In Chicago, Rural Democrats Feel the Joy. Will It Last?

Surrounded by the aloof gray walls of the convention center room, flanked by bodyguards and large screens projecting a screen saver that looked like vermicelli noodles swimming in dark water, and in front of an audience of conference goers wearing boots and blue jeans and bold-colored pantsuits, carrying “Cat ladies for Kamala” tote bags—and in the case of one delegate, a rose-colored suit jacket with the number 47 embroidered in string lights on the back, the 7 shaped like the state of Florida—Walz signaled that rural America had a voice at the top of the party ticket, a point she underscored by poking fun at her husband.

“I’m here to tell you I grew up in a community twice the size of Tim Walz’s,” she said, eliciting laughter from the audience. “Still not very big, right?”

Tim Walz spent much of his youth in Valentine, Nebraska, a rural community at the state’s northern border, and was one of 24 graduates from his high school in Butte, Nebraska, a community of around 500. Gwen Walz, whose maiden name is Whipple, was born in Glencoe, Minnesota, and grew up in Ivanhoe, a community in southwestern Minnesota of around 750.

What brought Tim and Gwen Walz together was a literal dividing wall. In the early 1990s, the two worked at Alliance High School in Alliance, Nebraska, a town of about 8,000 in the western Sandhills of Nebraska’s panhandle. As a rural school with “not a lot of resources and a lot of challenges,” Gwen Walz said, the school needed extra classroom space. Administrators turned an old choir room into classrooms by placing a divider down the middle. Gwen Whipple taught English on one side; Tim Walz taught geography on the other.

“This might not be a surprise to you, but his class was a little louder than mine,” Walz said. Not long after, the two married.

Too long in the shadows

For speakers at the Tuesday and Thursday Rural Council meetings, another kind of divide cropped up. Galvanized by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s rapid ascent to the national Democratic ticket in the 2024 election, rural Democrats sought to make the case that the party’s future lies with rural America. Positioning themselves as underdogs and trailblazers within the party, they articulated an optimistic vision for their fortunes in rural America.

“I am living proof that Democrats can and should win in rural America,” said Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, who was among the final pool of candidates considered for Harris’s running mate. As the headline speaker at the Rural Council’s Tuesday meeting, Beshear emphasized that while a majority of people could get behind the Democrats priorities, partisan messaging would do little to sway rural voters beyond the Democratic faithful.

Beshear sought to dispel the notion that Democrats must appeal to conservative priorities to win in rural areas; rather, he said, Democrats need to make clear why their policies address the issues that matter most to rural Americans—from accessible healthcare to affordable housing, clean water and reproductive rights. “When we do that, we don’t move a state or the country to the right or the left,” he said, “we move it forward for every single American.”

Tim Walz, in his Wednesday night acceptance speech, said, “Growing up in a small town like [Butte], you learn how to take care of each other.” Speakers at the Rural Council followed his lead, preaching a politics of neighborly care—the rural conviction of helping one another no matter the circumstances—and independence—the art of minding one’s own (damn) business and keeping the government from intruding on people’s lives. It was rural America, speakers argued, that would revive the silent majority consensus, one imbued with broadly social democratic values.

Kansas Gov. Lora Kelly took the stage as another governor who defied expectations in a state that has voted for a Republican president in every election since 1968.

“A lot of people are surprised to hear Kansas has a Democratic governor—even within our own party,” Kelly said. “Mostly people, you know, from the more congested coastlines of our country.”

Her secret? “Talk to [rural folks] about their schools,” she said. “Talk to them about affordable healthcare. Talk to them about their roads. Talk to them about childcare. Talk to them about housing.”

Another of Kelly’s secrets? Investment in rural candidates.

According to Kelly, the Democratic Governors Association spent $20 million in Kentucky to re-elect Gov. Beshear in 2023. This year, she says, they’re “off to the races” in North Carolina’s governor race. Although new to her role as chair of the DGA, Kelly showed that she is taking the lead from her predecessor, Tim Walz, who had chaired the DGA since 2023 before stepping aside in August.

“Democratic values are rural values. And we should say it loud and clear,” she said.

Yet, Kelly stressed, it’s not just about talk. “You win in rural America when you decide you want to win in rural America—when you make it a priority. When you show up, not just for pictures, but to listen, to learn. To not only appreciate our rural way of life, but to appreciate why we love that rural way of life … where that spirit of neighbor helping neighbor is strong.”

Vanishing Democrats

Kelly’s speech touched upon a stark reality that has haunted rural organizers and party leaders for decades: When it comes to rural America, Democrats are simply absent. And where they do struggle to exist, they fail to command the same level of investment and attention as their urban counterparts. Over the past several decades the Democratic Party has shifted resources away from red states and rural candidates.

