Rural Megaphones

Democrats Need To Look to the Hills, the Hollers, and the Plains before 2026 and Beyond

I’m going to tell you something that the most successful candidates in Virginia this year —and successful Democrats nationwide—already know: we will never win the Presidency or lasting majorities again, at any level, without Rural America.

Look at the electoral maps from the last few cycles. Rural counties have swung key states red—or simply stayed home. But this year, something changed in Virginia. Democrats made historic gains in both the House of Delegates and statewide races, thanks in no small part to Rural Virginia. Compared to 2024, every county except four moved more Democratic. Compared to 2021, every single county swung our way.

That wasn’t luck. It was strategy. For the first time, Virginia Democrats fielded a candidate in every one of the 100 House districts. That kind of local presence built the infrastructure that helped carry Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger to victory—by one of the largest margins in decades—and deliver the first Democratic trifecta in almost forty years, with the biggest legislative majority since 1989.

If Democrats want to win in 2026 and beyond, we can’t just refine our message. We have to rethink where and how we deliver it.

The Abandoned but Mighty Minority.

By 2040, seventy percent of Americans will be represented by just thirty senators from fifteen states, while the other thirty percent will be represented by seventy senators from the remaining thirty-five. Yet, as recently as a few years ago, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said: “For every blue-collar rural Democrat we lose, we pick up a moderate Republican in the suburbs.”

That trade-off never materialized. Swing voters haven’t replaced the working-class base we’ve lost. Partisan tribalism runs deeper each cycle. The problem isn’t that rural Democrats are voting Republican—it’s that they’re not voting at all.

Disillusionment runs deep. Donald Trump tapped into that with his brand of angry populism, but he didn’t create it. Roughly one-third of Americans didn’t vote in 2024, and many of them live in rural communities. These are Democrats in waiting—voters who share our values but feel abandoned.

The party’s current playbook—focusing on densely populated urban and suburban centers—is unsustainable. Rural Americans increasingly feel invisible to both parties, especially when Democratic leadership is dominated by members from coastal metro areas. It doesn’t help that both our Senate and House leaders hail from New York City—the symbolic opposite of rural America.

This alienation runs deep. Many rural voters opposed NAFTA decades ago as factories shuttered and jobs moved overseas. Today, even though rural America produces more than ever, its communities see none of the benefits. Their productivity has tripled, yet the profits flow to urban and corporate centers. Add Trump-era tariffs and bailouts that punished small farmers, and you get a political landscape ripe for Democratic renewal—if we’re willing to show up and fight for it.

An Aside on Rural America

Before going further, it’s worth dispelling some of the most ill-conceived notions about what Rural America actually looks like.

Rural America is too often portrayed as monolithic—conservative, white, and politically homogeneous. Commentators sometimes use “rural” and “working class” as coded language for white voters. But that stereotype misses the real story.

The percentage of non-Hispanic white residents in rural areas declined by four percentage points between 2010 and 2020, a shift equivalent to two million more people of color calling rural America home. Today, people of color make up roughly 24% of rural communities, compared to 43% in urban areas.

• Hispanic and Latino residents represent the largest share of the rural minority population—about 4.1 million people, or 9% of the total.

• The Census counted 3.5 million non-Hispanic Black residents (7.7%), a slight decline from 2010.

• The population identifying as Native Peoples or “Some Other Race” rose to 1.1 million (2.5%), and Asians make up about 1% of the rural population.

Here in Virginia, nearly half of the rural population is non-white. The Commonwealth’s Southside region, for example, is home to large and historic Black rural communities—including Prince Edward County, where a student-led strike at a rural high school helped spark the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the Shenandoah Valley is one of only six federally designated refugee resettlement areas in the country. Its towns have become home to families from Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Palestine, China, and beyond—people who have built new lives, businesses, and faith communities in the heart of rural Virginia.

Rural America is changing. It’s diverse, dynamic, and far more complex than the caricature we see in headlines. The next time someone insists that rural means white, you can tell them—with confidence—they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Redistricting may shift district lines, but it can’t change geography—and geography still shapes power. Look at the past three presidential elections: Donald Trump has won the majority of U.S. counties each time, by a staggering margin of roughly 85 to 15.

Now, land doesn’t vote—but representation is built on land. And when you examine the numbers, the imbalance becomes clear. In 2016, it became a running joke that Trump somehow lost the popular vote but still won the presidency. But when you look closer, he carried 230 congressional districts, while Hillary Clinton won 206. Those numbers matter, because congressional districts—not national vote totals—decide who holds the gavel in Washington.

Since then, those district lines have shifted through redistricting, but the geographic divide has only hardened. And if Democrats don’t invest in rural organizing now, the next round of Republican gerrymandering will only make that imbalance worse.

