This is the second in a series of interviews, in which we will ask rural candidates, elected office holders, political consultants and organizers what lessons are to be learned from the 2024 General Election. 

Keith McCants, 42, is the chair of the Democratic Party in Bryan County, Georgia. Located southwest of Savanah, this half-rural and half-suburban county is among the fastest growing in the state. On November 5, 68% of voters in Bryan County cast ballots for Donald Trump.

McCants describes himself as a “conservative Democrat” and identifies as a Blue Dog. The Blue Dog Coalition is a largely rural caucus of moderate Democrats in the House of Representatives. It is led by Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.-3), Jared Golden (Maine 2)  and Mary Peltola (Alaska-at large), all three of whom represent House districts that Trump won. At its peak in 2009, the caucus boasted 54 members. It now has 11. Politico reports that the Blue Dog Caucus was “decimated in the 2010 election and has since drifted ideologically from pro-corporation centrists to pro-worker populists.”

A member of the United Steelworkers Local 795, McCants works at a local manufacturing plant. He is the father of three children, ages 21, 15 and 5, and lives with his wife in Richmond Hill, a suburb of 19,013 outside of Savannah that has doubled in population since 2010. McCants grew up in the Black Belt town of Oglethorpe, the county seat of Macon County, where he served on city council from 2013 to 2018.

McCants is critical of the way the Harris-Walz campaign was managed in Georgia and thinks that the Georgia Democratic Party, unable to see beyond the Atlanta metro area, has forsaken both Black and white rural voters. We asked him what might have been done differently.

How did you get into politics?

I was just watching CNN one day, back in 1998, and I saw Sam Nunn and Max Cleland, two former Georgia Democratic U.S. Senators, doing an interview, and I’m like, “What are they talking about?” I remember the day clearly.

That year, my junior year in high school, I volunteered for Sanford Bishop, the House member for Georgia’s 2nd district. It was something I did on a whim. I started liking it. I liked the retail politics, the hand shaking, the back slapping, the rallies.

Once I got out of high school, I worked on other campaigns until I first ran for office myself in 2013, for city council in my hometown of Oglethorpe, in Macon County, which is in the Black Belt.

No one recruited me. No one told me to do it. I just ran on my own because I saw a need for change in my hometown. It was the same cast of characters. I knew they were all good people, but they just didn’t do anything. I had been going all over the state doing this and that for other candidates and helping other people. So, I thought, why not come home and make a difference in my hometown.

I lost by four votes the first time. But the guy I ran against decided to step down and I was asked if I would take on his term, which I did. I served five years on the city council.

I really got known across rural Georgia because of my blog, Peanut Politics. I was the only Democrat who spoke to rural issues and for rural Democrats as a whole. I managed to build up a solid following. I developed trust among folks running for office and current and former elected officials, especially among Republicans. They’ve been trying to get me to switch over for the last 10 years.

As chair of the Bryan County Democrats, what’s your main takeaway from the election?

It was one of the most disappointing things that I’ve experienced in my 24 years of being an advocate for rural Georgia. It was a debacle.

I’m not surprised by the result. There was no ground game whatsoever from the Harris campaign. There was no get-out-the-vote efforts whatsoever. This was a billion-dollar campaign, and the question being asked right now is where did all that money go? Because it did not make it on the ground here in Georgia. A million dollars would have made the difference in her winning this state.

There’s a lot of anger towards the Harris campaign. There’s anger towards Biden. But a lot of us rural Democrats down here were not surprised by the result because we didn’t see any action from the Harris campaign whatsoever. It was all Atlanta, and Atlanta some more. Harris made one trip to Savannah in late August for a rally, but other than that, it was strictly metro Atlanta.

So what do you think should be done?

There’s an effort right now here in Georgia to remove the current Democratic Party state chairwoman Rep. Nikema Williams. It’s being led by Sen. Jon Ossoff and I understand Sen. Rafael Warnock is behind the effort as well.

But to me, it shouldn’t fall squarely on her shoulders because this is a problem that we’ve been having here for the last 15 years. It’s just different leadership with the same results. So you have calls for a total wipeout of the current leadership and installation of new people on top of the Georgia Democratic Party. But all that will not matter if they don’t get down into the rural areas because this is where the Democratic Party is hurting.

Did you all know that in the Black Belt region of this state President Trump carried four majority Black counties, Washington, Early, Jefferson and Dooly? When I saw that, I knew right then Harris had no shot to win Georgia.

For readers who aren’t familiar with Georgia’s Black Belt, could you explain its significance in state politics?

The Black Belt stretches from Augusta across central Georgia all the way down into the 2nd congressional district, in the southwest. Without support in the Black Belt counties no Democrat can win statewide.

It’s just a fact. The Black Belt was the primary reason why Senators Warnock and Ossoff won their elections in 2020 and 2021. They campaigned in these counties and invested large sums of money.

The Black Belt is largely poor. It’s heavily agricultural. It doesn’t have a lot of income. And it has underperforming school systems. There are a lot of disadvantages in the Black Belt.

But if you go and talk to the voters in these areas, they will show up. And this past Tuesday, they did not show up for Harris because they were not being courted. A lot of these voters just decided to stay home. They’re like, “Nobody’s talking to me. I got the mailer in my mailbox. Yes, Kamala is a black woman, but what is she offering me and my family?”

The thinking was that black voters would just turn out because Kamala is a Black woman. It doesn’t work like that. That was a major miscalculation. You have to work these areas, you have to cultivate these areas.

So where were the decisions made that led to this disconnect? Is it the national campaign? Is it the state party? Is it Atlanta based? Who do you see as being implicated?

It’s a little bit of everything. Ever since former Gov. Roy Barnes (D) lost in 2002, it’s been pretty much an Atlanta-focused state party. And following 2010, when Barnes tried to reclaim the governor’s mansion, there was a full acceleration to the left in the Democratic Party to try to mimic the Democratic National Committee, which was a detriment to us up until 2020 when we had Sens. Ossoff and Warnock win.

But the activists in the state party, the organizers, they are not comfortable around rural people. It’s just a fact. They don’t want to travel to middle Georgia or southern Georgia. They don’t want to spend the time here. They don’t want to invest here. They’ll drive through these areas to get to Savannah or Columbus or Albany, but they will not stop in Swainsboro. They won’t stop in Eastman. They won’t stop in Quitman.

There’s a discomfort amongst the Atlanta crowd with rural folks like myself. We do have rural progressives here. But for the most part, we’re mostly middle of the road or more independent-minded, even the Black Democrats in rural areas like myself. I’m a conservative Democrat. I’m an NRA member. I’m a small business owner. I’m a member of the local Chamber of Commerce down here.

They call Democrats like myself Republican-lites because we don’t adhere to what they believe in Midtown Atlanta. So they look at someone like me, and say, “You don’t believe in that. You’re a Republican, kid. You’re not one of us.” I’ve heard that for many years. But it’s voters like myself they continue to lose each election cycle. And they need voters like me to remain in the party, Black males in particular, because if we continue to leave the Democratic Party, the state party is going to be in trouble. I haven’t left the Democratic Party, but I’ve given some thought to becoming a full-fledged independent because of what happened.

I don’t care that the majority of the population is located in and around Atlanta. Georgia is not like Virginia, where if you carry northern Virginia and you pretty much win the state. It’s not Pennsylvania where you carry the eastern part of the state and Pittsburgh. You must have a winning coalition here in Georgia. You’ve got to get those rural Black Belt counties if you’re going to win statewide.

And right now, until they show a willingness to come down here to invest and to campaign and to talk to us, it’s going to be the same old song.

We don’t have tall buildings down here. We don’t have Starbucks. We don’t have the latest things that metros have. But we do matter. Rural voters do matter.

What did you think of Obama coming down to Atlanta to encourage black men to vote for Harris?

It really didn’t have any effect on Black men because down here the majority of Black men who did vote, the ones that I know, they voted for Trump.

They voted for Trump because he came across as strong and masculine.

