Winning candidates ran on pocketbook issues and largely skipped culture war fights
Democrats made deep inroads into rural America in Tuesday’s midterm elections, according to an analysis by Anthony Flaccavento and Erica Etelson, co-founders of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, published by The Guardian on November 6. Rural voters swung 15 points toward Democratic US Senate candidates compared with their 2024 presidential vote choice, the authors report, and Democrats won Senate races in 10 of the 21 most rural-populated states that held elections — among them Kansas, Mississippi and Iowa, states the authors describe as long surrendered to Republicans.
The swing cut nearly in half Trump’s 40-point rural margin from 2024, the pair write. They caution that Republican turnout fell nationwide, so the share of the shift that reflected voters moving toward Democrats rather than staying home remains unknown.
Non-college voters moved as well. For the first time since 2012, a majority — 51% — of non-college voters backed a Democrat for the US House of Representatives, a 17-point improvement over 2024, according to the analysis.
In North Carolina, Jamie Ager won the House race for the 11th congressional district, flipping a Republican-held seat that Trump won handily in 2024. Long before entering politics, the authors write, Ager made his name at the meat counter of a grocery store in Boone, North Carolina. In the early 2000s, he owned and operated Hickory Nut Gap, a regenerative farm near Asheville, and over the next two decades helped build a regional food system that delivered healthier food to thousands of people, improved land stewardship and made farming a bit more profitable.
The platforms of winning (or leading) candidates in red and purple states followed a clear pattern, the authors write, with concrete economic issues of working and rural people at the center. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton’s “prairie populism” railed against the crushing costs of farming inputs, a theme Iowa’s Josh Turek also stressed. Scott Colom of Mississippi emphasized the loss of labor and delivery departments in rural communities, and Texas candidates Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico spoke out for rural schools against defunding and voucher programs.
Keisha Lance Bottoms spoke openly about the rural-urban divide and her own roots in the Georgia countryside, while Annie Andrews of South Carolina centered kitchen table economics, rural healthcare and farmland preservation. In Montana, Sam Forstag — identified by the authors as the first Democrat Montana has sent to the US House since 1994 — emphasized protecting the public lands Montanans rely on for recreation and sustenance.
The nine Senate candidates who flipped, or are projected to flip, their seats focused unrelentingly on easing voters’ pocketbook pain, reining in corruption, putting the brakes on AI datacenters and supporting workers, farmers, veterans and small businesses, the authors write. With the exception of Troy Jackson and Andrews, they found little more than a glancing mention of any culture war issue across the candidates’ campaign websites. The same held, they report, for the five Democrats who flipped governorships.
Hinojosa, Texas’s governor-elect, described the approach directly. “I have no interest in fighting culture wars,” she told the New York Times, according to the analysis. “There is just one fight [against tech giants], and we are so caught up fighting each other … over the ways we disagree about social issues … I’m not going to perpetuate that any more.” The authors credit that stance with an eight-point Democratic shift across Texas’s 17 rural counties.
The authors trace the results partly to a deliberate ground game. Having learned, in their telling, that ignoring rural and factory-town voters is “the road to ruin,” Democratic House and Senate candidates flocked to small towns. Abdul El-Sayed appeared at barns, union halls and fairgrounds in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Colom visited almost every county in Mississippi, held 60 town halls and turned up at a small-town rally of Trump supporters. Rob Sand completed a 100-stop tour across Iowa, including all of its rural counties.
Amy Acton, Ohio’s governor-elect, met with local agricultural extension districts to advocate for rural broadband and 4-H, according to the analysis. In Minnesota, the authors write, Jake Johnson — who flipped the state’s first congressional district — sent teams of volunteers across the district for one-on-one conversations with voters, contributing to a six-point swing in their rural county.
The party’s campaign arm built new infrastructure as well. For the first time ever, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fielded a rural engagement program that included local organizing in rural districts, volunteer mobilization and assistance with ad buys and mailers, the authors write. Grassroots organizations including Every State Blue and Dirt Road Organizing also worked the districts, mobilizing the Democratic base while reaching out to swing voters and disaffected Trump supporters.
The authors argue that Democrats spent several painful cycles learning the value of “sitting down at the kitchen table and staying there,” a strategy they believe will serve the party well for the foreseeable future. They call the combined effect of the outreach gamechanging: when Democrats compete seriously in rural areas, they write, the party can win or at least begin making significant inroads.
What happens next, the authors conclude, will determine whether Tuesday’s results are a short-lived repudiation of Trump or the start of a movement that, in their words, “takes on elite power in service of working people.” Corbin Trent, a media strategist and former communications director for Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said the Democrats “have been given the keys by the American people. It’s time to drive the car to a better place,” according to the analysis.