Right now, the GOP holds a 219-seat majority in the House, with 214 Democrats and two vacancies. Once those are filled—Adelita Grijalva for Democrats and a Republican successor for Mark Green—we’ll be at roughly 220–215. That means the majority could flip with just three seats. That’s not a fantasy. It’s math.

And look at where those opportunities exist: in rural and exurban America.

Ten rural or semi-rural congressional districts are currently rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report:

• Democratic-held:

  • CA-13 – Gray

  • ME-02 – Golden

  • NM-02 – Vasquez

  • WA-03 – Gluesenkamp Perez

• Republican-held:

  • CA-22 – Valadao

  • CA-48 – Issa

  • CO-08 – Evans

  • IA-02 – Miller-Meeks

  • PA-10 – Perry

Those ten seats could determine the balance of power in Congress—and almost all of them run through rural America.

The same holds true for the Senate. Unless Democrats eliminate the filibuster, we’ll need every possible seat to clear the 60-vote threshold. The last time we had a supermajority was in 2008 under Senator Harry Reid. That coalition included rural Democrats like Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller (WV), Max Baucus (MT), Tom Harkin (IA), Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan (ND), Tim Johnson (SD), Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), Sherrod Brown (OH), and Mark Begich (AK)—all from states that Democrats have since written off.

We can’t govern boldly without reclaiming at least some of that territory. And make no mistake: the states that will decide Senate control in 2026—Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Ohio—are all heavily rural.

If Democrats want to pass big, generational reforms—on campaign finance, voting rights, or the courts—they can’t do it without the people who live beyond the interstates and the skylines. Because no one is reforming the Senate anytime soon—and the map won’t change itself.

Looking down to the states, six state legislatures are within a few seats of a majority, as I outlined in a prior piece. These are going to be the places where the gerrymandering mentioned above could be reversed at the end of this decade:

• Arizona

  • House - 14 D - 21 R

  • Senate- 13 D - 17 R

• Maine

  • House - 76 D - 73 R

  • Senate - 20 D - 15 R

• Michigan

  • House - 52 D - 58 R

  • Senate - 19 D - 18 R

• Minnesota

  • House - 67 D - 67 R

  • Senate - 33 D - 32 R

• Pennsylvania

  • House - 102 D - 101 R

  • Senate - 23 D - 27 R

Rural districts will determine these state legislatures, as we saw on Tuesday in Virginia, where Democrats were poised to expand their 51-seat majority by four seats. After they ran in all 100 districts and threw their weight behind more rural districts, they grew their majority by 13 seats.

Reverse Coatails

While Abigail Spanberger and her campaign deserve enormous credit for their disciplined, empathetic, and statewide-focused message, her victory didn’t happen in isolation. It was powered by a bottom-up movement that flipped the traditional coattail effect on its head.

House candidates across Virginia didn’t just ride Spanberger’s wave—they created it.

Almost every county in the Commonwealth—all but four—moved further left than in 2024. And compared to 2021, every single county and every single House district shifted more Democratic. That level of movement doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of candidates running everywhere, meeting voters where they live, and refusing to concede any community.

The Spanberger campaign, the Virginia House Democratic Caucus, and the coordinated campaign learned the lessons of 2021 the hard way. That year, Democrats lost by just 1.9 percentage points—a heartbreakingly narrow margin. A few more trips to rural regions, a few more organizers on the ground, and the outcome could have been different. This time, they didn’t make the same mistake.

By fielding candidates in all 100 House districts, Democrats built local credibility and visibility that extended far beyond any one race. Even in districts where the odds were long, having a Democrat on the ballot made a difference. Those candidates became the local face of the ticket—the trusted neighbor voters saw at the farmers’ market, the PTA meeting, or Sunday service.

And it paid off.

Democrats didn’t just win the governorship by nearly 15 points—they won their largest legislative majority in 36 years. That kind of structural gain doesn’t happen without local infrastructure. When voters saw a Democrat running in every corner of the state—from the coalfields of Southwest Virginia to the Shenandoah Valley and the Eastern Shore—they saw a party that hadn’t given up on them.

That’s the real lesson of 2025: it’s not just about statewide charisma or messaging. It’s about creating reverse coattails—where local candidates lift the ticket from the bottom up.

Because even if many of those rural Democrats didn’t win their own races, they helped bring in thousands of additional Democratic votes. They changed the culture of participation. And that momentum—built on trust, presence, and persistence—will carry into 2026 and beyond.

Democrats need those local candidates, committee chairs, and organizers to keep serving as megaphones for the party’s values. They are the connective tissue between the national message and local reality. They remind rural voters that Democrats aren’t an abstract idea—they’re neighbors.

And if we keep investing in them, we can keep winning.