That failure to contest local races and offer an alternative vision, speakers at the Rural Council suggested, leaves a vacuum that allows extreme ideas to take root.

It is a tension felt within the Rural Council itself, which was first organized in 2004. According to rural strategist and political consultant Matt Barron, the Rural Council has felt itself “stuck in second-class status” for much of its existence within the DNC. Barron served as a charter member of the Obama Agriculture & Rural Policy Committee during 2007-2008 presidential campaign and helped organize the 2008 DNC Rural Council.

Barron points out that the Harris campaign has yet to hire a rural vote director and has not deployed fundamental campaign paraphernalia, such as rural-focused yard signs, and bumper stickers that would be critical to establish a visible presence in rural communities, especially as county and state fairs wrap up for the summer.

“There’s this feeling that we’ve been through this movie before,” says Barron.

As of this weekend, no rural focused positions appeared on the Harris-Walz campaign job listings. The Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Last Sunday, the Democratic National Committee released a 91-page party platform that was adopted Monday night at the convention. It included proposals to take on Big Ag, expand the Child Tax Credit and protect our food system for corporate greed—but dotted throughout the document were references to a “second Biden term.”

Just showing up

“Just showing up” became something of a mantra at the Rural Council’s two meetings. “There are Democratic voters that I have spoken to across the state that have been waiting for someone to come to talk to them for years,” said Caroline Gleich, a Senate hopeful running for the seat of retiring Mitt Romney in Utah, a Republican stronghold.

“For far too long, we have not paid attention to rural areas,” said Chris Jones, co-chair of the Dirt Road Democrats, a Political Action Committee founded by Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison. In 2022, Jones became the first African American major party nominee for Governor of Arkansas, but lost by a nearly 30-point margin to Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Jones said that across the 75 Arkansas counties he visited on the campaign trail, people would often tell him that the last time they had seen a Democrat campaigning in their area was when Bill Clinton was running for president.

Jones pointed out that of the 2 million registered voters in Arkansas, only 900,000 voted in 2022. Many of those nonvoters are in rural areas, Jones said, a story that he sees playing out in red states across the country. For this reason, he said. Dirt Road Democrats are focusing on increasing voter turnout more than electoral outcomes. “If you just show up, people will begin to see something different.”

Reproductive health deserts

In other ways, the pragmatic gradualism of “just showing up” to shave away voting margins in rural states may have obscured the way that Democrats have obstructed their own goals.

On Thursday, Heidi Heitkamp, the former North Dakota Democratic senator, who came to the Rural Council to promote her One Country Project, hosted a panel on abortion and reproductive rights. The panel, one of the council’s highlights, featured gripping testimony by Emily Boevers, an OB-GYN in Iowa on how women and their families who have suffered dearly from state abortion bans—like the six-week ban enacted in Iowa this month—and Tammi Kromenaker, owner of the Red River Women’s Clinic, the only abortion provider in North Dakota for over 20 years that was forced to close and relocate in Moorhead, Minnesota, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022.

But the panel failed to bring up the fact that Heitkamp was one of three Democrats who voted to nominate Neil Gorsuch for Supreme Court Justice, a man who reportedly took 10 minutes to approve the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson overturning Roe v. Wade. (Heitkamp voted against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and against a national 20-week abortion ban).

The specter of Project 2025

While the politics of abortion took the spotlight at the DNC national stage, the politics of public education seemed to take the Rural Council by storm.

When Walz listed off her many roles—first lady of Minnesota, mom, sister, military spouse—it was her role as a teacher that drew a standing ovation from the crowd. After acknowledging the other teachers in the room, Walz took a moment to reflect on the start of a new academic year. “We feel it in our bones, right?”

One of Tuesday’s final speakers was David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party who has become a Party exegete of Project 2025, a coalition of over 100 right-wing organizations led by the Heritage Foundation’s along with the 900-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a playbook for the first 180 days of a second Trump term, directed by former Trump administration appointee Paul Dans.

Among Project 2025’s sprawling, sometimes contradictory and outlandish proposals, Pepper outlined its direct attack on rural communities through its assault on government-funded programs, federal institutions and anti-corruption guardrails. For Pepper, education provided the crucial frame to understand Project 2025 not as an abstract conservative wish-list but as a playbook that is already playing out.

“They are currently, as we speak, in states like Ohio, destroying public education through universal vouchers,” he said. “This is true in Arizona and in Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana … [R]ural public schools are seeing their budgets cut so that some wealthy family in suburban Columbus can get an $8,000 break on the private school tuition they’ve always been able to afford.”

