.

You can do nothing, oppose everything at every level, place all the blame on the Republicans and not provide any vision for the country.

And then there’s the fight back mode, where you fight back not only in defense of what Trump and Musk and the Republicans are doing, but also provide a more hopeful vision of what Democrats can be building with voters if they vote for us in 2026 across all different levels of office. Chair Martin and I at the DNC are in the fight back mode.

We want to not only hold that strong line of opposition, but also provide a place of action and a place of hope for voters. The last thing that we want is to fall into the trap of feeling like our world is falling apart and there’s nothing that we can do about it.

My belief as an organizer who’s taken on tough battles like opposing the Keystone XL pipeline or helping get Obamacare passed is that, yes, you have to have fierce opposition in the streets—but you also have to provide hope and sources of action so that people can get involved beyond protesting. That is why I keep harping on folks to get involved in your local county infrastructure, get involved in more partisan voter registration. We’ve lost that muscle in our party. We’ve handed that over to a lot of nonpartisan groups.

As a result, that first contact with a voter is not about why you should be a Democrat or register as a Democrat. Instead, it’s basically issue-based groups doing their voter registration drives. And so voters, especially young people, think, “Well, I guess I’ll be an independent” because they don’t know the difference between Republicans and Democrats. We need to do a lot more in our states and at the local level to get that democracy muscle much stronger.

I completely disagree with James Carville that we have to play dead. And I love him. I think he’s hilarious. He’s very smart and strategic in many ways. But, we have to go beyond the 1990s kind of thinking about how our party operates.

In what you just said, you seem to implicitly criticize the role of nonprofit, issue-based organizations and their influence over the political direction of the Democratic Party. Could you elaborate on that?

First, there’s a critical role for the nonpartisan 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4) organizations in politics. Obviously, (c)3s don’t get involved in partisan politics, but they’re involved in civics.

But about 20 years ago, Democratic donors and the party as an institution made a mistake when we created something called the Democracy Alliance, an association of individual and institutional big donors.

After the Democrats lost the presidential race in 2004, these big Democratic and progressive donors said, “We have nothing like the Republicans and conservatives have in terms of progressive infrastructure.”

So the Democracy Alliance propped up all these new (c)4s like America Votes and Center for American Progress. The problem is that none of those groups have the word “democratic” in it.

And so we got into this place where generations of voters now identify more as progressives than as Democrats. That created opportunity for conflict. Yes, we should make sure issue-based groups have the resources they need to win the hearts and minds of voters. But in doing so it starved the Democratic Party of resources.

During that time, state parties were basically getting $2,500 a month from the Democratic National Committee to run their operations. You can’t run a statewide political operation if 3-5% of the budget at the DNC is going back to the states. We need that up to 25%.

Under Ken and my leadership over the past few years, we’ve been able to inch that up to $12,500 a month for each state party. And now our goal is to get at least $25,000 to each state party each month.

But that’s going to take work. It’s going to take a lot of fundraising. And it’s a whole culture shift.

Our politics and our donors have been focused on eight battleground states. That’s where all the resources go. Or, we have been focused on propping up (c)3 and (c)4 organizations. And this leaves the core infrastructure, which is state parties, starved of resources.

That’s what has been happening over the past 20 years and why we are in the situation we’re in right now.

I’m not criticizing investing resources in battleground states. But we will never expand the map if we continue to run a battleground state model where we end up funding a whole consultant class inside the DNC. We have to be funding everywhere.

You never know when a state is going to pop, when a potential candidate or strong state party leader is going to start reforming and building from the grassroots. That’s why you need to be investing in all 57 states and territories all the time to expand that map.

Some of our current battleground states, especially in the Midwest, are going to lose congressional seats in the next redistricting cycle. Those seats are going to go to places like South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas and Florida. We have to be investing in those states where it may look hopeless for some Democrats right now. We are going to continue to lose at the Electoral College in the House Congressional races if we don’t start investing in lots of states.