The Democratic Party here in Georgia has to move away from being this very soft and sensitive-to-everything party that they’ve become, or they’re going to continue to bleed male voters. It’s a party that has been catering to female voters. Let a man be a man. White male voters left a long time ago. Black male voters are not leaving in droves, but a little bit by a little bit each cycle. They’re not necessarily going Republican, but they’re going independent.

I understand women out vote men, but everything you heard, especially in the Harris campaign, even out here in Georgia, it’s all geared towards women in the suburbs, Black women, who are the backbone of Democratic Party.

And then you’re focusing on voters who hardly vote. These are low-income, low-information voters who don’t bother to vote but are the main ones who complain about what’s being taken away and what’s being cut.

That’s been my frustration for a long time with the Democratic Party. We always try to care for the downtrodden and the less fortunate, and I understand that, but, I’m just being real with you all, those voters just don’t vote.

You can have barbecues all day long, and fish fries. You can bring celebrities in, like Harris did, and these people still don’t vote. So my thinking is, why waste all your time?

What did you think about the Harris campaign’s messaging around the economy?

She had a good message, but the messenger was the issue. She just wasn’t able to make the sale. She wasn’t able to convince voters that, yes, I’ll be better for your pocketbooks.

And then there was her inability, her unwillingness, to distance herself from President Biden. She could have come out and said, “I would have done this differently if I were president.” That cost her a lot.

Here in Richmond Hill, the Trump campaign had all these signs along Interstate I-95, “Trump low prices. Kamala high prices.” They resonated. It was simple.

If you were head of the Georgia Democratic Party what would your agenda be?

They need to get back to being the party of the working-class men and women in this state, and not worry so much about these cultural issues like transgender people playing sports and what bathroom they go into. Those are the issues that torpedoed the Democratic Party. That’s not to say they’re not important, but they put those issues first and foremost at the expense of families like myself, young families who work every day. We’re not concerned about that. If it was me, I would bring this party away from cultural-identity politics into a more bread-and-butter, kitchen-table issue related party. We used to be a party like that in the 1990s, in the early 2000s.

We’ve gone so far to the left, trying to appease the left flank because they have the money. They’re the ones who fund the candidates like Stacey Abrams. And I like Stacey Abrams, but a lot of her money came from groups like that and she came out here pushing issues that don’t appeal to mainstream Georgians. And if candidates don’t push those issues, then they’ll cut you off financially and you’re at a disadvantage against your Republican counterparts.

I would also stress better candidate recruitment because our recruitment here in Georgia has been abysmal for the last decade. We just had some of the worst candidates run for office.

What about the labor movement and support for union organizing? Is that something that would resonate in rural Georgia?

It doesn’t because outside of the cities, the unions are not that big of an influence here in Georgia. It doesn’t carry the same weight as up in Michigan or Pennsylvania. Although I’m a union member, the United Steel Workers, up in Savannah.

What about the role of the churches in Georgia? According to the exit polls White evangelicals comprised 29% of the Georgia electorate and 92%of them voted for Trump.

Religion plays a major role in the rural areas. I’m a Southern Baptist. The Democrats at one point used to be the party that paid attention to what I call the Christian vote or the value voter. The party has gotten away from that.

Again, it’s all about a comfort level. The left flank of the party doesn’t understand that faith plays a big part in life across rural Georgia. If you’re not willing to learn about why our faith is very important to us Democrats who believe in God—I don’t care what anybody says, we believe in our Lord and Savior—it’s sad me. That’s where we’ve come up short as a party.

What do you see as the strategy for rebuilding the trust of rural voters in Georgia?

First and foremost, we should install a new leader of the state Democratic Party. I have my pick. I like John Barrow, former congressman in the 12th district. He lost to Rick Allen in 2014.

Barrow is a rural Democrat, and he still has an apparatus in place from his statewide run in 2018 for Secretary of State and from his campaign for the Georgia Supreme Court this year. He would be able to rebrand the Democratic Party and turn the page from the old to the new. He understands rural Georgia, he understands our way of life. He understands our politics, what will work, what won’t work. And most importantly—I’m just going to say it—he’s white.

The Democratic Party has become too Black and too urban. A lot of white moderates have gone to the Republican Party as a result. They think, the Democratic Party is for Black people.

These are conversations that I have on a daily basis. They say, “The Democratic Party—and, Keith, I like you, and I’ll vote for you in a minute—but your party, they are only concerned about different identity groups, and we white voters don’t have a place unless we’re white and we’re liberal.”

That notion of Georgia Democratic Party being too Black, it’s true. If you look at our state legislature, for example, we only have one rural white Democrat left in the entire state. That’s Debbie Buckner over in Johnson County, who is in the State House. In the State Senate, we have zero.

So as much as the Democratic Party talks about diversity, if you don’t have any whites in the party, I don’t call that diverse.

The Democratic Party has an image problem, a branding problem, and it’s going to take someone who knows how to really shake off those connotations.

I’ve heard that Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, is someone that’s being pushed to take over the Democratic Party, and I like Keisha Lance Bottoms, but she’s not the right pick at this time. She’s still from Atlanta.

If she, or whoever, is willing to travel to these different counties and listen to concerns of Democrats who don’t live in the cities, then they’ll get a better understanding of what’s wrong, how to deal with it, and how to craft a message that appeals to all Georgians—not a message that just appeals to their friends in Atlanta or Gwinnett County, Cobb County or Clayton County, but to everybody: metro Atlanta, south Georgia, down around White Cross, around the swamps, around the Wild Grass region of south central Georgia, the peanut fields. But it’s not going to be fixed overnight. These problems have been here with us for a long time.

The Democratic Party has to listen to the people on the ground, the people who are at their kitchen tables every night and not the elites who are living the good life. Until they get back to being the party of Jefferson and Jackson, it’s going to be a tough row to hoe.

What advice would you give a young person in rural Georgia, who like you 26 years ago, wants to get involved in politics?

I would tell him or her, don’t wait for someone to tell you to do something. If it’s in your heart to do something like this, then go for it, step up. The rewards will outweigh the negative aspects of it.

But it takes work, it takes time, it takes commitment, it takes dedication. And, it took me over 20 years to get to this point, and it’s not easy.

Go with your gut and don’t worry about it. People are gonna talk about you regardless of what you do, whether it’s good or bad. I had a lot of that: “Kid, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

If you feel that sense of urgency within you to make a difference in your community like I did, then you go for it. And chances are most times you will be successful.

The post As Goes the Black Belt, So Goes Georgia appeared first on Barn Raiser.

Donald Trump was elected the nation’s 47th president in the early morning hours after Election Day, returning to the White House with a decisive win in both the electoral college and the popular vote. Trump especially made inroads in urban and suburban areas, and increased his margins in rural America since 2020. For instance, in blue-collar Fayette County, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, Trump won nearly 70% of the vote, increasing his margins by almost 5% since 2020.

According to AP VoteCast, 62% of rural voters voted for Trump and 36% for Kamala Harris, about a 4% rightward shift compared to 2020. Harris underperformed Biden’s 2020 numbers in many rural counties across the nation, especially in swing states, and lost ground in Black rural counties in Georgia and North Carolina.

Down ballot, many races have yet to be decided. As of Wednesday, both the House and Senate Agriculture Committees will see changes to membership in the upcoming legislative session, with two incumbent committee members, New York Rep. Marcus Molinaro (R) and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), losing re-election.

The following is a roundup of key races and results from rural or rural-related districts, with incumbents whose districts are in predominately rural areas or are either on the Agriculture Committee or Agriculture Appropriations Committee. These committees are important in determining rural-related budgets and the still-stalled farm bill re-authorization process that is likely to be negotiated in the 119th Congress.

U.S. Senate

Nebraska

In one of the more surprising races this year, independent candidate Dan Osborn narrowly lost a tight battle for a U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska. Republican incumbent Deb Fischer, who has held the seat since 2013 and whose current candidacy backed out of a long-held campaign promise of a pledge to only serve two terms. Osborn, a former union organizer, ran a labor-backed campaign whose working-class message and critique of corporate infiltration in politics drew in voters across the red-solid Nebraska. “Our U.S. Senate is a country club,” Osborn told Barn Raiser in an interview. “It’s full of millionaires, business execs and lawyers. Working-class people just aren’t represented.” Other Fischer supported the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and supports a national abortion ban without exceptions, and has sided with dominant meatpackers and the agribusiness lobby to deny relief for ranchers in the state.

