Out of all the speeches given over the four days of the convention, those were the only ones where a rural voice was on stage and a focus of our party. That is a problem.

At the national level, the Democratic Party has become consultant-driven and D.C.-centric, concentrating power into a handful of people and leaving behind all the leaders and ideas at the state and local level. 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. This is not to say only rural folks should lead our party, that’s not my point at all; we need urban and suburban voices as leaders at the table so our party reflects America. But when you leave out an entire swath of our country’s population, it’s a problem that leads us to where we are now: losing the rural vote by 50 to 60 percentage points in many areas. You couple that with a 20-point swing from Biden to Trump by young voters in 2024 and you got a crisis.

Sure, we can justify this with inflation and immigration—eggs, gas and rent are too damn high, and Americans are frustrated that after Reagan gave amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants we still don’t have a rational system that helps hardworking people become American citizens. We can also justify the loss by saying Kamala Harris only lost by a small percentage. But the reality is the Republicans have been chipping away at core parts of our base for years. They have turned us into a party that is branded as weak liberals with college degrees who look down on Americans who go to dive bars instead of wine bars.

So, where do we go from here?

I don’t think the answer is mass mobilizations like we did during Trump’s first presidency. For one thing, I am not even sure that is safe given the rhetoric of Trump’s people. Instead, we need to start by helping families who will inevitably be torn apart by Trump’s radical immigration raids. We need to get to work on recruiting candidates who look like and talk like regular Americans, and do so all across America, not just in the battleground states. We need our own Project 2025—we cannot be on the defensive all the damn time thinking we are going to win the hearts and minds of voters when we are on our heels reacting to nonsense and distractions from the right. We need bold ideas that are filled with hope again, not unlike what Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did for our country and our party. We need to put forward ideas that will immediately help build wealth for folks, protect their family’s health and expand universal public education to include pre-K and community college so that everyone can get ahead.

All of this starts with a strong chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and president of the Association of Democratic State Committees (ASDC). They have to be a team committed to major reforms and being willing to listen to the hard truths we need to hear from both our base and the voters we have lost. This is not a tweak of our message. This is a full-on rebranding, reconnecting and rebuilding of our party.

That is why I am running for ASDC President and supporting Ken Martin, Chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, for DNC Chair.

Ken and I are ready on day one to fix problems we have known about for the last 20 years—problems that the consulting class has hindered us from getting over the finish line. For instance, we should ensure that state parties are full partners at the table since they run all the state level races and build the infrastructure that federal races and presidential candidates rely on to win. Ken and I bear the scars from battles we’ve been fighting on the inside of our party to get more resources to the states and to get more state leaders on critical DNC committees that decide things like our presidential primary calendar. We need to get dark money out of our primaries so that our nominees reflect our base. We need to get consultants out of party leadership positions. We are ready on day one to build, reform and win.

State parties started to get underfunded first by major donors that thought progressive outside groups were better suited to register and mobilize voters. That trend continued under Barack Obama who prioritized funding the infrastructure that helped get him elected called Organizing For America. Instead of continuing the successful “50 State Strategy” that had been created by DNC chair Howard Dean and the ASDC, Obama defunded and deprioritized state parties and focused instead on outside groups. The result was the party losing over 1,500 state-level races.

State parties cannot build an organization that wins races up and down the ballot with $12,500 a month stipend from the DNC. That amount was a measly $2,500 until Tom Perez and Jamie Harrison (the two most recent chairs of the DNC) listened to state party leaders like myself and Ken Martin and negotiated more funds going to the states. That amount has to double at a minimum if our red, blue and purple states are going to have the funds to organize year-round. These resources would mean a state party has the funds to hire various critical staff members like a full-time rural organizer who is constantly showing up at rodeos, county fairs and community events to recruit candidates and talk about the issues Democrats stand up for. It is absolutely critical when we look at the numbers this year that we realize no state is safely blue, permanently a battleground target or forever a flyover state.

In Nebraska, I implemented a few reforms to make our party more fair but also to help win elections. Programs like our Candidates of Color Fund, which helps give candidates assistance who start with a disadvantage; or our Block Captains, which gives volunteers 50 doors in their neighborhood to canvass three times each year as a way to develop relationships with voters beyond election cycles. I also created an At-Large system that appoints young people, rural folks and communities of color—who normally enter the party through their community rather than their county party—so they too have a voice in our State Central Committee. In Minnesota, Ken Martin has implemented programs like creating an in-house call center and oppositional research so his candidates and county parties do not have to worry about that critical piece of campaign infrastructure. These pieces may seem mundane or obvious, but these are the pieces of the infrastructure we must be building at the state and national level in order to win elections again.

Now, I am not so arrogant to think we have all the answers or the perfect plan. We do not. But we do have the stomach and backbone to try new things, push back on the status quo and to truly listen to our base.

We cannot turn our backs on all the diverse parts of our party. That is our strength. We need to make sure the guy at the dive bar feels just as welcome in our party as the mom at the wine bar. Because at the end of the day, both of them would do anything to make sure their kids get a good education, that their family is healthy, and that they can pass down a piece of land or a house to the next generation. One sign that our party is winning again will be when the pickup truck and the minivan both have an “I am a proud Democratic voter” bumper sticker on their cars.

Jane Fleming Kleeb

Since December 2016, Jane has served in a volunteer capacity as Chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party. She is the author of Harvest the Vote: How Democrats Can Win Again in Rural America, published in 2020. Jane serves on the Executive Committees of both the Democratic National Committee and the Association of State Democratic Committees. Under Kleeb’s leadership, Nebraska Democrats elected up and down the ballot have grown from 500 in 2016 to over 900 in 2023. Innovative programs such as Block Captains, 93-County Voter Guides, Frank LaMere Rural Grassroots Fellows and the Candidates of Color Fund were created under her term. For her years of work in rural communities, Jane was named a Climate Breakthrough awardee in 2023, the highest honor in the climate change field. Jane is setting out to create a new project called Energy Builders that works with rural communities to change the economic model of large-scale clean energy projects to benefit the people who live on the land that is creating America’s next 100 years of energy. She currently lives in rural Nebraska with her husband Scott and three daughters– Kora, Maya, and Willa.