During the election for the new chair of the DNC, a lot of the Democracy Alliance funders were supporting Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler over Ken Martin. Why was that?

For a couple reasons.

One, Ben comes from the Democracy Alliance world. Not unsimilar to me. I ran the Young Democrats of America when Democracy Alliance was founded. We were one of the groups that got funded by the Democracy Alliance because the Young Dems are outside of the DNC infrastructure. Ben was one of the leaders of MoveOn during those years, and a lot of those donors knew Ben through that work.

And a lot of those same donors funded the innovative things Ben and the chair before him, Martha Laning, were doing to flip Wisconsin into more of a purple state than a red state.

In previous presidential election cycles, including 2024, the Democrats have brought on a rural vote director only to have their position eliminated shortly after the election. What can the party do to better support rural-focused positions, whether that’s a full-time rural vote director or rural desks supporting more of the Rural Council’s work?

With the boom and bust cycle of electoral politics that we’ve been running, we not only end up losing people with strong talent and all the institutional knowledge of what they did in that election cycle, but we also leave behind all the volunteers and all the caucuses and councils at the state level, because now we don’t have a desk and there’s no money going to organizing in between elections and recruiting candidates and training them.

We basically build up for presidential elections, and then tear down, rather than keep it steady, keep it built.

It is my hope and expectation that with Chair Martin we are going to be funding these desks in a more significant way. They can be glue to all the caucuses and councils.

It’s not that there’s a lack of infrastructure in our state and our national parties. It’s that the work is not being funded. We lots of great caucuses and councils like the Women’s Caucus, the Rural Council, the Black Caucus, the Native Caucus and the Climate Council. But they can only do so much, just like our state parties can only do so much.

We’re running on volunteer power. You have to have real resources to actually build out and run programs, from partisan voter registration programs to messaging programs to branding. These are all things that grassroots Democrats are rightfully criticizing the national and state parties for—resources weren’t dedicated to the infrastructure that we have.

Instead, the resources have been mostly centered on battleground states and consultants with advertising budgets. We have the infrastructure. It just needs to be funded.

Democrats spent $4 billion on advertising in the last campaign cycle. The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative has circulated a petition via MoveOn, asking DNC Chair Martin to call upon Democratic funders to direct 10% of their resources to rural and working-class districts. What do you think of this idea? Should the party change how it allocates resources? And if so, how?

I definitely support that effort, but I have a different lens, because I know the funding structure that we have internally. Right now, about 8% of the DNC budget is going back out to the states. That is unconscionable. It should be a minimum of 25% of the DNC budget is going back out to the states, where the work is being done.

Of course, we need to be doing national political work. I love all of our national staff and the data work they’re doing in the national mobilizations for all of our voter files in conjunction with the state parties. That has to continue to be funded at the national level. But more resources need to go into the states. And then both the state parties and the national party needs to be held accountable.

Chair Martin and I are going to kick off what’s called a SWOT analysis.

If you’ve been part of any big organization, you’ve probably done this—it’s a look at your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We will be doing that with each of our state parties. By investing more resources, those state parties, state party leadership and elected state officials can come to the table and say, “Here are the things that we’re doing really well. Here are the things that we know need to improve.”

Even in blue states, there are rural areas. So I agree we need more money going back to the states and we need to be investing in rural areas.

How should the Democratic Party deal with the issues of dark money in the party?

It’s something we need to address in a multi-leveled and detailed way. Sometimes when people talk about dark money, they mean fossil fuel money or money from corporations that are union busting.

Chair Martin has made it very clear that he’s not going to take fossil fuel money. He’s not going to take money from corporations that are union busting. But even saying that is difficult because we have a lot of great Democrat donors that are working in some of these big corporations in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico.

If they’re already giving, are we talking about turning away that money, or are we actually talking about not being beholden to the big corporations themselves, which is what I think grassroots Democrats mean when they talk about getting rid of the influence of dark money.