Montana

Republican Tim Sheehy, a former Navy Seal from a wealthy suburban Minneapolis family, defeated Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, a rancher, 53% to 45%, with 96% of the vote counted.

Apparently Sheehy’s derogatory comments about Native people made little impression on Montana voters. The Char-Koosta News, the official news publication of the Flathead Indian Reservation, reported that in an audio recording of a November 6, 2023, fundraiser, Sheehy bragged “about roping and branding with members of the Crow Nation.” He said, “It’s a great way to bond with Indians—while they are drunk at 8 a.m.” Attendees can be heard laughing.

We checked in with Gilles Stockton, a third generation Montana rancher, from Grass Range, Montana, who is a former president of the Montana Cattleman’s Association and author of Feeding a Divided America: Reflections of a Western Rancher in the Era of Climate Change. We asked Stockton, why Montanans voted for Sheehy and decided not to return Tester to the Senate for a fourth term?

“You mean, what is wrong with my neighbors? Well, that’s a hard one isn’t it? Why did people have so much confidence in Trump? I think it’s that they are just opposed to Democrats.

“Tester ran an authentic, beautiful campaign at every level. Although all of his campaign ads featured ranchers who were supporting him, his stump speech didn’t bring up agriculture at all. It was about public lands and healthcare and schools.

“The attack ads against him were based on making shit up. What do voters think they are going to get with Sheehy? He is a proven—if not a liar—a dissembler.”

That last comment was a reference to an Afghan War injury that Sheehy invented. At the same time, Stockton credits his fellow Montanans for voting for a constitutional amendment to protect women’s reproductive rights that passed by a wide margin.

U.S. House

Alaska 1

Democratic incumbent Mary Peltola faces off against third-generation Alaskan Nick Begich III (R). As of Wednesday evening, Peltola was trailing Begich by around 10,000 votes, with 75% of votes reported. Peltola is the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress, and first won the seat after beating Begich and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin in a 2022 Special Election with the slogan “Fish, Family, Freedom.” Begich’s grandfather, Nick Begich Sr., previously held the seat in the 70s, but disappeared on a chartered plane en route to Juneau. The race is currently leaning towards Begich, but results may not be known until all ranked-choice tabulations are released later in the month. Ballot Measure 2, an effort to repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting system, is on track to pass. 

While both candidates have expressed similar views in support of oil drilling in Alaska, Peltola is in favor of larger federal infrastructure projects, and Begich has associated himself with deficit hawks in the congressional Freedom Caucus.

California 13

Freshman congressman John Duarte (R) faced off in a rematch with Adam Gray (D), who he narrowly defeated in the 2022 midterm election. As of Wednesday evening, Duarte held a nearly 3-point lead with a little more than 50% of the vote counted. Duarte has campaigned as a moderate Republican focusing on economic issues like inflation and touting his differences from national Republican policies on immigration and abortion, though he has voiced his support for the Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade.

Gray has consistently portrayed himself as a centrist who worked with members across the aisle during his time in the California assembly. Both candidates have close ties to the Central Valley’s agriculture economy—Duarte’s family owns one of the largest crop nurseries in the country, while Gray grew up working in his family’s farm supply store. The race is currently leaning towards Duarte. 

California 22

About 60% of votes have been tallied as of Wednesday evening, and Republican incumbent David Valadao, a former dairy farmer, is currently leading by a 10-point margin. California’s 22nd is a largely rural district in the Central Valley. Rudy Salas, his Democrat opponent, is looking to win a rematch he lost in 2022. Salas, whose parents immigrated from the Azores, once worked as an underage farmworker in the Central Valley as part of his father’s crew. He is a centrist that is seen to largely represent farmworkers in the valley.

Valadao won this district in 2022, after redistricting. He previously served in the 21st congressional district and was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump in the wake of January 6. As a representative, his career has largely been shaped by water politics, where protecting water access to the valley’s massive farms and dairy operations often clashes with concerns of drinking water contamination by agricultural runoff. Valadao has been criticized for voting against the Inflation Reduction Act because it allowed the federal government to negotiate the price of insulin.

Colorado 8

In a race that remains too close to call, freshman Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo has a lead of about 4,000 votes over Colorado state Rep. Gabe Evans (R).

Iowa 3

Rep. Zach Nunn, a first-term Republican incumbent, member of the House Agriculture Committee and Air Force Reserve member, defeated a formidable challenge from Democratic candidate Lanon Baccam, an Army veteran and former federal Agriculture Department official with deep roots in rural Iowa.

Nunn held off Baccam by a four-point margin in a congressional district that covers parts of the Des Moines metro area and parts of southern Iowa. Baccam ran on a platform of protecting public education, reproductive rights and fighting for expanding rural economic development. Nunn won on a message of strengthening the economy by reining in bureaucracy and strict immigration laws.

Maine 2

As of Wednesday evening, with over 90% of the votes reported, Democrat Jared Golden has held on to a slim lead in his incumbent bid for the U.S. House in Maine, the country’s most rural state. Golden, a third-term representative and one of five Democrats that voted for Trump in 2020, is holding off a challenge by Trump-backed Republican Austin Theriault, a state representative and former NASCAR driver. More than $21 million in outside spending has been invested in the campaign, which has largely focused on guns, abortion and the high cost of living.

Nebraska 2

With over 95% of votes reporting, Republican incumbent Don Bacon, a retired Air Force commander, once again is narrowly edging out Democrat state Sen. Tony Vargas, a former science teacher and first-generation immigrant of Peruvian parents. This was a rematch from 2022, which Bacon won by just 6,000 votes, in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, a primarily urban and suburban district that includes Omaha and surrounding suburban and rural areas. Bacon has served on the House Agriculture Committee since he won this seat in 2016.

New York 19

Democrat Josh Riley toppled House Republican Marc Molinaro, a House Agriculture Committee member, to win a crucial seat in upstate New York that covers parts of the Hudson Valley, New York’s Southern Tier and the Finger Lakes. The district is larger in landmass than the state of Massachusetts, but with nearly 800,000 people. Molinaro defeated Riley in 2022 by fewer than 2 points. He was seen as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress. Riley’s 2024 upset capitalized on Molinaro’s rightward leap this election cycle, railing him as a “career politician” without a vision for solving D.C. gridlock and a Trump sycophant with a dangerous anti-immigrant platform.

New Mexico 2

Democratic incumbent Rep. Gabe Vasquez defeated Republican Yvette Herrel, who in 2022 Vazquez ousted from Congress in a district that is larger in landmass than the state of Pennsylvania. Vasquez, a first generation Mexican American, was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in Cuidad Juárez, Mexico. He sits on the Agriculture Committee, representing a rural district that has a landmass larger than Pennsylvania.

Herrel ran a campaign largely focused on border security and crime. Albuquerque, one quarter of which is in the 2nd district, has a rate of violent crime that is almost double the national average.

Conceding defeat, Herrel posted on X:

“The results tonight weren’t what we hoped for, but I’m so grateful to the incredible people of #NM02 for their support over the years. With [Donald Trump] back in the White House, our country’s future is bright. Let’s come together and Make America Great Again!”

North Carolina 1

Democratic Rep. Don Davis, a first-term Democrat and Air Force veteran, has prevailed against former defense contractor Laurie Buckhout in largely rural congressional district in northeast North Carolina. Buckhout has voiced support for the January 6 insurrectionists and identifies herself as: “Mom. Wife. Combat Commander. Business leader. America First Conservative Fighter.” Davis has built an image as a bipartisan congressman, becoming one of the House Democrats most likely to vote against his party. He has the distinction of being the lone Democrat in Congress to co-sponsor a GOP bill to limit Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices.

