Wins or narrow losses could shape 2028 strategy and investment
The Guardian reported: ‘In this final stretch of the US midterm elections, Democrats and independents could win back communities and towns across America’s rural heartlands through a combination of resurgent “prairie populism”, local despair over the impact of Donald Trump’s agenda and an old-fashioned tenet of shoe-leather politics: showing up everywhere.’
Several high-profile candidates are seeking to win over areas the left and center ceded to Republicans in the last decade-plus. The candidates were running “on populist messages rooted in the agrarian culture of their states, harkening back to politicians who stood up to corporate interests in previous generations by tying together farmers and workers who felt abandoned by both political parties,” the Guardian reported.
When Dan Osborn rolled into one of Nebraska’s most rural counties earlier this month, he began walking into businesses along Arthur’s tiny main drag, ready to meet whomever he could in a town of about 100. The Guardian said that for an independent making a run for the US Senate in a red state, every vote matters, including votes in solidly Republican areas that political candidates often overlook. Osborn is touring all 93 counties in Nebraska before election day; he has about a dozen left.
Iowa Democratic US Senate candidate Josh Turek calls himself a “commonsense prairie populist.” He says he will go anywhere and considers sometimes-uncomfortable conversations with people who disagree critical to building trust. Turek represents the reddest district Democrats won in the Iowa legislature, where Donald Trump wins by double digits. He has committed to visiting each of Iowa’s 99 counties annually if he wins.
Wins, or even narrow losses, in these rural areas would signal to national Democrats and independents where to invest in 2028 and how to run campaigns that can win over skeptical voters in rural states.
In Montana, Sam Forstag, a Democrat running for Congress in a red district, has emphasized economic populism in his campaign to flip the district. He wants to fight for “people like the kid I was growing up, whose belly is full because of food stamps”. One writer described the politics of Kansas pastor and Democrat Adam Hamilton as a “populism of decency,” comparing Hamilton with William Jennings Bryan, a late-1900s evangelical populist from neighboring Nebraska known as the “great commoner.” A photograph accompanying the reporting showed Turek greeting a member of the public at the farmers’ market in Dubuque on 17 October 2026. (Kamil Krzaczyński/AFP/Getty Images)
The candidates often push back on attempts to label their politics and emphasize pragmatism and a willingness to work with politicians from any political background. Hamilton’s campaign said he looked up to Bob Dole, the late longtime Republican US senator from Kansas, and said Hamilton would work with anyone. The campaign said: “It’s how Kansas got the Farm Bill that has supported farmers and low-income kids for decades – by working together, Democrats and Republicans, to deliver for our state.”
Turek said: “For me, populism is not doing things through a political lens, through party lens, but your political north star always being, what is best for the people?” He added: “So for me, it’s what is best for Iowa. What’s best for Iowans, particularly what is best for the middle class? What’s best for the workers? What’s best for rural communities? What’s best for small family farms?”
The Guardian said, “This election cycle adds in datacenters and artificial intelligence to the populist platform, drawing on anti-corporate and anti-elite sentiments and a desire in rural areas to maintain their land, and their lifestyles, away from big tech interference.” Datacenters and artificial intelligence were part of the agenda candidates addressed this election cycle.
As Turek campaigned, he found that Iowans embrace issues including livable wages, affordable housing and healthcare, drinkable water, addressing corruption, overturning the Supreme Court ruling that led to unfettered money in politics, functioning infrastructure and strong public schools. Turek encounters people who have voted for Trump two or three times — card-carrying Republicans — in rural communities disproportionately affected by healthcare cuts and “bad federal policy.” “This is not the state they grew up in, and they’re hurting,” they tell him.
“I can’t speak for the party as a whole,” Turek said, “but for myself, it’s going to be really clear who I’m up there fighting for.”
In Arthur, Osborn first talked to a handful of locals at the town’s market, then went next door to the Bunkhouse, a restaurant with walls lined with antlers, animal skins and Nebraska license plates. He grabbed a burger with a couple of supporters who had heard he would be in town, then talked to other tables, first apologizing for the frequency of political ads and then explaining who he was: “I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat, I just wanna work for workers.”
A photograph accompanying the reporting showed Osborn speaking with voters in Red Cloud on 1 October 2026. Another caption identified Aaron Botts asking Osborn a question during a Red Cloud, Nebraska, town hall that day. Both photographs were by Omaha World-Herald/Getty Images.
Ray, a 75-year-old Democrat from Arthur who met Osborn at the Bunkhouse, said he liked that Osborn was not rich, was a Nebraska local and wanted to help people. Ray recalled gas prices at 30 cents a gallon and called current prices “ridiculous.” He said: “I want somebody that ain’t in there for themselves, you know?” Asked whether Osborn can win, Ray said: “I hope he does, but who knows.” He added: “If people get fed up enough with these other clowns that are running.”
The Guardian reported, “Osborn, a former union leader, brings together workers and farmers in his politics, like the prairie populists did to stand up to corporate interests.” He is running on an anti-corruption, anti-two-party-system, pro-working-class platform and told voters: “When we talk about prairie populism, that’s the counter to populism – just enriching your buddies.”