In recent weeks, Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025 and in July, Dans announced he would be stepping away from The Heritage Foundation. But both the Republican National Committee’s national platform and Trump on the campaign trail have echoed many of the same ideas in Project 2025, including eliminating Head Start, which provides comprehensive early childhood education and other services to low-income children and families, establishing “universal school choice” through school vouchers and “returning education to the states” by closing the Department of Education.

According to Pepper, this represents a rapid escalation of the playbook advanced by Trump’s former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who brought the school voucher system to a national stage. “It may be the single most potent issue” for rural Democrats to run on said Pepper, adding that candidates should do all they can to make the issue about the public schools in their area. 

Indeed, it was an issue that came up on July 23, when Gov. Walz, then on the veepstakes circuit, made a viral appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, during which, after labeling Trump and Vance “weird, he said:

And there is angst, because robber barons like JD Vance and Donald Trump gutted the Midwest. … They talk about private schools, where in the heck are you going to find a private school in a town of 400? Those are public schools. Those are great teachers that are out there making a difference and gave us an opportunity to succeed.

Workers in the vineyard

Xochitl Torres, the deputy agriculture secretary, and Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture (speaking in part through his wife, Christie Vilsack, because of Hatch Act limitations on speech), made appearances on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively, to tout the Biden-Harris administration’s signature legislations, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as the most historic investment in rural communities since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“I feel like we’ve been workers in the vineyard for all these many years to try and get the Democratic party really focused and interested in talking about rural America,” said Vilsack. “I think we’ve finally found the opportunity.”

Neither Torres nor Vilsack mentioned what a Harris-Walz administration would do establish a distinct rural agenda—proposals, like reforming commodity checkoff programs, making permanent mandatory funding of the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, establishing Country of Origin Labeling or continuing efforts to strengthen the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921. They also did not speak about Harris’s recent proposal for a federal price gouging ban in the food and grocery industries.

Nor was there any mention of the more daring proposals, popular in many rural communities, that have become part of Biden’s legacy. His Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina M. Khan and the Justice Department have aggressively revived antitrust law, blocking consolidation in the grocery industry, and taking on monopoly power in agriculture. This year the Environmental Protection Agency established the first-ever federal rules for PFAS “forever chemicals.”

Instead, Torres and Vilsack asked the audience to read in between the lines. It was an endorsement for a continuity of changes made—extolling efforts to bring back the Child Tax Credit, support rural hospitals, invest in rural broadband, provide relief for small and mid-size farms and protect abortion access—and a generalized indictment of the Republican rural agenda, particularly the resurrection of Trump’s trade war with China. Put another way, the Harris ticket would pick right up where the Biden administration left off—this time with an ace in the hole for rural America.

The dirt road ahead

The Rural Council meetings revealed the challenges ahead for the nascent Harris-Walz campaign. Paeans to joy, while providing an energizing antidote to the Trump campaign’s toxic stew of authoritarian and minoritarian-rule politics, do little to establish the campaign infrastructure that has been lacking for years in rural America. And while appeals to build broad rural-urban coalition, tempered by lessons from the past, show a desire to expand the party beyond the faithful, the urgency of a compressed campaign time frame provides an excuse to push the necessary work off to another day. That curtails an appetite within the party for ambitious proposals or even to simply listen to rural concerns. And it ignores a potentially brewing conflict between the neoliberal and rural progressive wings of the Democratic Party, like that which erupted when Congress debated the 1990 Farm Bill and the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement, as Cory Haala observed in Time magazine.

With a little more than 70 days to go before November 5, there was no denying the long road that would have to be traversed in short order.

As the final speaker on Thursday, DNC Chair Jaime Harrison pronounced that it was “now time for the Democratic Party to reclaim its title as the party of rural America.” In 2020, Harrison raised more money than any U.S. Senate candidate in history, collecting $130 million to unseat incumbent Lindsay Graham. But Harrison lost by a nearly 20-point margin.

Armed with residual funds from his campaign, Harrison, whose grandmother picked cotton, decided to start the Dirt Road Democrats PAC, named for the South Carolina dirt road on which he grew up. In Harrison’s telling, there is a transformation on the horizon, not in the millenarian sense of a “final battle” for the nation’s soul, but a new horizon dawning after the dark night of losing one’s religion, citing a version of Psalm 30, which he heard growing up: “Suffering may come for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

More than warm idealism, Harrison alluded, it was pragmatism, the belief that grit and determination—and real investments like rural broadband and expanding Medicaid in states to keep rural hospitals open—could steer the twin sails of chance and fortune.

Harrison recounted his reaction when he heard of Walz’s nomination: “I said, ‘Gov., coach, you and I need to do a rural tour. You and I are gonna get on a bus and go all across rural America so that we show up.’ ”

Justin Perkins

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is currently finishing his Master of Divinity at 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.