A frank discussion with the onetime Senate candidate and former D.N.C. chair about why he still thinks Democrats can compete in rural America—and what it will take to win back red states.
Over the past decade, Donald Trump has turned America's town-and-country political divide into a bottomless chasm you could see from space, winning rural counties by 40 points in 2024 and seemingly extinguishing Democratic hopes in farm country for a generation. And yet, it wasn't so long ago that Bill Clinton, a Democrat from rural Arkansas, won nearly half the rural vote. Barack Obama lost it by less than eight points in 2008. As late as 2010, dozens of Blue Dog Democrats represented rural House districts.
Since then, rural voters have largely given up on Democrats, and the national party has mostly returned the favor. These days, the best R.O.I. for donors tends to come from the purplish suburban districts that have swung from Obama to Trump and back again. Of course, there's a self-reinforcing logic to the party's strategy: Urban and suburban areas are where most of the voters are, and rural areas are now so conservative that it's hard to argue it's worth investing in longshot races rather than battleground districts that are still winnable in 2026.
But Jaime Harrison, the former U.S. Senate candidate from South Carolina who served a four-year term as D.N.C. chair, is trying to challenge that logic. He argues that if Democrats give up on rural voters, the party is destined to lose, as population shifts to the South create a better political map for Republicans. His Dirt Road Democrats PAC aims to win back hearts and minds in the rural districts and states where Democrats haven't won in decades, including next year's Alabama and South Carolina gubernatorial races.
The point, Harrison told me, isn't necessarily to win, but rather to lose by less—part of a long-term strategy to rebuild the party's strength in places where the Democratic brand has become toxic. He knows this endeavor will take time, persistence, and especially money, at a time when Democratic donors are only just recovering from their 2024 hangover. But Harrison greeted my skepticism with optimism. The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: You started Dirt Road Democrats to help persuade rural voters to vote for your party. Haven't Democrats tried this before?
Jaime Harrison: Not really. Not in this way. For the longest time, Democrats had a foothold in rural America. Many of these communities need representation. Republicans claim to fight for rural communities, but right now we're seeing a massive number of bankruptcies with farmers in this country under Republican control. Many family farms are going under like we have never seen before. These folks aren't getting the attention and the resources that they need. We didn't have Wi-Fi in these communities, and guess what? It was Democrats who actually delivered on that. So what we have to do is talk with the folks in these communities, let them know that we're fighting for [them].
How can you convince rural voters, who have been turning away from the party for a couple of decades, to come back?
The first step is showing up. It's low-hanging fruit to go into urban, suburban areas where you have concentrations of Democratic voters. It takes a little more time and energy and effort to go into rural communities. We have to attend some of the churches, some of the local functions. We have to recruit people from those communities to actually run, and to run under the Democratic ticket—things that we just have not done or done well over the past two, three decades.
Are party outfits like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or the Democratic Governors Association not doing that? [Ed. note: The D.C.C.C. this weekend announced Our Power, Our Country, "the earliest-ever investment" to engage rural voters and voters of color.]
This is a long-term investment effort, a partnership with state parties that isn't just cycle-based. If you look at a state like Mississippi, Mississippi is extremely diverse—50 percent are White, 45 percent are African American, 5 percent are Hispanic, and that number is growing. When Black voters in Mississippi go to the polls, they probably vote Democratic 80 to 90 percent for a really energized campaign.
The problem is that there's low turnout. And many of those Black voters aren't just in the big cities. Those folks are in rural communities. If Democrats aren't showing up in those communities, then the average turnout is maybe 40 percent. You can't win a race that way. There is no reason why Mississippi should not be a competitive state for Democrats.
A lot of the races you are looking at—Alabama governor, South Carolina governor, you mentioned Mississippi Senate, South Carolina's first congressional seat, one in North Carolina, one in Tennessee, one in Arkansas—are considered real reaches for Democrats. So why focus on the ones that you might not have any success in?
Because you are planting seeds for long-term growth, and that's really, really important. Why we are particularly paying close attention to the South is this: If you take a look at presidential politics, the path to 270 for Democrats in these last few elections is going to look very different after 2030. Population shifts to the Southern states are going to add more electoral votes, and so we're going to need a different path for Democrats to win. That means we have to start looking in the South.
But Democrats are in the minority. So should your resources focus on battleground districts this cycle to ensure a Democratic majority in 2026?
Coming off the 2004 election, we saw something very similar to what we've been seeing over this last year—people writing the obituary of the Democratic Party. We lost [with] John Kerry [as the presidential nominee]; we lost all those U.S. Senate races in '04. In 2006 things shifted. One, [D.N.C. Chair] Howard Dean [launched] his 50-State Strategy, investing in all states, not just the battleground states. [There was also] overreach of the Republican majority—George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security. There are a lot of similarities between '06 and what we are about to move into in 2026. I believe that we are on the cusp of another wave election, similar to the one in '06, and in that election cycle, we won seats where nobody thought that we had a shot.
Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger reached out to rural voters, and she exceeded Kamala Harris's vote in those areas by about 10 points, according to exit polls. But she didn't win them. Were there any lessons learned there?
Sometimes you don't need to outright win these communities. You just need to cut the margins. In many of these communities, we don't even have Democrats on the ballot. One of the things I've [said to] all of the state parties—I'm working hand in glove with the state party here in South Carolina—is there needs to be a Democrat on every ballot for every office. Why is that important? It's important to give people a choice, but it allows the local Democrats to do some organizing around that particular candidate, and therefore drive out a vote that they normally would not drive.
If you're able to then just shift up, even a few percentage points, Democratic turnout in those areas for a candidate for governor, you cut the margins by which you lose those areas. [If you] at the same time overperform in your urban spaces, that is the recipe for winning.
Do Democrats need to change some of their policies, like on guns, for example, in order to appeal to rural voters?
I said this on Election Day. We've got to go back to what Tip O'Neill said a long time ago: All politics is local. Don't be a Washington, D.C., Democrat. Represent the people that you're trying to represent. If there's a culture of safe guns in your community, you've got to represent the folks who are voting for you.
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