Osborn next went to Hyannis, a slightly bigger town about 30 minutes away through rolling hills and whipping wind, for another small meeting, this time in a bank conference room with skeptical questions from the few people who showed up. They asked about abortion, social programs, immigration and Islam. On abortion, Osborn said: “I’m 100% pro-life in my own personal life. I would never advocate for that. But I’m also pro-choice.” On social programs, he wants to protect Social Security and keep it solvent. Osborn supports reforming immigration policies and says Nebraska needs immigrants to fill jobs. On Islam, he said: “I think everybody has the freedom to worship however they want.” Osborn stressed that he was not a Democrat despite advertisements running against him that claimed otherwise; the ads ran courtesy of his opponent, Republican senator Pete Ricketts.
Not everyone was persuaded. Mark Vinton, a 46-year-old rancher from the area who chairs the county Republican party, said he was looking for whichever candidate would align most with Trump. He heard Osborn would be in town and initially thought the visit was a marketing ploy for Osborn to tour all 93 counties. But Vinton gave Osborn credit for taking his questions “respectfully” and seeming like a “reasonable guy.” Vinton said his mind could have been changed, but it was not, and it was safe to say the two men had philosophical and political differences. He would not vote for Osborn and added: “I’m going to support whoever supports the president’s policies.”
Kristy Ferguson, a 72-year-old independent from Arthur, was not sure she would vote before leaving town to winter in Florida. A friend in Florida texted her and said she needed to vote for Osborn before taking off. Ferguson voted that morning, heard Osborn was in town and went to find him. She knew of three left-leaning people in town and called them to come meet him too. Ferguson said, “I didn’t really know there was a chance” he could win. “I hope he can be in the Senate, so that’s a valuable vote.”
Osborn said reaching voters in places like Arthur requires a “permission structure” in heavily Republican communities for them to vote for an independent. Voters need to be willing to put aside their political identity, he said, a big ask that is why he tries to reach them in person as often as he can, routinely doing five or six town halls each day across the state. “It could come down to hundreds of votes in Nebraska, so talking to every single person matters,” he said. If Osborn loses, “then it’s just business as usual”, he said. “And then it’s just an R winning because they’re an R. And they don’t come to Arthur, because they don’t need to. And I don’t want to think about that future.”
Another photograph accompanying the reporting showed Dan Osborn speaking to voters during a town hall meeting in North Platte, Nebraska, on 3 September 2026. (Austin Johnson/AFP/Getty Images)
Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb said: “I’ve never seen our party so quickly adapt to where the voters were on an issue, and really leaning into where the voters were, versus poll-testing it to death.” She added: “I think that’s been a lesson now for candidates to say it’s OK to talk about these local issues that people are talking about.” Kleeb said Democrats are rebuilding their state parties and that Democratic and independent candidates need to show voters they are going to stick around beyond one election cycle. If these populists can win, it will “supercharge” political investment in these areas, Kleeb said. “We can prove, see, you picked up issues that people were talking about, you didn’t poll-test to death, you weren’t in an ivory tower, and you actually went on the ground and spoke to rural voters, and look at what happens: you win.”
The approach has a long history. In the late half of the 19th century, the left-of-center populist movement in the US focused on small farmers, with the railroads as the chief enemy, according to Cory Haala, a history professor at South Dakota State University who wrote a book on Midwestern progressive populism. Railroads bought up land and charged farmers exorbitant rates to ship their goods to other parts of the country. These farmers, often working together with organized labor, pushed to regulate railroads and stand against out-of-state interests, Haala said.
Some hallmarks remain today: a state-run bank in North Dakota, as well as a state-run flour mill and political parties such as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor alliance in Minnesota. Throughout the 20th century, progressive populism ebbed and flowed, with another peak in the 1980s in response to the farm crisis, when poor economic conditions led to massive small-farm failures.
Populists and farming-focused Democrats won for decades throughout the prairie and Midwestern states, including Tom Harkin in Iowa, Byron Dorgan in North Dakota, Tom Daschle in South Dakota and Bob Kerry in Nebraska. By 2013, USA Today called them a “fading species.” Haala said: “The conversations that we’re seeing around anti-monopoly, around antitrust and around datacenters are providing new flashpoints for the kind of populist organizing that was successful in the 1980s, in the 1930s and earlier than that.” In that same anti-monopoly, antitrust and datacenter context, he said: “It is an oftentimes out-of-state, kind of faceless corporate endeavor.”
Former US senator Heidi Heitkamp was the last Democrat to win statewide in North Dakota. She won in 2012 and lost her re-election in 2018. Her successor, Republican Kevin Cramer, recently told Out of State, a rural policy newsletter, that he was glad he was not on the ballot this year. A photograph accompanying the reporting showed then-senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, speaking with a group of North Dakota State University students in Fargo on 11 October 2018. (Dave Kolpack/AP)
Heitkamp told The Guardian that the Democratic Party decided it was easier to grow its base in the suburbs than to maintain any kind of presence in rural America. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the US Senate, said as much in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
Heitkamp said candidates rooted in their states are trying again by speaking directly to the economic trouble their neighbors face, including high gas prices, tariffs, rural hospital healthcare woes and datacenters. “Democrats and independent populists need to respond directly to these concerns to build back their reputations and ultimately expand their representation,” she said. “Rural areas are heavily dependent on being able to get in the car and afford to drive,” she said. “And where people once upon a time believed that this administration would solve those challenges, they’ve lost faith.”