And then there’s the fact that some tax-exempt organizations like (c)4s and 527s don’t have to disclose their donors. And they could be donors who have ill intent for the Democratic Party, who are putting forward candidates that don’t share our core values.

Even in some blue states, candidates are running as Democrats, getting elected, and then changing their party to become Republican. Then you add in Bitcoin money, which is another layer of complexity and difficulty around dark money in our primaries.

Chair Martin and I are committed to working with leaders like Larry Cohen, the former president of Communication Workers of America, who have been leading this effort inside the DNC for years, along with Representatives like Ro Khanna and others who want the DNC to have a clear stance on the corporations that we would refuse to take money from, which Chair Martin has already spoken about.

But how can we take this to the next step? I think we can make this process clearer and stronger.

One idea is at the state party level. State parties have control over who does or does not get on voter guides, our mail permit or our voter files. For example, in Nebraska if you violate certain rules, you cannot use our voter file, which is a big resource that candidates need to win their election. State parties could also have a rule that any candidate in a Democratic primary who accepts dark money will not get access to party lists or be endorsed in our voter guides.

Theoretically, what you’re saying is that there are ways for state parties to withdraw support within the nominating process, not the general election, for candidates who take money from hidden funds?

Clearly grassroots voters of our party want us to do something.

What we’re trying to untangle is how to create a process that doesn’t hurt strong Democrats who are running, while also being very clear about our values and that it matches the money that we’re taking.

President Trump claims that he is fighting government bureaucracy and waste. How can Democrats make effective counter arguments for defending government programs but at the same time not coming across as supporters of the status quo that voters rejected in this last election?

Democrats have always been the party that believes in good government, that believes the government has a role in making sure that kids, for example, have quality public education.

My middle child didn’t speak when she was two years old, and the public schools stepped in and created an IEP [Individualized Education Program] for her, even at two years old. She was able to get services at her daycare, and they would come to our home, and at the age of three she got into a preschool program. That’s all through the IEP system at our public schools, which was, of course, funded hand in glove with the Department of Education that Trump just decided to undo with a stroke of a pen.

Democrats have an opportunity to connect the dots of how the government works in our lives to protect the safety and well-being of all Americans and create that level playing field in society, which is what Democrats clearly believe in. We’ve begun to do that in these town halls.

We’ve also begun to do that on social media. We need to be doing that more constantly. The wrecking ball, chainsaw approach that Elon Musk is doing with Donald Trump is not just the vision of Project 2025, it’s a destructive, long-term Republican policy that’s been in the works for decades.

Musk and some people from Silicon Valley have a bizarre political philosophy that is part of their Dark Enlightenment movement. That is a threat to not only our government, but democracy itself. They truly believe we should not have the government running services, that it should all be run by corporations. First, they are trying to take out are our public schools, and then I think you’ll see them going after the United States Postal Service, Amtrak and the Federal Aviation Administration. Then, our national parks. These are the low-hanging fruit they want to privatize to show the public that corporations can do it better. But we all know what happens, especially if you live in a rural community.

My husband’s family got electricity not from a corporation. A private electrical company did not string electricity into Custer County, Nebraska, where there was probably about 10 to 20 families living at the time in the 1940s. It was the government through the Custer Public Power District.

It was the government under Democrats who did that, who brought rural electricity out to them so they could live a stronger and better life. Our job as Democrats is to tell the story and show how strong government has been the backbone of our country for more than 200 years.

How do Democrats address their cultural disconnect with those working-class, rural voters who have a more conservative cultural background and see Democrats as being more concerned about pronouns than paychecks?

These past two election cycles, the Republicans were very effective using pretty hateful language against trans people, against LGBT people as a cultural wedge.