Oregon 5

Democratic state Rep. Janelle Bynum held on to a nearly 8,000 vote lead Wednesday evening against Republican incumbent Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Chavez-DeRemer, is outside her party’s mainstream, being one of only six Republican House members to sign a pledge to respect the results of the 2024 presidential election. Bynum, a member of the Oregon House who with her husband Mark owns several McDonald’s franchises in the Portland area, has twice gone up against Chavez-DeRemer in Oregon State House races, defeating her each time.

Washington 3

In Washington’s 3rd district, with 82% of the vote counted Wednesday evening, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez appears headed to a second term in the House, is leading the GOP’s Joe Kent, 52% to 48%. Gluesenkamp Perez defeated Kent in 2022, making national news by winning in a congressional district that Trump won by four points in 2020.

Joe Kent, an Army Special Forces veteran who worked for the CIA, claimed the Covid-19 vaccines are an “experimental gene therapy” and employed the consulting services of a Proud Boy member during his 2022 campaign. He was endorsed by Donald Trump.

At an election night celebration Gluesenkamp Perez spoke to her supporters. “It is possible to take a different path. Step away from the national talking points and the hyper-partisanship, and run a campaign based on respect for working people and the issues that directly impact us here at home,” she said. “Focusing on the issues at home is how we break the extremism and the gridlock and start to fix what is broken in our country.” She did not endorse Kamala Harris for president.

Wisconsin 3

In Wisconsin’s 3rd District, Derrick Van Orden, a Christian Nationalist, defeated Rebecca Cooke, 51% to 49%.

In a story published on December 9, 2022, the day the Barn Raiser website launched, Jim Goodman, a retired dairy farmer and board chair of the National Family Farm Coalition,  reported on his newly elected GOP congressman, Derrick Van Orden, a man he described as a “former Navy Seal, Trump-endorsed election denier and January 6 insurrection participant.” Goodman wrote:

He claimed to have a plan for Wisconsin farmers but never elaborated in any detail. My guess is his plan will be scripted by corporate interests. Outside money and endorsements by big agriculture groups always come with strings attached.

During his campaign Van Orden fueled the fires of the culture wars rather than addressing the needs of farmers. At a prayer breakfast in October, Van Orden said, “There are many God-fearing Christians who are Democrats. There’s not a single God-fearing Christian that is a leftist, because those two things are incompatible.”

When one claims to be a Christian as Van Orden does, it is hard to understand his hypocritical, un-Christian behavior, violent threats, homophobia, and particularly his bragging about the time in the military when he delighted in exposing a young lieutenant’s poison-oak-swollen genitals to “two cute girls” who were his fellow officers.

Barn Raiser turned to Jim Goodman, a retired dairy farmer and board chair of the National Family Farm Coalition, to explain how Orden won this time around.

“Incumbency has something to do with it. He was on the Ag Committee and being a rural district that was pretty important. He did send out a newsletter, so he had the illusion of keeping in touch with the farmers in the district. He didn’t talk about yelling at Senate page or the last insurrection he participated in. He tried to paint himself as a guy who was out there working for farmers, working on the farm bill and for more imports.”

Goodman was happy to see that Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin beat back a challenge from Eric Hovde, winning with 49.4% of the vote to his 48.5%.

“She is good at being a moderate on farm issues,” he says. “She is all about Wisconsin having more markets for dairy products. And the fact of her being openly gay and winning farmers over is quite an accomplishment. And she talked quite a bit about the right to repair farm machinery.”

Goodman worries that Kip Tom, who is one of Indiana’s largest farmers and who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, is on Trump’s short list for Secretary of Agriculture. “Again it is going to be ‘get big or get out,’ ” says Goodman. 

Ballot Measures and Referendums

In Missouri a measure to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and guarantee paid sick leave minimum wage results from deep-red Missouri, won in rural counties and passed statewide by nearly 60%.

Almost 75% of Nebraskans voted in favor of requiring employers to provide earned paid sick leave.

In Washington state, voters beat down a measure that would have rolled back the state’s long-term care program, which applies a 0.58% tax on the paychecks of workers in the state to provide a lifetime benefit of $36,500 for nursing home care and long-term care.

Abortion

Americans in 10 states voted on whether to enshrine the right to abortion into their state constitutions. Five of those states had the opportunity to overturn statewide abortion bans that were passed after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, which eliminated the federal right to an abortion. In other states like Colorado and New York, voters decided whether to boost abortion protections that already exist under state law, making them harder to roll back in the event conservatives take power.

In Arizona, a large majority of voters said “yes” to Proposition 139, a measure that enshrines the right to abortion until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks, in the state constitution. Abortion is currently banned in the state after 15 weeks.

In Colorado, more than 60% of voters went in favor of amending the state constitution to block the state government from denying, impeding or discriminating against individuals’ right to abortion. There is currently no gestational limit on the right to abortion in the state. It needed 55% of the vote to pass.

In Florida, a majority of voters approved a measure to overturn the state’s six-week ban, however the measure failed because it did not gain the 60% of the vote needed to pass. It would have added the right to an abortion up until viability to the state’s constitution.

Maryland’s measure passed overwhelmingly. Initiated by legislators rather than citizens, it amends the state constitution to confirm individuals’ “right to reproductive freedom, including but not limited to the ability to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end the individual’s pregnancy.” There is currently no gestational limit on the right to abortion in the state.

In Missouri, 51% of voters denied an amendment to overturn the state’s current, near-total abortion ban and establish a constitutional guarantee to the “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” including abortion care until fetal viability.

In Montana, nearly 60% of voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to explicitly include “a right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion” up until fetal viability, or after viability to protect a patient’s life or health.

Nebraska is the only state where voters faced competing ballot measures. The measure that garners the most votes would take effect.

A narrow margin of Nebraska voters rejected Initiative 439, which would have enshrined the right to abortion up until viability into the state constitution.

A slightly larger margin of voters approved Nebraska Initiative 434, which keeps intact the state’s current 12-week ban.

Nevada voters overwhelmingly agreed to amend the state constitution to protect the right to abortionup until viability, or after viability in cases where a patient’s health or life may be threatened.

In New York, abortion is currently protected until fetal viability. A majority of voters approved Proposal 1, which, while it does not explicitly reference abortion, encompasses abortion protections by broadening the state’s anti-discrimination laws by adding, among other things, protections against discrimination on the basis of “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health.” It does not explicitly reference abortion, but advocates say its pregnancy-related language encompasses abortion protections.

South Dakota voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would protect the right to an abortion only in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Ranked Choice Voting

Voters in four states—Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon—rejected measures to allow ranked-choice voting (RCV) in their state. Two states—Maine and Alaska—have already adopted this nonpartisan measure for fairer results and voted for president this fall with RCV.

The post Rural America in the 2024 Election: Key Races and Ballot Measures appeared first on Barn Raiser.

“Rural people know inherently what it means to be a good neighbor,” Lynlee Thorne says over the phone from her farm in Rockingham County, Virginia.

It is late August, the week following the Democratic National Convention, and Thorne is listening to the convention speeches while moving cattle troughs. She apologizes for the background noise, and marvels at Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock’s impassioned plea for Democrats to stake their claim as the party of good neighbors—a message she believes resonates deeply in her corner of rural, southwestern Virginia.

“I got this farm 10 years ago, and the cattle got out onto the road in the first week,” she says. “It was terrifying, but my neighbors helped out and I had a group of friends right away.”

As the political director of Rural GroundGame (RGG), a grassroots organization supporting Democratic candidates in Virginia, Thorne says Republican policies are antithetical to this neighborly ethos. Like many other Democratic organizers, she and RGG are placing Project 2025 front and center in their outreach efforts. Rockingham County’s school board has banned more than 50 books in 2024, which she sees as a sign that the anti-public education aspects of Project 2025 are already underway in Virginia.

When she points out specific Project 2025 policies like book bans, “People say, ‘of course that’s bad, that’s not who we are,’” she says. “It’s a distraction from what people really care about and the need to make their communities better.”

