Democrats say they aim to win back rural voters for 2026 : NPR

In their effort to regain the majority in the US House of Representatives next year, Democrats are announcing a new investment in winning over voters in rural areas – where the party has suffered deep losses in recent elections.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says this is the first time it has had a program specifically dedicated to engaging rural voters.

Susan DelBene, who chairs the DCCC and represents Washington’s 1st Congressional District, said Democrats see an opportunity to engage rural voters as President Trump’s economic agenda, particularly tariffs, has become less popular.

He said rural voters see the “harm” being caused by GOP policies that are causing “costs to rise, health care to be ruined” and that Democrats could provide an alternative.

“I think Republicans are turning their backs,” DelBene told NPR. “They are actively hurting rural communities with their policies. Democrats are fighting to improve the lives of rural Americans and farmers.”

An administration official recently told NPR that Trump has defended his economic agenda and plans to bring the message to the country soon.

The Democrats’ spending is part of an “eight-figure investment” in rural communities, according to a DCCC press release first shared with NPR. DelBene said the DCCC has a full-time staff that will focus on “strategic rural engagement across the country” for the medium term. He said the party has begun working with rural community groups and leaders in key competitive districts – including redrawn districts in South Texas.

“When we look at swing districts across the country, the districts that are going to determine the majority in the House of Representatives, we know that rural voters are critical in those districts,” DelBene said.

Anthony Flacvento, co-founder and executive director of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, said economic despair among most voters could provide an opportunity for Democrats, and rural voters connect economically with populist policies.

“It is very clear to us that a progressive, populist economic approach is needed,” he said. “It’s really needed. Like we need the anti-monopoly, antitrust, pro-union-and-investment-in-infrastructure type of things that go along with it.”

But it’s an open question whether the economic message will help Democrats win back parts of the voting bloc that are leaving the party in large numbers.

Winning back rural voters could be “very difficult”

According to the Pew Research Center, in last year’s presidential election, Trump received 69% of voters who described their communities as rural, while Kamala Harris received only 29%.

Flaccavento said it is likely to be “hard as hell” for Democrats to win back at least a portion of those rural voters. But, he said, it is a problem the party needs to confront head-on.

“We tend to focus on rural areas, but because there’s so much commonality between why people have left the Democrats and why they’ve become so disillusioned, there’s a lot of commonality between working-class people and rural people in small towns and cities,” Flaccavento said. “When you put those two together, rural voters and blue-collar, working-class voters, you have the largest voting group in the country.”

Flaccavento, a small farmer from southwestern Virginia who describes himself as a liberal Democrat, ran twice to represent Virginia’s 9th Congressional District. He said that he has high expectations from his performance in 2018.

“We held more than 100 individual town hall meetings, which were attended by about 7,000 people. We had very good social media. We raised a million rupees. We did everything right,” he said. “And I still got destroyed at the voting box 2 to 1.”

Flaccavento said it has long been difficult to overcome the negative perception of Democrats in rural areas because the party dismisses the concerns of working people and rural people.

“Mainly economic concerns,” he said. “They are undervalued.”

Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College in Maine, said Democrats haven’t just dismissed the concerns of rural voters, he said the party has “actively pushed them away.”

Jacobs said that when Democrats abandoned their 50-state strategy the party began to scale back campaign investments in rural America. Instead, he said, the party focused on mobilizing its base voters in big cities and convincing independent-leaning voters in the suburbs.

“Ultimately, what you get is a full buy-in to a vision better expressed than Chuck Schumer, that ‘for every rural working-class person we lose, we’ll elect two more in the suburbs,'” he said, paraphrasing the Senate Democratic leader. “And as 2016 showed, this was a foolish approach, but it didn’t seem to change anything for the next eight years.”

Flacventaro agreed that this had been a “losing strategy” for the party.

But he said it would take more than targeted investment in some swing districts to truly regain some of the support lost in rural America.

He said, “My hope is that this is a serious commitment, not a token commitment, and that it is a commitment that goes beyond a handful of targeted races.” “We have to start making long-term investments and long-term work in every rural congressional district. Some of them may take five or 10 years or more to become competitive, but we have to start that work now.”

Jacobs said she hopes Democrats have begun to “wake up” to the fact that rural areas cannot be neglected.

He said, “If you’re going to form a national party and compete at the national level, you have to represent the entire country and all of its wonderful and complex messiness.” “And that includes how rural Americans fit into your idea of ​​the nation.”