BUCKS COUNTY, Penn. — From the start of this election, Democrats touted their extensive get-out-the-vote and campaign office operation in rural, conservative areas of the seven battleground states. Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Tim Walz and campaign surrogates publicly expressed confidence in the campaign’s ability to “lose by less” and to outpace President Joe Biden’s 2020 run in those areas.
But state and national rural organizers who spoke to NOTUS in the wake of Harris’ loss said the campaign often ignored their concerns about the rural strategy. Above all, they said, the campaign and the Democratic National Committee’s rural outreach was too little, too late.
For all the camo hats and pheasant hunting, the barnstorms and roadside shop visits and offices opened where they had never been before, Harris did worse than Biden across the board in rural areas, and Donald Trump performed better in those same areas than he ever had before.
Across the “blue wall” and into other presidential battleground states, campaign staffers and some of their closest allies identified several root causes. Their complaints included an outreach operation that started too late in the cycle and that didn’t prominently include Harris herself.
“We didn’t have time, we didn’t have the ground game we needed. This needed to start the year before,” said Kylie Oversen, a member of the national Rural 4 Harris-Walz organizing team.
The campaign did not hire its rural vote director, Matt Hildreth, or release its two-page plan for rural America until September. Despite the historically short timeline for the Harris campaign, the Biden campaign hadn’t hired rural staff or put out an agenda prior to Biden dropping out of the race.
The communication between the team, composed of 11 rural Democratic strategists, and Hildreth was “a little disjointed,” Oversen said.
“There was really only one person within the campaign solely dedicated to rural. He couldn’t lift all those things by himself,” she said. “We were in constant communication, but how that translated from him to the whole campaign is hard to say.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Hildreth declined to comment. Pennsylvania Democratic activist Carmina Taylor, who organized alongside Hildreth in Pennsylvania in rural areas for Harris, reached out to NOTUS to say that Hildreth was stymied by the Harris campaign.
“Matt was never equipped for success,” Taylor told NOTUS. “He was the only person that was responsive to inquiries in rural spaces. But in terms of resources, he was stifled.”
Matt Barron, another member of Rural 4 Harris-Walz, said his team provided the campaign with a list of rural surrogates. Barron said it was never used.
Staffers in both the local coordinated offices and at the top level lacked rural background and disregarded the team’s advice, Barron said.
Barron communicated with the campaign about state fairs, stressing the importance of Harris making a visit. He provided the campaign with a list of county and state fairs in the battleground states.
“And [a staffer] replied to me back, ‘Oh, my God, this is amazing,’ in all caps. I read that as, this guy’s never set foot on a county fairgrounds and doesn’t even know the importance they hold in rural counties,” Barron said.
Ultimately, Harris never visited a fair, a rural health clinic or a farm while on the campaign trail.
“She had this two-pager, but she didn’t invest herself in selling it,” Barron said.
National and state rural organizers who spoke to NOTUS stressed that the Harris campaign was only part of the problem. The true difficulty, they say, is a yearslong de-emphasis on rural investments from the DNC and state parties. (The DNC did not respond to a request for comment.)
The initiatives the Harris campaign did pursue to reach rural voters didn’t have the same chorus of credible surrogates promoting them that Biden had in 2020, Barron said. The campaign rolled out a Hunters and Anglers for Harris-Walz committee without a single name or organization attached. That’s striking compared to the 2020 Sportsmen for Biden-Harris group, which had several dozen influential names in the hook and bullet community behind it.
In Georgia, the Harris campaign’s strategy to reach rural voters was less tried and failed and more never tried at all.
The campaign directed the vast majority of its resources to the state’s metro areas, trying to drive up voter turnout among educated white women. Its most visible effort to reach country folks was sending former President Bill Clinton to Albany in the final weeks of the campaign — which, at times, seemed to backfire.
Otherwise, state Democrats reverted to their pre-Stacey Abrams patterns of campaigning.
One strategist recalled that Abrams launched her campaign for governor in Albany rather than Atlanta, a choice intended to signal to the rest of the state that they were in the fold. The strategist, who has worked on rural campaigns, said the Harris campaign didn’t spend enough time with rural Black voters, instead focusing on the large metro areas of Atlanta and Savannah.
“Celebrity culture has overtaken large swaths of the Democratic Party,” the strategist said. “We get more excited about rallies with entertainers in the Atlanta metro and don’t understand, you know, rural Black folk don’t care about that.”
In Pennsylvania, Gillian Kratzer, chair of the Pennsylvania Democrats rural caucus, pointed to a lack of investment from the state party in the off years as the reason why rural Democrats underperformed. (The Pennsylvania Democratic Party did not respond to a request for comment.)
But Kratzer acknowledged that the campaign played a role in why Harris lost — she also said it only reached its momentum in the last weeks of the election.
“The ground game that we had over the last two weeks was, to some extent, the ground game that we needed to have from day one,” Kratzer said. The initial focus on setting up shop in new areas didn’t cut it, she said. “Offices are rooms in buildings. That’s not enough.”
Kratzer noted the record enthusiasm for Trump in Pennsylvania’s rural counties where he overperformed compared to 2016 and 2020. Her theory is that the problem for Democrats isn’t lack of enthusiasm, but lack of resources.
“I can’t even count how many Republicans came into our office and said that they can’t deal with another four years of Trump, or that they really felt like Tim Walz is somebody who gets them,” she said. “And it just wasn’t enough.”
James Heckman, who chairs Pennsylvania’s almost entirely rural Northwest Caucus, said Harris had the right policies to appeal to rural voters but said she consistently struggled to get that message across in his region.
“I believe in Kamala’s policies, and the things she wanted to do, but you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. And we Democrats have really got to take a look at our messaging because that is where we have screwed up,” Heckman said.
It’s a similar story in the other battlegrounds. Nash County in eastern North Carolina, for example, elected Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, went in Trump’s favor again this year. Sam Lozier, spokesperson for the North Carolina House Democratic Caucus, attributed to a wave of misinformation to rural voters that Democrats failed to overcome.
“A lot of people in these areas just didn’t trust anything that they were seeing about the national race in this cycle, and I don’t know how we earn that trust back,” Lozier told NOTUS. “I feel like it’s just going to get worse.”
And in Wisconsin, every rural county except Door shifted toward Trump.
“I was hoping for better. I think our ground game was good, and we felt momentum,” a Democratic organizer in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin, told NOTUS. “We’re all soul-searching. And rural voters sent a pretty clear message nationally, right? It’s going to take work to figure out what the next steps are.”
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Katherine Swartz and Ben T.N. Mause are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. Nuha Dolby and Calen Razor contributed reporting.