Appealing to rural America by invoking its idealized image of farmlands, main streets and tight-knit communities, is all part of the theater of campaigning in national politics, as evidenced by vice-presidential candidates J.D. Vance and Tim Walz touting their rural roots. But for the Democratic Party, its connection to rural America has been steadily dropping—Bill Clinton won about 1,100 rural counties in 1996, Barack Obama won 455 in 2008, and Joe Biden won only 200 in 2020.

And while the Democrats’ presence in rural America has declined the challenges faced by rural communities has escalated. People in rural communities are 25% more likely to live in poverty than the average American. Of the 100 most disadvantaged communities in the United States, 91 are rural. And economic challenges resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and inflation are felt most acutely in rural America.

Unlike their urban counterparts, Democratic candidates in rural areas face long distances for door knocking and a more hostile political environment that can discourage prospective candidates. What’s more, Democratic expenditures in rural areas account for about 3% of party funding. The numbers are even more stark in non-battleground rural areas.

Rural GroundGame was founded in 2019 to address the decline of the Democratic Party in rural areas of Virginia by offering campaign support to Democratic nominees, committees and organizations across a state where rural areas receive only 1.6% of party funding. Its team of three full-time staff and 18 part-time staff pools resources like shared campaigning and communications tools critical for reaching untapped rural voters.           

In 2023, Thorne says RGG contributed nearly $128,000 to 144 campaigns and made 2.2 million direct voter contacts across the state. It is headquartered in Virginia’s 6th Congressional District, which includes most of the western part of the state, from the Shenandoah Valley to the state’s northern and western border with West Virginia. Shenandoah is home to one of America’s most scenic byways, Skyline Drive, natural caves, Civil War battlefields and, less famously, more than 300,000 registered voters who have not voted in at least three years, many of whom hear little, if anything, from the Democratic Party. In six of the past 12 U.S. congressional campaigns, for example, Republicans ran unopposed or against boot-strapping third-party candidates.

While a handful of Democratic leaders in Virginia like Sen. Tim Kain, Rep. Jennifer McClellan and Rep. Gerry Connolly have supported RGG’s efforts, it can seem as if the party has largely given up on trying to win races in rural Virginia.

“Investing in this work is not seen as ‘strategic,’ ” Thorne says. “You might get a pat on the back and a ‘bless your heart,’ but not much more.”

She has noticed a slow cultural shift against this trend—that it’s no longer acceptable to overlook or malign rural communities—but Democratic organizers here still face an uphill battle. 

“We need to convert that cultural shift into meaningful implementation of resources and partnerships,” she says. RGG and the candidates they support are seeing promising signs throughout rural Virginia. Jade Harris, a 26-year-old native of Rockbridge County in the Shenandoah Valley, has run for both the Virginia House of Delegates (2022) and State Senate (2023).

While she ultimately lost both races, her campaigns engaged new voters, motivated donors, and built momentum for the Democratic policy in southwestern Virginia. In her 2020 campaign for the Virginia House—a special election in which she only had three weeks to raise funds and turn out voters—Harris outperformed President Joe Biden by 10 points across District 24—and by 20 points in her home county of Rockbridge.

“Nobody should go to the polls and only see one name on their ballot. That’s not how democracy should work,” she says.

In total across the two campaigns, Harris says that she raised nearly $54,000.

“The electoral results and fundraising achievements alone are a massive boon to the case that rural candidates need resources. It doesn’t take a million dollars to perform well here and give people options,” says Harris.

In a new part-time role with RGG, Harris is helping other rural candidates access resources and mobilize rural voters. She was one of the 119 delegates from Virginia at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an event that energized her before the busiest stretch of the campaign season.

Thorne thinks that the Democrats’ core message—good neighbors fixing roads and feeding kids with good policy—can still resonate, if only the party would give its rural organizers more resources and support.       

In September we meet Thorne and Harris in the college town of Lexington at the Rockbridge Area Democrats office, where Harris launched her political career with a speech that won her the party’s nomination in the 2022 special election for the Virginia House. Thorne digs through a closet and fishes out a box of RGG yard signs that she helped design: “Good Neighbors Feed Kids, Fix Roads. Vote Harris-Walz,” it reads, emblazoned in John Deere yellow and green.

These signs are part of RGG’s newest get out the vote efforts, which has been met with a groundswell of support from rural Democratic leaders according to Thorne. A network of more than 150 volunteers is getting out the vote for Harris-Walz, distributing materials on Project 2025, passing out Harris-Walz good neighbor signs, and connecting one on one with rural voters from the Shenandoah Valley to the Eastern Shore.

One of those leaders familiar with the efforts that go into rural campaigning is Stephanie Clark, a former city council member in Covington, a town of 6,000 about 40 miles west of Lexington. In 2023, Clark, a pastor at New Vision Baptist Church, ran as a Democrat for the Virginia House in District 37.    

“Rural GroundGame brings so much understanding, teaching, and resources to rural Democratic candidates. Every person that runs in this area of the state needs a solid support system, and Rural GroundGame was that for me,” says Clark.

Clark got her start in politics as a school administrator where she developed a passion for listening and finding solutions to her neighbors’ challenges, like how to get a new stop sign to slow traffic near a school bus stop. Clark takes a stake in her neighbor’s challenges and wellbeing. She and her husband regularly welcome community members to share stories on their front porch—neighbor to neighbor. These days, she stays active distributing RGG Harris-Walz literature and capturing stories as part of RGG’s Storyteller Project.     

The Storyteller Project, taking a page from Clarke’s book, aims to capture stories from voters on why they’re supporting Democrats. These stories are then presented in short videos—“scrappy, not scripted,” Thorne says—and shared via paid campaigns on social media to reach a wider audience. The Virginia-based Video Activists Academy trains volunteers, who receive equipment including a smartphone, tripod, microphone and lights to record videos in their communities.

Over key lime pie and sweet tea at Family TreeT’s restaurant in Low Moor, Clark, Harris and Thorne recall the recent Labor Day parade in nearby Buena Vista, widely seen as the unofficial start to campaign season. 

Their excitement is fueled not only by the lively debates from aspiring candidates and active politicians from both sides of the aisle, including Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and Sen. Tim Kaine, but also by this symbolic shift. Buena Vista was once a strong union town and used to swing Democratic but has been leaning Republican in recent years. Now more and more Democratic candidates, like Harris and Clark, are getting airtime to advocate for solutions to the challenges their communities face.

The owner of Family TreeT’s stops by the table to catch up with Clark, telling her that the town council needs to offer more support to small businesses like hers. “If I can do all this with a few thousand dollars,” she says, gesturing at the space, which is busy on a weekday afternoon, “imagine what else I could do.” Clark, Thorne and Harris all nod in agreement.

“Have you ever thought about serving on the Town Council?” Clark counters. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” the owner says. Says Thorne: “We should talk.”

The post Can ‘Good Neighbor’ Politics Win in Rural America? appeared first on Barn Raiser.

The below analysis is based on the Associated Press VoteCast, an extensive survey of both voters and nonvoters that aims to tell the story behind election results. Conducted for the AP and Fox News by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, it’s a detailed snapshot of the American electorate that helps explain who voted, who didn’t vote, what issues they care about, how they feel about the candidates and why they voted the way they did — or didn’t vote at all.

Every year, the AP shares explainers that detail their prominent role in calling elections and their process for doing so. Among these include information on voter fraud, who can vote in U.S. elections, what is the Electoral College and the process of vote counting and how races are called.

Check out more of Barn Raiser’s election coverage here. Click here for election results and updates.

The post 2024 General Election Analysis appeared first on Barn Raiser.

In 1994, Greg Gunthorp’s father warned him and his wife against buying the family sow herd and breeding stock. The market was basically over for the independent producers, his father told him. The price of a pig sold on the commodities market in the mid-1990s went for less than what Gunthorp’s grandfather received during the Great Depression. 

But Gunthorp, who lives in Northeast Indiana in LaGrange County, made it work as an independent pig farmer, selling to restaurants throughout the Midwest and through internet sales to consumers who want to know where their meat comes from. 

However, due to the continued consolidation of the meat industry, Gunthorp said big companies are now starting to encroach into this territory.