It’s our job as Democrats to talk about economic justice, to talk about human rights and to talk about freedom, especially in our rural communities. I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of farmers and ranchers say, “If it doesn’t bother the cattle, it doesn’t bother me.” This is the kind of mantra in rural areas that says, essentially, “If I’m not hurting you, please leave me alone.”

I think as Democrats, we can take a page out of that mindset and philosophy, because that’s what we believe too. We don’t think that the government should be in people’s bedrooms or involved in health care decisions.

That’s something that Minnesota Gov. Walz does a good job at, along with people like Sen. Chris Murphy and AOC [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]. There are lots of Democrats use the framework of freedom and human rights in very effective ways that I, us, as national party leaders, need to be doing as well.

In your op-ed for Barn Raiser last year, you mentioned that Democrats “need our own Project 2025.” If you were to help craft a Project 2029, what should be the major planks of that platform?

We need not only a Project 2029 for issues, we also need a Project 2029 for voting and democratic infrastructure. The Association of State Democratic Committees has created a new committee, Project 2029, that is working purely on democracy issues. Assuming we take back the White House in 2028, we want to be able to hand the new president a list of things that they can do by executive order to enhance democracy.

We also want to make sure there are items that can pass at the state and county levels. For example, counties can make it much more accessible to vote early or vote by mail. That’s on the electoral infrastructure and democracy side of things, which also includes census redistricting and same-day voter registration.

I’ve spent the last 15-plus years in rural communities, working with farmers, ranchers and tribes to protect their land and water from very risky fossil fuel projects. One of the planks that Democrats should be working on is ending eminent-domain-for-private-gain projects.

As Democrats, there’s absolutely no place in our country where we should be supporting a private corporation taking a private individual’s land so that private corporation can make more money.

That is something that will clearly resonate not only in our rural communities, but it will also resonate in urban communities too. Black and brown folks’ land and homes are constantly taken for big sports arenas, for example. That’s just as wrong as a pipeline going through somebody’s farm or ranch.

The other issue that I talk a lot about is expanding public education. Republicans seem to want to shrink public education and hand that over to private corporations and charter schools. I think we should be expanding public education to include pre-K for all kids all the way through two years of community college. It should be fully funded at the federal and state level.

We know that a significant number of students, 43% in fact, will end their secondary educational pursuits at a community college and go into a trade. They will go into nursing. They will go into a union apprenticeship program, electrical, for example, fixing windmills, installing solar panels.

That is a huge track for working-class and middle-class families. And then for those that want to pursue a four-year degree, they have a good head start with two years under their belt, especially since college has become so expensive.

We have to start communicating new ideas to the American public that that will help everybody, that will level the playing field and will put more money in people’s pockets.

Both DNC Chair Ken Martin and Tim Walz come out of the organizing tradition of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. Do you see a common thread with Wellstone’s theory of organizing, particularly in rural areas, that is striking a nerve with the current leadership?

In the early 2000s, I switched my party voter registration from Republican to Democrat. That was because of work that I was doing with Sen. Paul Wellstone at the time. I had been working on eating disorder legislation and was just getting nowhere.

Paul Wellstone heard the voices of a family in Minnesota who lost their daughter to anorexia. He worked with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton on the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act.

Republicans at the time were actually coming to the table to get that passed. But they said eating disorders had to be cut from the bill, because it was the most expensive out of all mental health issues to treat. But Wellstone stood his ground. And for me, that like encapsulated why I became a Democrat—it was fighting back against big corporations that were hurting people.

When we were fighting the Keystone XL pipeline, what I heard from farmers and ranchers who are mostly conservative Republicans in Nebraska, over and over again, is that they hate big. They hate big everything. They hate big government, they hate big corporations. It’s why many of them actually weren’t NRA members, because they thought that was too big.

So that that is definitely the nerve that is being struck right now. It’s why Bernie and AOC connect so well with people. We have seen the impacts, personally, of how big corporations and billionaires have hurt our families, have hurt the very institutions that we care about, whether that’s public education, or the parks in our community.