Our rural Democrats are hurting. They’re trying to organize with almost no resources—no paid staff, no headquarters, sometimes not even a mailing list. The few volunteers they have are often veterans of twenty cycles, doing it all on their own. If Democrats are serious about winning again, we have to start by rebuilding the basic infrastructure these committees have lost—member recruitment, volunteer training, and the consistent financial support to sustain local leadership.

Because right now, without those tools, rural Democrats are being drowned out by a megaphone of misinformation.

When politicians, pundits, and even pastors tell people every Sunday that Democrats are demonic or anti-American, that message sticks. In communities where trust in government and media has collapsed, the pulpit and the local news anchor become the arbiters of truth. And when both are echoing conservative talking points, Democrats don’t stand a chance unless we’re physically present to push back.

Evangelical megachurch networks have become de facto political machines—using their vast communications systems to amplify right-wing narratives. Gun rights groups, farm bureaus, hunting clubs, fraternal lodges, and homeschool networks are not inherently political, but they often carry conservative messages to enormous audiences. Add to that the dominance of corporate-owned local media, particularly outlets under Sinclair Broadcast Group, which flood rural markets with fear-based, anti-Democratic rhetoric.

Republicans don’t win rural America on party infrastructure alone—they win through culture. Through networks that already exist in daily life. Democrats once had those networks too—union halls, farmers’ cooperatives, local party clubs—but too many have disappeared or been left to wither.

We’ve spent decades pulling our resources into the “Urban Crescent” and the suburban ring around it, hoping the numbers there would offset the losses elsewhere. That strategy has reached its ceiling. Rural communities are done waiting to be seen.

Democrats need to start organizing in these communities—politically and socially. It’s not enough to drop in at election time. We need a presence at the county fair, the food drive, the volunteer firehouse fundraiser. We need to show up as part of the community, not as outsiders parachuting in from D.C.

Precinct-level organizing is a lofty goal, but it wasn’t that long ago that Democratic precinct captains were the most trusted mouthpieces in American politics. We can recapture that model. Start small: fund local chairs, train precinct leaders, and give them the tools to succeed—updated voter lists, materials, and messaging that actually fits their community.

If we pour money and attention into rural committees early—not six months before an election—it will pay off. Visibility attracts volunteers. Volunteers attract donors. And over time, it becomes normal—not risky—to be an active Democrat in a rural county again.

That visibility also builds authenticity. It’s one thing for a national figure to tell rural voters what they should care about—it’s another when it comes from someone they’ve known their whole life. That’s what “authenticity” really means. Not a carefully branded candidate from inside the Beltway, but a neighbor who knows what it’s like when the mill closes or the hospital cuts services.

We can’t parachute in polished candidates who fit a demographic spreadsheet and expect voters not to notice they’ve never seen them before. We need to elevate local voices, and in doing so, educate the national pundit class about what these voters actually care about. The wisdom of rural communities should shape our strategy, not the other way around.

The Democratic Party’s future in rural America depends on rebuilding trust, re-establishing networks, and empowering the people already there. Because if we invest in them, we don’t just build campaigns—we build communities that can sustain themselves long after Election Day.

Not vice versa.

The Issues To Amplify

Right to Repair

In today’s world of disposable consumerism, manufacturers design products to break—forcing people to buy replacements instead of fixing what they already own. It’s called planned obsolescence, and it hits farmers especially hard. When a $300,000 tractor stops working, they can’t just “take it in.” Many manufacturers make repairs exclusive to their own technicians or brand-specific parts, locking out independent mechanics and driving up costs.

While there has been progress—such as the Memorandums of Understanding between the American Farm Bureau Federation and major manufacturers like Deere & Co.—the problem isn’t solved. Those MOUs aren’t legally binding and don’t extend to the wide range of equipment that rural communities rely on daily. We need legislation to guarantee the right to repair—not just for tractors, but for everything from smartphones to refrigerators.

When farmers and consumers can fix their tools affordably, it saves them money and passes those savings on to everyone, including the urban and suburban consumers who buy what they produce. That’s a win for everyone, not just the countryside.

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Investments in Agriculture

While Trump’s administration used taxpayer dollars to bail out foreign soybean competitors, Democrats should be reinvesting that money into American family farms. Rural economies don’t need more subsidies for multinational agribusiness—they need targeted support for generational farmers who sustain their local economies.

Breaking up corporate monopolies in agriculture would restore fairness to the market, ensuring that the people doing the work aren’t squeezed out by the corporations that dominate processing, shipping, and retail. Democrats should champion local food systems, community-supported agriculture, and regional co-ops that keep profits in the community instead of Wall Street.