“We’re kind of at the same place today that we were in 1998,” he said. “The big guys have moved into this space with predatory pricing and deceptive marketing, and all of the same kinds of practices that we’ve seen in the commodity market have invaded the (independent) wholesale space.”

It’s not just the meat industry. From seeds to fertilizer to farming equipment, the agricultural supply chain is dominated today by roughly three dozen companies, according to an analysis from Farm Action, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting corporate monopolies in food and agriculture.   

Ahead of next month’s presidential election, Investigate Midwest looked into the two candidates’ track records and promises regarding consolidation in the agricultural sector.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, has said she plans to continue President Joe Biden’s policies of issuing more funding for smaller meatpackers and enforcing antitrust laws. 

Some Republicans said Donald Trump, if elected to a second term, would look to further deregulate the agriculture industry, which they believe could allow smaller meatpackers and independent farmers to better compete against large corporations. 

Those corporations “have the power to decide who gets to farm and how they farm, what food gets produced and sold in this country, and how much we all have to pay for it,” said Basel Musharbash, an antitrust attorney and principal author of a consolidation report published by Farm Action.

Critics, like Musharbach, believe the loss of family farms caused by consolidation has simultaneously contributed to the decline in rural populations and reduced wages for farmers and ranchers. 

Some also blame consolidation for the rise in food prices, which many Americans have named as the most pressing financial problem facing families this election. 

Harris has promised to ban price gouging and fight consolidation in the agriculture industry. Her plan includes expanding farmer access to credit and crop insurance, along with pushing for passage of the Agricultural Right to Repair Act, which would require manufacturers of electronics-enabled agricultural equipment to share documents, parts, software and tools with owners and independent repair shops.

Farmers have been clamoring for the right to repair for years. John Deere sells as much machinery as the next eight largest competitors combined, and currently controls 37% of all agricultural machinery sales in the U.S. The company dominates the submarket for large tractors at 53% and controls 63% of all combine sales in the U.S. 

However, Claire Kelloway, food program manager at Open Markets, a nonprofit that has pushed for more corporate oversight and stronger competition enforcement, believes the best way to address consolidation is by aggressively going after violations of antitrust laws and enforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act.

The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was established 100 years ago in response to the concentrated meatpacker market. It also gave more regulatory powers to the federal government to help small independent meat producers.   

“There's various levels of exclusive dealing, commercial bribery, predatory marketing practices and advantages that large companies have,” Kelloway said.

Harris has promised to work with Congress to pass bipartisan legislation to create the “Office of the Special Investigator for Competition Matters” within the USDA, which sponsors of the bill say would strengthen enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act. 

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has not released statements or proposed policies regarding antitrust laws. 

However, U.S. Rep. Glenn “GT” Thompson, the Republican chair of the House agriculture committee, believes that under a second Trump term, consolidation could best be reversed by eliminating USDA regulations. 

“Long before President Biden, overreaching, over-egregious regulations on food processing meant mom and pops couldn’t survive, they didn’t have the resources to be able to be in compliance,” Thompson told Investigate Midwest during an event at this year’s Republican National Convention.

But environmental groups, like Food and Water Watch, say that deregulation helped lead to the rise of consolidated factory farms. The group, along with 12 other organizations, sued Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency in 2023 over the agency’s failure to regulate factory farm pollution under the Clean Water Act. 

Trump’s USDA changes weakened oversight, accelerated consolidation

During Trump’s presidency, his administration gutted one of the USDA agencies responsible for enforcing contract transparency and fairness for poultry and swine farmers. That office, the Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration, was folded into the office responsible for marketing agricultural goods, the Agricultural Marketing Service. 

The move weakened the agency’s ability to determine whether a meat packer violated the Packers and Stockyards Act. Under Trump, USDA officials suspended fewer individuals and businesses for cheating farmers than during the Obama presidency. Trump also issued fewer fines during his four years in office than Biden did during his first two years, according to the most recent USDA data. 

In 2020, under Trump, the USDA further weakened the act by withdrawing Obama-era rules that would have made it easier for livestock farmers to prove that large companies like JBS Foods or Tyson Foods treated them unfairly. 

The Trump campaign did not answer direct questions about consolidations. Instead, a spokesperson criticized the Biden administration for the high cost of fertilizer, fuel and machinery. The campaign also touted some of Trump’s rural prosperity programs, such as a $1.3 billion investment for high-speed broadband infrastructure and the $871 million in USDA grants for rural community facilities, like hospitals, schools, libraries, and public safety facilities in rural areas.

In 2019, Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, defended the consolidation of the agriculture industry. "In America, the big get bigger and the small go out…I don't think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability,” he told dairy farmers at the Wisconsin World Dairy Expo.

Perdue’s comment bothered some dairy farmers, who have faced plummeting profits for the past 20 years as consolidation has led to fewer farms and more mega-dairies.

The price dairy farmers are paid for fluid milk has not kept up with the costs of production, causing smaller operations to close. 

Biden tackles meat industry consolidation with funding and stricter antitrust rules

The number of U.S. farms has been declining since the 1970s, while the average size of remaining farms has steadily increased.

With a goal of increasing competition in the meat market, the Biden administration allocated $1 billion to help small meat producers expand their processing capacity.  

Some of the recipients of that grant funding, however, have already closed.

“Those investments down the road will fail if the government doesn't continue to take a strong stand against market abuses and corporate consolidation,” said Angela Huffman, co-founder and president of Farm Action. 

“They're giving this money out to small meatpacking plants and startup meatpacking plants, and that's great,” she added. “But the reason there are not more of them is because they don't have a market.”

Kelloway, with Open Markets, said that while the investment is a move in the right direction, it didn't address the consolidated industry’s root problem. In order to prevent large companies from simply purchasing those small, independent meat-packing companies once they’re established, the Biden-Harris administration needs to take additional steps to reinvigorate the enforcement of antitrust laws, she said. Harris said she plans to take those steps. 

The Biden administration has also taken a critical posture toward company mergers. In December 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department released new merger guidelines that are the strictest in 20 years, Kelloway said. 

Previously, regulators were focused on mergers only insofar as they lower the price for the consumer. However, the new guidelines place more emphasis on the potential for mergers to reduce competition and lead to negative outcomes for workers, consumers, and other parts of the supply chain, even if the merger may lower consumer prices.

The guidelines now state that if a merger is going to give one company 30% or more of a market, it could be grounds to block the deal. 

“When you reach these certain levels of concentration, bad things tend to happen for competitors, for consumers, for the market in general,” Kelloway said. 

The new guidelines are being applied in the case of the Kroger and Albertsons merger proposal, which is currently being blocked and challenged by the FTC and several attorneys general. Washington and the Colorado attorneys general filed separate cases in state courts to block the merger. Both officials claim the merger would raise prices for consumers and shrink the number of employment options for unionized grocery workers.  

Price gouging during the COVID-19 pandemic

Critics of a consolidated meat industry also say it’s more susceptible to market disruptions, pointing to supply chain problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while supply chain delays can be a problem for consumers, large companies often still make a profit. The FTC found that large grocery retailers took advantage of supply chain disruptions during the pandemic in a report released earlier this year. 

“Companies are really the ones that can benefit, on both sides, so to speak, in the bottleneck, paying farmers very little, but then also charging consumers more,” Kelloway said.

Throughout 2020, the average price of beef at the grocery store increased by 8.9%, according to the USDA, while prices paid to cattle producers remained low. 

Despite the rapid spread of COVID within tight-quartered meatpacking plants, Trump ordered the plants to remain open during the pandemic. 

It was later revealed in emails obtained by Investigate Midwest and other outlets that the North American Meat Institute, which represents large agricultural companies, including Tyson and Cargill, wrote a draft of Trump’s order keeping meatpacking plants open during the lockdown. 

Later, Trump urged the Department of Justice to conduct an investigation into potential anti-competitive practices. While grocery store prices increased, many cattle producers did not see a similar increase in revenue.  

"Are they dealing with each other? What's going on?" Trump asked at the time. 

