Democrats Are Trying to Court Rural America, Once Again

Winning rural voters has become Democrats’ white whale.

Despite concerted voter outreach, Democrats readily admit their reputation is poor in rural America. Rural voters helped put President Donald Trump in the White House twice and have reliably voted for Republicans in recent midterms as well.

But the Democratic Party is only doubling down on its strategies to win in these parts of the country.

The Democratic National Committee told NOTUS that it’s investing historic levels of money in state parties so they can hire rural organizing directors, put up billboards, and run radio ads. House Democrats’ official campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, began an eight-figure effort late last year to persuade voters of color and rural voters in competitive battleground districts. It’s the first time the committee has a program dedicated specifically to rural voters.

And Jaime Harrison, the former Democratic National Committee chair who promoted a rural strategy, has revived his PAC called Dirt Road Democrats and is investing in rural races across the country.

“In 2026, we’re going to have some upset victories in some rural communities,” Harrison told NOTUS.

Democrats are projecting confidence that large investments, relatable candidates, a consistent presence and a diminishing opinion of Trump will help them make gains in rural areas.

If they are successful, the party would be reversing a 25-point edge that Republicans have built over Democrats in the past two decades. They’d also have a data point indicating the party has a real chance at shifting traditional political lines in elections to come.

There’s plenty of skepticism across the aisle that this will come to pass in November.

“There’s a social culture war in rural America that the Democrats are never going to win unless they change their national agenda,” said Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist from North Carolina. “They’re not going to be able to make long-term gains and long-term inroads until rural voters perceive them as a right-of-center party. That’s not the trajectory that the Democratic Party is on right now.”

National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Reilly Richardson said, “No amount of ‘strategy’ can change the fact that Democrats will always cave to their far-left base at the expense of hardworking Americans.”

There’s also words of warning from inside the party.

“The money they raise goes mainly to television ads, consultants, more urban East Coast elites that really don’t have an understanding of what’s going on in working-class households,” said Robin Johnson, a rural Democratic strategist based in the Midwest. “Then we scratch our heads and wonder why we lose every two years. It’s the same thing, rinse and repeat.”

That said, Shumaker acknowledged that it does look like Democrats “actually are looking to try to make those areas competitive.” And Johnson said that Democrats are likely to pick up seats in the House.

Democrats’ counterpoint to all of the above is that their strategy will take time.

“This is investing in a 20- to 40-year project for rural North Carolina. I’m not naive to think that these counties can be flipped overnight,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said. “If I do my job right, we will see that shift in every county in North Carolina, just like we did in Virginia.”

In the short term, party officials say nontraditional candidates with local ties will make all the difference. In North Carolina, the party searched for pastors, retired state employees, school board volunteers and football coaches to run, said Grayson Barnette, a Democratic strategist and senior adviser to the state party.

Harrison and Clayton pointed to former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, who is running for Senate, as a candidate they hope can flip a Republican-held seat this year.

Party officials are also pinning their hopes on candidates like Sam Forstag, a smokejumper running in Montana’s 1st District to unseat Rep. Ryan Zinke, or Jamie Ager, a fourth-generation farmer running to unseat Rep. Chuck Edwards in North Carolina’s 11th District.

Cooper’s campaign said they are running a “statewide field operation” in suburban, urban and rural areas. The former governor, who grew up working on a farm in Nash County, hosted a roundtable with farmers in Eastern North Carolina to discuss the impact of tariffs on the industry and spoke at the North Carolina Farm Bureau’s annual convention.

“Rural Nash County native Roy Cooper is running for the United States Senate to help those North Carolinians who feel forgotten and believe the American dream isn’t within reach anymore,” a Cooper spokesperson said.

North Carolina, specifically, is home to many of these Democratic efforts to win over rural America. The state has the second-largest rural population in the country, right behind Texas. Of the state’s 100 counties, 78 are considered rural. Trump took the state in 2024, in large part due to the many rural counties that reliably go red. He even flipped three rural counties that year.

North Carolina Democrats have Democratic-aligned candidates running in every state Legislative seat this year. In 2020 and 2022, the party left 44 state legislative seats uncontested. Those seats were left unfilled to save money in certain places, but also because the party struggled to recruit in “unwinnable” areas, Clayton said.

“That left, for the last at least two to three election cycles, I think a bad taste in people’s mouths about the fact that if there’s no one there to run at a local level for me that’s a Democrat, like the party obviously doesn’t care enough about me to even have somebody here or to put somebody up on a ballot,” Clayton said.

The reverse coattail effect is especially true in rural counties, said Garrett Lagan, chair of the Democratic Party in Swain County.

“In a town like ours, in a county like ours, having local folks running to serve the community will bring more people who they know, and want to see them in office, to the polls, and I believe that that will help the up-ballot races to a much greater degree than the up-ballot races will help our local candidates.”

Republicans talking about Democrats instead of Democrats talking about themselves contributes to their poor reputation in rural America, said Libby Schneider, deputy executive director of the Democratic National Committee.

“One of the reasons our brand is so toxic is because we ceded that ground, so people only view Democrats in some of these very red areas as the folks they hear about on Fox News or on Sinclair Broadcasting as the sort of boogeyman Democrats,” she said.

Continued investment into rural parts of the state is the only way to “stop the bleeding” from Democrats’ losses nationally in 2024, Barnette, who advises North Carolina Democrats, said.

Johnson had one major piece of advice about that investment, however: If it’s spent on television ads, “it’s going to be wasted,” he said.

“The brand is so heavily damaged in rural counties,” he said. “Invest wisely — get local people out, train them how to have conversations at the doors, have them go out and be the face of the party instead of the Washington insiders, and start building up contacts year-round. These people that win these districts knock doors [in] off years. They’re out all the time.”

The stakes of the project couldn’t be higher. If Democrats make headway in the South and other rural regions, then it could open new avenues for victory in the 2028 election, Harrison said.

“Those rural representatives now have a seat at the table and the ear of the person who could be the next President of the United States,” Harrison said.