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FEMA and Natural Disaster Relief

Rural America has borne the brunt of the climate crisis—record flooding in the Midwest, wildfires across the West, and landslides throughout Appalachia. And while the need for federal support has skyrocketed, Trump’s administration gutted FEMA’s budget and stripped away its already limited capacity to respond.

We saw this clearly during Hurricane Helene, which devastated communities from Florida all the way through Appalachia, leaving small towns destroyed and federal aid delayed. Rebuilding FEMA funding and ensuring timely disaster relief isn’t just policy—it’s survival. These are the investments that keep people from abandoning their hometowns after the next storm.

Protecting these communities means stopping the exodus from rural America and giving families confidence that they can rebuild and thrive where they ar

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Pushing Back Against Suburban NIMBYism

The explosion of data centers, particularly across the South and mid-Atlantic, has become a flashpoint between suburban and rural communities. Suburban residents often push these facilities out of their neighborhoods due to their enormous energy demands, water use, and emissions. As a result, they get built in rural areas with fewer regulations and less local resistance—leaving those communities to deal with the fallout.

We’ve already seen what happens when this goes unchecked. Elon Musk’s “Grok” facility in Arkansas polluted local air and water, with effects stretching all the way to Memphis. In Loudoun County, Virginia, uncontrolled data center expansion has sparked an environmental crisis and forced residents to fight back against overdevelopment.

Democrats can lead here by calling for common-sense regulations on both the facilities and the AI-driven industries fueling their growth. That means protecting local water tables, investing in cleaner energy sources, and ensuring that any community hosting these projects sees real economic benefits—not just environmental costs.

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Following Through on Rural Broadband

One of the Biden administration’s biggest achievements—the $42.5 billion investment in rural broadband—was a historic step toward bridging the digital divide. But too much of that funding remains tied up in bureaucracy. The promises haven’t yet reached the people who need it most.

It’s not enough to allocate money; Democrats must ensure implementation, oversight, and transparency. That means tracking where funds go, cutting through red tape, and holding contractors accountable for results.

When rural broadband becomes reality, it’s not just about faster internet—it’s about equal access to education, healthcare, and opportunity. A student in Wythe County deserves the same online classroom access as one in Arlington. A small business in Pulaski should be able to sell its products online as easily as one in Fairfax.

Seeing these projects through—and making sure people know who delivered them—will do more to restore faith in government than any slogan or ad campaign ever could.

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A Rural Roadmap for Renewal

These aren’t niche policies. They’re the foundation for rebuilding a Democratic coalition that listens to and delivers for every community. Rural voters don’t want pity or platitudes—they want proof.

If Democrats fight for these issues—repair rights, fair agriculture, reliable disaster relief, responsible development, and functional broadband—we can show rural America that we’re not just visiting for votes. We’re building a future with them, not for them.Conclusion: The Road Runs Through Rural America

The path to the next Democratic majority won’t be paved by consultants in D.C. or data models from Brooklyn—it will be built on dirt roads, at kitchen tables, and in county fairs across Rural America.

If this year’s results in Virginia proved anything, it’s that the story of Democratic resurgence starts where too many in our party stopped looking. When we invest in people—not just ad buys—when we organize instead of agonize, and when we put local faces on national values, voters notice. They don’t need perfect messaging; they need proof that we’re still listening.

Rural voters aren’t asking for special treatment—they’re asking for partnership. They want a seat at the table, not a lecture from it. And when Democrats show up, listen, and deliver, they respond in kind.

For too long, we’ve talked about Rural America as a problem to solve instead of a partner to build with. But the truth is simple: there is no lasting Democratic majority without the hills, the hollers, and the plains.

If we want to move this country forward—on climate, on healthcare, on democracy itself—we need to rebuild trust where we’ve lost it, organize where we’ve been silent, and keep showing up long after the election signs come down.

The road to 2026, and to the future of the Democratic Party, runs straight through Rural America. The only question now is whether we’ll take it.

TL;DR

Democrats can’t win lasting majorities—or govern boldly—without Rural America.

Virginia proved what happens when we stop writing off rural voters and start organizing everywhere: historic margins, a new trifecta, and the biggest Democratic majority in nearly four decades.

The road to 2026 runs through the hills, hollers, and plains—through local candidates who know their neighbors, through investment in rural infrastructure, and through policies that actually matter to working people: right to repair, fair agriculture, disaster relief, broadband access, and responsible development.

Rural voters don’t need pity. They need presence. If Democrats show up, listen, and deliver, we won’t just rebuild a coalition—we’ll rebuild trust.

By the Ballot is an opinion series published on Substack. All views expressed are solely those of the author and should not be interpreted as reporting or objective journalism or attributed to any other individual or organization. I am not a journalist or reporter, nor do I claim to be one. This publication represents personal commentary, analysis, and opinion only.