The USDA eventually released a report in 2020 saying it could not conclude if anyone in the cattle industry violated the Packers and Stockyards Act. The DOJ's investigation remains open, according to Bill Bullard, CEO of R-Calf, a nonpartisan organization of U.S. cattle and sheep producers. 

Bullard said he hopes to see the next president increase enforcement under the Packers and Stockyards Act and “vigorously enforce antitrust laws” that the Biden administration started. Bullard also praised the Trump administration’s use of tariffs as an economic tool and hopes the new administration will include livestock in an effort to level the playing field for domestic producers.

The post As ag consolidation grows, Harris and Trump pitch different approaches appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

In 2004, John Platt and his wife purchased 26 acres of untouched woodlands in Florida’s panhandle. As they transformed it into a horse ranch, they toppled trees and stripped the undergrowth with the herbicide paraquat. Through 2012, Platt sprayed the powerful weedkiller for multiple days in a row each year, by hand.

When Platt bought the land, he weighed around 190 pounds, he said. Now, as he battles Parkinson’s disease, he’s dropped to under 150 pounds. His symptoms, he said, are incessant. He has tremors, difficulty recalling words and severe fatigue. He blames the paraquat. 

“We now know that had a significant impact on my life,” Platt said. “We wouldn’t have continued to use it if we had known what impact it was going to have.”

Platt is one of approximately 6,000 people currently suing Syngenta, which sells paraquat under the trade name Gramoxone. They allege the popular weedkiller led to their Parkinson’s disease, a condition that destroys motor functions. Syngenta, one of the largest chemical companies in the world, has disputed the allegations. Over the years, the company has maintained that there is no connection between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease.

However, thousands of pages of records released in litigation, spanning Syngenta’s decades-long history, show the company’s own scientists determined that paraquat had the potential to damage the brain and nervous system as far back as the 1950s. And, as evidence of a connection between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease mounted, Syngenta attempted to discredit critical scientists and limit the spread of information that could threaten paraquat sales.

“Due possibly to good publicity on our part, very few people here believe that paraquat causes any sort of problem in the field and we have the support of the official side,” a toxicologist at Syngenta’s predecessor company wrote to a Chevron toxicologist in 1975, in response to early concerns about paraquat’s long-term health impacts.

Court documents show that over the course of more than five decades on the market, Syngenta elected against following up on early research suggesting that paraquat was neurotoxic, lobbied to keep a prominent paraquat researcher off an EPA panel, and kept quiet about the results of its own studies when they appeared unfavorable to the company.

Syngenta is an international company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, and owned by Sinochem, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate. It is one of the largest agricultural chemical companies in the world, with a higher market share than its primary competitors: Bayer, Corteva, and BASF. Syngenta has more than 30,000 employees, and reported $19.1 billion in sales in 2023.

Syngenta did not respond to multiple requests for comment over the course of several weeks. On its website, it said that science does not support a connection between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease, and that it is a victim of a “Mass Tort Machine” of plaintiffs’ lawyers attempting to “enrich themselves” by securing settlements. 

In 2021, the EPA completed a decade-long review of paraquat’s risks to human health and re-approved it for sale. The EPA’s decision concluded that “the weight of evidence was insufficient” to link paraquat to Parkinson’s disease. After it was challenged in court in May 2022 by a group of nonprofits, the EPA agreed to reconsider its decision, a process that will take until January 2025 to complete. 

State and federal lawmakers have attempted to ban the herbicide. California Assemblymember Laura Friedman introduced a bill this year that, if passed, would require the state to reevaluate paraquat to determine whether it should be prohibited.

Friedman said she wants the EPA to take a more active role in pesticide regulation. 

“We’ve seen our federal agencies being in much more of a reactive mode, waiting for people to get sick, waiting for years and years of evidence of real harm being caused before they take action,” she said. “Other countries don’t operate that way.” 

On the federal level, Sen. Cory Booker introduced a bill in 2023 that would ban the use of paraquat, among other provisions restricting pesticide use. However, it has made no movement through Congress since its introduction.

Paraquat is banned in more than 60 countries, including the U.K., the European Union, China and Brazil. In late 2022, paraquat was removed from the Canadian market. 

It is difficult to assess how much paraquat is used in the U.S. today. The EPA’s decision said it was one of the most widely used herbicides in the country from 2014 to 2018, according to the most recent available data. The amount of paraquat sprayed nationwide increased significantly during that time, according to estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Paraquat is mainly used on the U.S.’s three primary cash crops: corn, soybeans and cotton. Like dicamba, paraquat gained popularity once weeds resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, became a common problem for farmers. 

“We’ve seen our federal agencies being in much more of a reactive mode, waiting for people to get sick, waiting for years and years of evidence of real harm being caused before they take action … Other countries don’t operate that way.” 

Laura Friedman, California Assemblymember

In June 2021, the thousands of cases that plaintiffs like Platt have filed against Syngenta were combined into one federal proceeding in the District of Southern Illinois, and the case is ongoing. Trial proceedings, originally scheduled for November 2022, have been repeatedly delayed.

Sarah Doles, Platt’s lawyer and co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said she worries about the human costs: Her clients are elderly people in ill health. Many plaintiffs, she said, have died without seeing their cases resolved. 

“These clients just really want to tell their story and tell their story while they can,” she said, “because they’re losing the ability to do so.”

1955 – 1979 — ‘A growing problem’

Paraquat’s potential as a weedkiller was discovered in 1955 at Imperial Chemical Industries, or ICI, a British chemical company that would eventually become Syngenta. 

Three years later, before paraquat was ever commercially sold, a scientist in ICI’s medical division wrote to a high-ranking toxicologist that a chemical then called 2,2′ dipyridyl — paraquat — appeared to have “a moderate toxicity mainly by affecting the central nervous system,” or the brain and spinal cord, according to court records. 

In 1965, ICI entered into an agreement with Chevron, the oil and gas giant, to sell paraquat in the U.S. Chevron remained the herbicide’s U.S. distributor for the next two decades.

Paraquat’s acute toxicity was established early. Direct exposure to paraquat, such as through drinking it, can cause serious organ damage and death. Suicides and accidental deaths were reported soon after paraquat’s release. However, the chemical was generally believed to be safe as long as direct exposure was avoided.

The year after paraquat’s U.S. release, a scientific study by three ICI scientists studied the effects of paraquat on rats. The authors wrote that, judging by the symptoms they saw, paraquat appeared to affect the animals’ central nervous systems.

The EPA and Syngenta have said the results of animal studies on paraquat are not relevant to the everyday exposure levels of workers using the chemical, partly because large amounts of paraquat are injected into the test animals in most studies. 

In an EPA update on its paraquat decision released in January, the agency said that injection was not considered a “relevant pathway” to exposure in workers. They would more likely inhale the chemical, lick it off their lips, or get it on their skin, usually in very small quantities.

In 1968, a woman in Japan died after consuming paraquat, and ICI tested tissue samples from her body. Residual paraquat was found in her kidneys, lungs, liver and brain. Ken Fletcher, a doctor at ICI, wrote that the levels found were “rather higher than we would have expected, particularly in the brain, considering the relatively small quantity that was taken.” 

Based on a 1967 study of Malaysian paraquat sprayers, ICI knew that paraquat could get into the blood of workers in the course of working with it, according to court records. Another ICI rodent study in 1973 re-confirmed that, at least in mice, once paraquat was in the body, it could get into the spine and brain. 

But how long paraquat could remain in the brain, and what damage it might do, remained uninvestigated for years.

One of the first instances of public officials raising concerns about paraquat’s long-term safety came in the early 1970s. California state officials questioned the potential chronic health effects from workplace exposure to paraquat. 

In a letter from August 1974, Chevron lead toxicologist Richard Cavalli wrote that he had spoken with a doctor who had identified what he called “paraquat syndrome” in those repeatedly exposed to the herbicide. The syndrome consisted of an array of symptoms ranging from severe headaches to chest tightness. 

The next year, Cavalli wrote to ICI that several people who’d worked with paraquat had alleged permanent central nervous system damage from paraquat, including a man who’d developed a spinal lesion. Such allegations, he wrote, appeared to be “a growing problem in the litigation area.” 

