Jaime Harrison issued his final memo after four years at the helm of the Democratic Party. He focused on Democrats’ most successful messaging in an otherwise crushing election cycle: Project 2025.
Specifically, the memo, shared exclusively with NOTUS, argued how the conservative agenda-defining document would adversely affect the many rural voters that helped elect Donald Trump to a second term.
“After historic investments in rural America under the Biden-Harris administration, Trump’s first week in office leaves no room for doubt: Trump will enact his Project 2025 agenda and devastate rural communities across America,” the memo read.
The memo covered seven issues — health care, reproductive health, opioid treatment, rural farmers, costs and taxes, school funding and the United States Postal Service — making the case that “the stakes are even higher for individuals living in rural communities.”
Harrison told NOTUS he chose to focus on rural voters in his final note to the party because of his own background.
“I grew up in rural South Carolina off of a dirt road. I’ve been in cornfields, picked honeydew, cantaloupe, seen chickens and plucked and everything else,” Harrison said in an interview with NOTUS. “Some of the people that I love the most in this world still live in rural America.”
But despite the personal nature of the memo, its subject matter underscores one of Democrats’ biggest campaign failures from the last cycle. Despite Harrison’s efforts — including a record $264 million this cycle across all states in direct transfers, funds to state parties and to coordinated campaigns — Democrats fared worse across rural America than in 2020 and 2016.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris underperformed in rural counties compared to Joe Biden in 2020, including in Black rural counties in Georgia and North Carolina.
“Well, listen, we can’t define everything just through presidential races,” Harrison said, pointing to down-ballot wins in North Carolina and Democratic governors in the red states of Kansas and Kentucky.
“In terms of the future of the U.S. Senate, and also in terms of apportionment in the House of Representatives, we’ve got to be able to compete in these areas,” he said.
The memo points to the unique challenges Democrats see rural Americans facing under provisions laid out in Project 2025, a central strategy for the party in the 2024 election.
It also comes as Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025, is in the middle of the Senate confirmation process to lead the Office of Management and Budget — the agency that sent the federal government into a frenzy this week with a memo ordering a freeze on federal grants and loans. The memo was ultimately rescinded, though the future of the policy remains uncertain.
On health care, the memo points out that rural Americans are less likely to have private or employer-sponsored health insurance, and that at least half of all rural children relied on Medicaid coverage.
In response to the opioid epidemic, the memo points to Trump’s proposed budgets in his first term that cut funding for substance abuse programs — including cutting the Office of National Drug Control Policy by 95% — while at the same time, rates of drug overdose deaths in rural areas have surpassed those of urban areas, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The memo points to a provision in Project 2025 that would end the Small Business Administration’s direct lending program and access to federal recovery grants. And expansion of tariffs — already being investigated under a new executive order — cost U.S. farmers $27 billion in agricultural exports, according to a 2022 study from the Department of Agriculture.
Harrison said it’s “incumbent upon the Democratic Party” to connect policies over the next four years to their effects on rural Americans. Post-chairmanship, he said his focus is to continue pushing the party “to think outside the traditional box of only relegating rural communities to the Republican Party.”
“I hope that there’s a new floor now and that the next chair can build on what we started, to really continue to make some inroads in those communities,” Harrison said.
“We’ve laid the foundation. Now it’s about building on that foundation,” he said.
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.