The following article, ‘Sowing Rural Insurgency” by Justin H. Vassallo is cross-posted from The American Prospect:
Regardless of whether one casts economic hardship, nativist bigotry, or coastal elitism as the primary cause of the Democratic Party’s disrepute in small factory towns and the farm belt, the resulting sense of alienation in rural America remains the single biggest obstacle to broadening the party’s regional power. And it has mostly stifled whatever impulse there might be to rally low-income Americans of all stripes against the crony capitalism now enveloping the American state.
Until Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) began holding rallies in Republican-held districts to address DOGE’s destructive impact on federal workers and programs, most progressives had not dared to dream of rural America as fertile ground for a backlash. But it’s central to the concept of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), a group determined to breathe new life into rural organizing strategies.
Conceived in early 2020 by Anthony Flaccavento, a small farmer, former Democratic congressional candidate, and community organizer in southern Virginia, and Erica Etelson, a political writer and former public-interest attorney based in California, RUBI is kindling a new way to approach—and ultimately advance—rural concerns within the progressive movement. Through training sessions, reports from local experts, policy development, and traditional volunteer work, RUBI hopes to depolarize rural politics and persuade other activist groups to engage in good faith with the needs, fears, and aspirations of rural communities.
RUBI’s most prominent effort to date is its campaign to convince the Democratic National Committee and the broader fundraising network on the left to devote substantially more resources to rural causes. Since Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, was elected in February to head the DNC, RUBI has lobbied him to allocate $400 million—10 percent of the Democratic ad buy for the 2024 general election—toward rural districts and candidates.
Although RUBI has yet to secure Martin’s commitment, co-signatories to the public letter include Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), author and sociologist Arlie Hochschild, veteran Texas populist Jim Hightower, two state party chairs and dozens of county committees, and scores of other individuals and organizations alarmed by Democratic decline in rural areas. (Disclosure: I am listed among the journalists who have signed it.)
Rural strategists hope to change the narrative and trajectory of American politics by transforming the everyday ways progressives think of and relate to left-behind Americans.
Regardless of the DNC’s final decision, the campaign testifies to the perseverance of rural progressive populism. It reflects, too, a growing recognition on the part of local groups committed to the welfare of rural workers that they are not isolated in their anger over how national Democrats have burned through billions of dollars in the last several election cycles without improving their position in a single “purple” state.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats lost well over a thousand congressional, statewide, and local down-ballot offices. Tentative gains in critical presidential swing states since 2018 have been largely offset by Trump’s comeback; he won all seven in November. Other states where Democrats used to be competitive across the board, such as Florida and Ohio, are poised to go the way of Missouri, Indiana, and Arkansas.
A recent study from the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire suggests that a shift among rural voters to Kamala Harris of just 3 percent could have led her to victory over Donald Trump. If even just a few dozen rural Democrats from the South and Midwest won back offices controlled by the GOP, there could be a tectonic shift in how the party competes at the gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential levels.
As RUBI’s founders know well, it is a herculean task just to get the party elite to admit the main facts—that austerity, trade shocks, and monopoly power have distressed rural America—much less own their own culpability in these issues. But although it is tempting to place all the blame on party elites, the same, unfortunately, can often be said of the major progressive groups that have cropped up since the Bush years, Flaccavento argues. The overriding focus, he says, on “call[ing] out how horrible the Republicans are 24/7” has left little energy to discuss what matters to rural folks: “jobs, employment, the economy, livelihoods, manufacturing, trade policy, [and] antitrust.”
This, then, is how rural strategists hope to change the narrative and trajectory of American politics: not through conferences, white papers, and viral media, but by transforming the everyday ways progressives think of and relate to left-behind Americans.
RUBI’S EMERGENCE, ALONGSIDE SIMILAR ORGANIZATIONS like Contest Every Race, the Center for Working-Class Politics, More Perfect Union, and Dirt Road Democrats, comes at a precarious moment in national politics. Not only is the Democratic brand now routinely described as “toxic” outside of deep-blue cities and college towns, but the meaning and purpose of 21st-century progressivism seems uncertain, with many supporters believing it has deviated, at least partially, from its populist and New Deal origins. Some activists are beginning to entertain the nonpartisan path taken by independent Dan Osborn, who since losing to Republican incumbent Deb Fischer in last year’s U.S. Senate race in Nebraska, has started a Working Class Heroes Fund to back future insurgents.