We’ve seen politicians, like in our state, especially in Republican-led states, completely dismantle services. And so people with mental health or physical health challenges, have even more of a stronger mountain to climb. The doctor that delivered my two babies in Hastings, Nebraska, is now delivering babies for women in 59 surrounding rural counties.

Republicans say that they care about our families and are pro-life, but in reality, we see what their policies do, because they are in the pocket of billionaires and big corporations. Our challenge as Democrats is that that has somehow got lost. Republicans have somehow claimed the mantle of pushing back against corporations and that they are the party of working people, which is mind boggling.

Bernie Sanders has been attracting huge crowds with his Fight Oligarchy tour. Bernie operates both inside and outside the Democratic Party. Is that a model for rural America? Should Democrats be working with unaffiliated voters and supporting independent candidates?

Obviously, my job as a proud partisan Democrat, especially the head of the ASDC and the vice chair of the DNC, is to build out our party infrastructure to get more Democrats registered and recruit and training Democratic candidates. But, there is also a place for Democrats to be working with independents in a coalition where we agree to work together in particular races because we want to break up the stranglehold that Republicans have in some states like in Nebraska’s 3rd District, for example, which is a really Republican part of our state.

It’s silly for us to pretend that we can just write off independents. Sen. Sanders is a perfect example.

He has always worked in coalition with the Democratic Party in Vermont. We should be doing that across the country. In every single state, even in blue states, there are red areas and there may be races where we don’t have a Democrat running, where somebody is not going to raise their hand to run, but we have a strong independent that’s going to run.

How do we make sure that we’re working together? There’s no reason why we couldn’t, for example, allow an independent to use our voter file, assuming there’s not a Democrat running in that particular race. And I think that sends a stronger message to Americans that Democrats are serious when we’re talking about ending the cruelty of Republicans.

What gives you hope nowadays?

It’s very hard to watch the news right now, especially where I’m at in a party leadership position, and still feel somewhat helpless about how to stop an Elon Musk from ripping apart our government.

What I’ve told myself, and what I’ve been talking about with my other fellow state party chairs, vice chairs and executive directors, is that we have to prepare and train for the areas that we do have control over. And for us, that’s building out our party infrastructure. It’s registering more Democrats and it’s recruiting more down-ballot candidates so we see fewer and fewer empty ballot lines.

And, what gives me hope is that people are energized about that.

People are excited to hear the Democratic Party giving them something concrete that we are working toward. I’m also very happy that Democrats and allied groups are filing lots of lawsuits in order to try to stop the bleeding that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are doing. And I’m excited that candidates are already knocking on our door saying that they’re ready to announce for big races in 2026. Normally that would only happen much later, in the fall of 2025, but it’s happening now.

So that gives me a lot of hope. And lastly, you know, I am like really excited that we have Bernie Sanders, AOC, Governor Walz, Ro Khanna, Jasmine Crockett and all these folks doing town halls across the country, stepping into the void that Republicans have left and letting voters know that we care about them.

Don Bacon is the GOP representative in the Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District—that’s the big swing district in our state. When Bacon voted for that awful budget that was basically going to cut Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP benefits, even though he pretends that it won’t, we sent out a press release blasting him.

But I also turned to my team and said, we need to kick into gear. We need to do a fundraiser, not for the party, but for the food pantry run by Black Men United. So we did a big fundraiser, we were able to drop off diapers and fresh fruits and vegetables.

That’s also what we have to do as Democrats. It’s not only about building out party infrastructure and recruiting candidates and getting more Democrats registered to vote. It’s also being there for the community and showing up and showing that we truly care about them as people.

Joel BleifussMore by this author →

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to Wisconsin and South Dakota in the 19th Century. Bleifuss was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a town on the edge of the Ozarks. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1978 and got his start in journalism in 1983 at his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground.

Justin PerkinsMore by this author →

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He received his Master of Divinity degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image.