Last week, after much delay, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) released its post-election autopsy of the 2024 cycle. As CNN noted, the report concludes that Harris lagged in rural areas nationally, that the gap proved insurmountable in the swing states, and that the campaign effectively wrote off rural America on the assumption that urban and suburban margins would make up the difference.
Those of us who worked on the Harris-Walz campaign did not need an autopsy to tell us what happened. We were there. The DNC spent two years and considerable effort to arrive at a conclusion that the rural team could have written on day one.
For 107 days in 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris ran for President. For 67 of those days, I served as her National Rural Vote Outreach Director. My first day in the campaign office was 20 days before early voting began in Minnesota.
Before he stepped down, President Biden’s reelection campaign ran for 453 days, from April 2023 to July 2024. During those 15 months, it had no rural program, no resources and no staff dedicated to engaging rural voters.
The Democratic Party is not losing ground in rural America because rural people are unreachable. Democrats are losing ground because the national party, its leaders, its data scientists, its consultants and its super PACs have written off rural voters for two decades.
In 2008 and 2012, President Obama made historic gains in America’s small towns and rural communities. Then, Republicans doubled down. They declared rural America “Trump Country” and wove their MAGA brand into the civic fabric of our communities.
During Obama’s second term, the Democratic Party retreated. Its presidential candidates abandoned their retail politics, opting instead for predictive analytics that microtargeted voters in the cities and suburbs.
By 2016, most rural Democrats had gone quiet. Our communities filled with Tea Party activists and Trump yard signs, and supporting a Democrat in public, with no backup from the national party, felt like a risk most people were not willing to take.
The retreat was devastating. In early 2020, RuralOrganizing.org ran focus groups with voters who hold Democratic policy positions but do not vote for Democratic candidates. When we asked them why, their number one reason was that they never see Democrats in their community.
After more than a decade, that is finally starting to change. Support for President Trump is collapsing in rural America.
A May 2026 Fox News national survey put his approval deeply underwater, 39% approve to 61% disapprove, the highest disapproval the network has recorded all term. The sharpest shift is among rural white voters, who swung from a +27 net approval in early 2025 to -6 now.
But a low approval rating does not mean voters are shifting to Democrats on their own. Without strategic investment at scale, the party could squander a once-in-a-decade opening.
We know what works. In 2025, Virginia Democrats contested all 100 House of Delegates seats, picked up 13, and drove a governor’s race turnout that beat the 2018 blue wave. The pattern has held everywhere the party shows up. Since January 2025, Democrats have overperformed their 2024 margins by roughly 13 points in special elections, and they have flipped 30 legislative seats while Republicans have flipped none.
The most striking results came from rural districts. That started in January of 2025 when Iowa Democrat Mike Zimmer flipped a state Senate seat Trump had carried, a 25-point swing in a single year. The lesson is plain: full legislative slates and local candidate recruitment, now underway from Michigan to Texas to Arizona, lift the entire ticket.
When we ask local Democratic leaders why they are finding success, they tell us the same thing. We are not just running campaigns. We are building a community. They understand that voting is an act of identity, not just an act of ideology, and they are giving their neighbors a community to join, one focused on bringing down everyday costs and getting the country back on track.
This matters far beyond any one cycle, because the impact of rural voters in our democracy continues to grow. Demographers at the University of Virginia’s Cooper Center project that by 2040, roughly 70% of Americans will live in just 15 states. The other 30%, spread across 35 disproportionately rural states, will hold outsized power over the country’s future, especially in the Senate, where Wyoming and California each get two votes. Ignoring those voters is not just bad politics. It is bad math.
Local Democrats cannot build that future alone, and right now we are asking them to. Hiring a National Rural Vote Director for 67 days is not a rural strategy. Neither is parachuting in every four years and leaving the day after the election. The county chairs, the state legislative candidates and the local organizers are the people who carry the party’s brand in places the national party has abandoned. They knock on the doors. They show up outside the dollar store, at the fish fry, at the county fair.
Right now, as we saw in 2008 with Obama’s campaign, it’s working. But rural Democrats are operating on fumes. The window is open wider than it has been since 2008, when Obama won over 40% of the rural vote. It will not stay open on its own.
We don’t need another autopsy. We need sustained, year-round investment to rebuild the party from the ground up.
Democrats win when we empower the local leaders in our party already doing the work, recruiting local and state candidates and building a community to carry the party forward.
If national leaders in the Democratic Party do that, the next autopsy can be the story of a comeback instead of a collapse.
Matt Hildreth is the Executive Director of Rural Organizing, a national organization working to rebuild a rural America that’s empowered, thriving, and equitable. Matt grew up on a small farm in eastern South Dakota and now lives in rural Washington State.
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