But harrowing political defeats do create a window—at least temporarily—to take aim at ossified party structures and discredited strategies. For organizers like Flaccavento and Etelson, these candid assessments are essential to mapping a recovery. Though RUBI aims, in part, to overhaul the activist PR-speak that typically puts off rural and less-educated workers, Flaccavento, who is steeped in rural development issues, is frank about the big picture that most D.C. consultants and their paymasters evade.
“Even the most down-to-earth language ain’t going to cut it until we address why so many people are pissed,” he says.
A significant part of RUBI’s work involves exploring how Democrats and the modern left went wrong with rural Americans. That’s what “really differentiates us from almost every other rural group out there,” says Flaccavento, “which are more either trying to find better candidates or just trying to make the case that the Democratic Party is the right party.” Flaccavento is adamant that progressives have to comprehensively recognize that they have been in a losing battle to “persuade [blue-collar rural] people that we really are for them when they don’t buy it anymore.”
RUBI is concerned with reimagining what “bottom-up prosperity” looks like in this age of regional inequality.
RUBI’s work is about more than dissecting the weaknesses of contemporary progressivism, however. Its major policy document, “A Rural New Deal,” co-published with Progressive Democrats of America, champions and expands upon the best aspects of President Biden’s domestic legacy, particularly in the areas of antitrust enforcement and re-establishing regional supply chains.
But unlike many D.C.-based think tanks, RUBI and its allies are not trying to graft a left-leaning technocratic agenda onto rural workers based on an abstract assumption of what they most need. Instead, RUBI is concerned with reimagining what “bottom-up prosperity” looks like in this age of regional inequality, and retrieving the policy tools that give local communities “the capacity,” as Flaccavento puts it, “to solve many if not most of their problems.”
Accordingly, RUBI has designed activities to boost community involvement and solidarity in low-income counties, and to ascertain the distinct burdens carried by rural Americans. It has launched a “Community Works” initiative with seven pilot programs in Virginia and Georgia, helping to host blood drives, donate food parcels to needy kids and seniors, organize trash pickup, and distribute smoke detectors, among other forms of outreach.
The pilots, Flaccavento notes, are “strenuously nonevangelical in the political sense”—with one important caveat. Although the purpose is to get a pulse on hard-up communities and encourage the kind of interactions that build morale and mutual aid, such events are sponsored in the fine print by local affiliates of the Democratic Party, typically county party chairs. The hope is that over time some of the residents touched by these community events—particularly nonvoters, irregular voters, independents, and ex-Democrats—will take the next step to backing causes that give them a new, endogenous stake in progressive politics.
As Flaccavento and Etelson tell it, the pilot programs have seen growing interest, attracting former activists jaded by national Democratic acquiescence to big business, as well as old-school “upstanding-citizen Republican types” worried about the social ills that have ravaged and depopulated small towns.
THE EMPHASIS ON UNFLINCHING SELF-CRITIQUE on the one hand and building civic dialogue on the other may strike some as quaint. For many progressives and establishment Democrats alike, the threat of the increasingly authoritarian and extraconstitutional Trump administration dwarfs the task of reckoning with the errors and broken promises that have tarnished the Democratic image in the heartland. Amid a five-alarm national crisis, a movement that eschews overt partisanship could reinforce the tendency of rural Democrats to remain shy about their commitments, undermining the long-term objective to build a stronger, more pugilistic Democratic Party that is less subservient to bigwig donors.
Skeptics of rural outreach will further argue that the writing has long been on the wall. Democratic presidential nominees haven’t cracked 40 percent of the rural vote since Obama’s 2008 campaign, and a trio of pro-labor Senate Democrats in states with large rural populations—Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, and Montana’s Jon Tester—lost re-election last November. Aside from Govs. Andy Beshear (Kentucky), Laura Kelly (Kansas), and Josh Stein (North Carolina), Democrats continue to get routed in states that have leaned Republican since the disastrous 2010 and 2014 midterms. Whether the advice echoes Chuck Schumer’s infamous wager from 2016 (let go of industrial labor and pivot to the affluent suburbs) or that of left-wing influencers (mobilize young people and the multiracial urban base), the regions that were once the engine of America’s cotton, textile, furniture, tobacco, rice, steel, and coal industries do not factor in Democrats’ proposed path back to power.
But RUBI doesn’t see it that way. In fact, it is exactly the inclination of party loyalists to move on from the policy choices and rhetorical excesses that antagonized rural voters that is impeding Democrats from expanding their coalition, argue Flaccavento and Etelson. After nearly 80 training sessions with progressive organizers, Etelson notes, RUBI still occasionally hears participants declare that rural folk, particularly white men, have simply failed “to improve themselves in [the last] 25 years.”
When local Democrats and grassroots activists do coalesce, they can stop regressive power grabs by state Republican Parties.
Anecdotes like these underscore that progressives who adhere to an economics- and class-first approach must surmount serious obstacles among themselves before they can build the kind of networks that might help carry left-populists in red districts to victory. While some prominent Democrats like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) are adopting a more combative stance toward America’s oligarchs, they are underestimating the problem if they think populist rhetoric will be enough to suddenly prompt a re-evaluation of Democratic priorities by disenchanted voters.
The air of complacency that persists even now illustrates the depth of RUBI’s challenge. Still, as many high-profile interest groups reel from a post-election drop in small donations, more grassroots organizers are arguing that an electoral coalition overly reliant on urban professionals simply cannot prevail in the current political environment. Places that have trended Republican since the successive shock waves dating back to the 1990s of NAFTA, permanent normal trade relations with China, and the Great Recession outnumber the affluent suburbs that have tilted blue—and this trend will continue as long as the electorate remains polarized by education and region.
If democracy is on the ballot, RUBI and like-minded groups argue, then Democrats must reach the people who are perhaps the only bulwark against total state capture by Silicon Valley and their hard-right handmaidens in Congress. And just a portion of the sought-after pledge from the DNC could make a difference.
In November, Democrats lost the House by fewer than 7,500 votes across three districts that include small cities and rural towns; in one of them, Iowa’s First District, Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan lost by only 799 votes. In other competitive districts in Pennsylvania and Nebraska, Democrats lost by under 7,000 votes; in Wisconsin and Michigan, there were tougher contests that nonetheless might flip in 2026 with more support from the national party. One can look to the success of House candidates with substantive populist messages, who outperformed Kamala Harris in key areas of their districts, to see that down-ballot Democrats still have a chance to stop defections and bring blue-collar workers back to the Democratic fold.
The effect on state legislatures and overlooked local offices could be even greater. According to one analysis, around 50 percent of elected offices in the 2022 midterms were uncontested, with many rural Republican incumbents running unopposed. This lack of a credible presence in rural America has compounded perceptions that Democrats are aloof and wedded to the priorities of distant elites. That arguably fuels more suspicion of climate policy and regulations which, while intended to build long-term resilience, strike many as unattuned to the disastrous labor-market “transitions” already wrought by globalization and the ascent of the so-called knowledge economy.
A strategy that invests generously in Democrats’ regional infrastructure while granting new candidates more autonomy and ideological flexibility could serve long-standing progressive goals. One need only consider Trump’s rollback of Biden’s major climate investments to conclude that rural Americans need to be actively included in the Democratic coalition. RUBI and other groups make the case that local Democratic candidates who can speak unreservedly to feelings of betrayal and distill the consequences of GOP rule need all the encouragement and financial support they can get.
When local Democrats and grassroots activists do coalesce, they can stop regressive power grabs by state Republican Parties. Contest Every Race, a group devoted to rebuilding local Democratic branches, maintains that rural organizing in North Carolina last fall ended the GOP’s supermajority in the statehouse. After the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, a significant majority of Kansans voted to protect the right to an abortion.
Even in states where Republicans aren’t losing their majority status anytime soon, flipping seats could build momentum behind progressive and pro-worker legislation. Last November, for example, 57 percent of Missourians supported Proposition A, which raised the minimum wage and introduced employer-paid sick leave; that law is now on its way to being repealed by the heavily Republican legislature. But if national Democrats had not forfeited Missouri—the bellwether state of the 20th century—and had more Democrats in the legislature, the outlook for Proposition A and similar goals might be more favorable.
In the months ahead, progressives will be tempted to train their sights on dramatic court battles and legislative showdowns. But as RUBI and other groups have urged, the seeds of national change must be planted in counties Democrats have abandoned if the next decade is to bring more hope than agony. This emerging strategy believes that once again bringing manual workers, farmers, and social reformers into common cause gives the Democratic Party its best chance to advance radical reform.