1980 – 1999 — ‘Keenly aware of our dependence on paraquat’

By the 1980s, paraquat’s toxicity was generating headlines. A 1983 article from Science Digest quoted multiple doctors that said paraquat was a serious health threat. The article, which listed several cases of accidental deaths from paraquat in various countries, said many claimed paraquat was “out of control.” 

In one case, a Florida gardener accidentally sprayed himself. Some paraquat got on his shirt and in his mouth. He washed his hands and face and returned to work but was rushed to the hospital five days later. Ultimately, he died after two-and-a-half months of attempts to save his life. A lung transplant didn’t take.

Then, scientists began to suspect a link between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease.

The potential connection was first theorized due to paraquat’s chemical similarity to MPTP. MPTP is a byproduct of synthetic heroin manufacturing known for producing almost instant Parkinson’s symptoms. 

In March 1985, an ICI research manager, according to court records, wrote: “Paraquat is our major product now and will remain one of our major products for many years to come. I am sure that all of us are keenly aware of our dependence on paraquat. Then, it behooves us to do whatever possible to: Extend and defend paraquat markets through innovative research, development and marketing approaches.”

The same year, Canadian neurologist André Barbeau published the first epidemiological evidence of a connection between paraquat and Parkinson’s. He found a high level of correlation between paraquat use and diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in regions of Quebec. 

Retired Chevron Chairman R. Gwin Follis wrote to Chevron’s then-chairman about Barbeau’s study, warning him about the potential dangers of selling a product linked to a chronic disease:

“Since we don’t want to take any chance of facing an asbestos situation down the road, I am sure your people are following this aspect of the matter most closely,” Follis wrote. “However, I thought I would pass this on to you as I cannot think of anything more horrible for us to bequeath to our successors than an asbestos problem.”

The next year, in 1986, ICI and Chevron ended their distribution partnership. When reached for comment, Chevron, which is now a co-defendant in some of the lawsuits against Syngenta, said that it never manufactured paraquat itself and should not be held liable. “Despite hundreds of studies conducted over the past 60 years, the scientific consensus is that paraquat has not been shown to be a cause of Parkinson’s disease,” the company stated by email.

A year after the split, a neurologist affiliated with the University of Miami reported a case study of a 32-year-old man who had worked with paraquat for 15 years. He had developed very early-onset Parkinson’s disease. 

Over the course of the 1990s, ICI underwent a succession of corporate mergers and demergers, which culminated in the creation of Syngenta as a corporation based in Switzerland in 2000. It is now owned by Chinese conglomerate Sinochem.

2000 – 2009 — ‘Scientific influencing strategy’

In the new millennium, Syngenta started defending paraquat against increasing scientific scrutiny of its potential connection with Parkinson’s. In 2000, it created a “Paraquat Information Center” website, paraquat.com. Around the same time, Syngenta set an ambitious sales goal. By 2010, the company wanted to sell $1 billion worth of paraquat, according to minutes from a 2001 meeting of the company’s Science and Technology Council. 

Of concern to Syngenta was the research of Deborah Cory-Slechta, a researcher at the University of Rochester in New York. In the early 2000s, Cory-Slechta’s studies found that administering paraquat to mice caused cell death in a specific part of the brain named the substantia nigra. The loss of brain cells in that part of the brain causes the hallmark motor symptoms of Parkinson’s. (Cory-Slechta did not return requests for comment.)

In June 2003, at a meeting of Syngenta’s regulatory development team for paraquat, employees laid out a “scientific influencing strategy,” which included publishing in-house research to increase its own credibility and aiming to influence external researchers’ future work, according to meeting minutes presented in court records. 

One rule governing Syngenta’s internal research was to avoid measuring paraquat levels in the brain. The detection of any amount of paraquat in the brain, “no matter how small,” would not “be perceived externally in a positive light,” according to an internal slideshow.

That in-house research, at the time, was led by a scientist named Louise Marks. Marks did not return repeated requests for comment through her new employer, Regulatory Science Associates.

According to court documents, in her first attempt, Marks found no effect of paraquat on the brains of mice, but she realized the methodology she’d used was out of date compared to other scientists’ methods. When she redid her study with a newer method, she found paraquat did, indeed, cause a measurable loss of brain cells. She tried again, with the same results: Paraquat kills cells in the part of the brain where Parkinson’s symptoms develop. 

Shawn Hayley, a professor at Carleton University in Canada who has done similar studies with paraquat in mice, said paraquat kills up to a third of those brain cells in the substantia nigra. 

Syngenta said on its website that it “rejects the claims of a causal link between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease because it is not supported by scientific evidence.” Parkinson’s disease predates the sale of paraquat, and gene mutations are the only known cause of Parkinson’s, Syngenta said. 

However, Hayley said only about a tenth of all Parkinson’s cases can be attributed to genetic factors alone. The vast majority are likely caused by a more difficult-to-trace combination of age, genetic vulnerability and exposure to environmental factors, such as toxins, he said.

While a direct causal relationship has not been and likely cannot be definitively proven in humans, as intentionally exposing humans to paraquat to see if they develop Parkinson’s would be unethical, Hayley said the studies on rodents do show a relationship. 

“Let’s put it this way, if mice and rats were not relevant for the human condition, then all of our biomedical science would be bullshit,” Hayley said. “That would be catastrophic. Literally billions and billions of dollars (of research) around the world are done on mice and rats every year. You have to make that jump.”

Syngenta did not publish or report to the EPA Marks’ studies showing a loss of brain cells. In October 2004 at a Society for Neuroscience conference, Marks presented the results of her initial study, which found no change in the number of brain cells. 

When reached by email, a spokesman for the EPA wrote that under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, companies have “a general obligation to submit additional information regarding the risks or benefits of a product and information which EPA might believe raises concerns about the continued registration of a product.” 

The spokesman said that companies are specifically required to notify the EPA of the results of a study on the toxicity of a pesticide if, “relative to all previously submitted studies, they show an adverse effect.” Syngenta’s corporate witness said in deposition that the company did not have to submit the Marks study results to the EPA because they were not the first to find those results. 

An internal Syngenta presentation from 2005 acknowledged Marks’ studies had confirmed brain cell loss in mice. The presentation listed important targets to “influence” regarding public perception of paraquat’s safety, including Cory-Slechta’s research group and a then-upcoming large government-funded study in the United Kingdom. 

In the U.S., Syngenta saw a problem. Cory-Slechta, who had been vocal about her concerns regarding paraquat’s potential neurotoxicity, had recently been nominated for the FIFRA Scientific Advisory Panel. The panel is made up of seven scientists who advise the EPA on health and safety matters related to pesticides. The members of the panel are not directly involved in policy-making. 

“Their advice is invaluable to the EPA as it strives to protect the American people from risks posed by pesticides,” the EPA spokesman wrote in an email.

Syngenta wanted to keep Cory-Slechta off the panel. It compiled comments critical of her work, including that she “appears single-minded in believing that some pesticides are a primary risk factor for Parkinsons” and that her conclusions were “in reality speculation.” Syngenta passed the comments to the national trade organization for pesticide manufacturers, CropLife America, to repeat to the EPA. 

In the email sent to CropLife, Greg Watson, a member of Syngenta’s regulatory division, wrote, “I would ask that you handle our comments with care & in such a way that they cannot be attributed to Syngenta.” 

Ultimately, Cory-Slechta was not named to the panel. The EPA spokesperson wrote in the email response that while the agency considers public comments when selecting candidates, it also considers many other factors, such as the scientist’s area of expertise and professional qualifications, and that individual comments are not considered in isolation. 

Syngenta said it rejects any claim it acted inappropriately regarding Cory-Slechta’s nomination. Syngenta did not respond to a request for comment from Watson. CropLife America did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2007, according to court records, Syngenta head of regulatory science Lewis Smith attended a neurotoxicology conference where he heard neurologist Caroline Tanner present data from an ongoing study. It involved more than 80,000 participants, one of the largest of its kind. Many were farmworkers who were exposed to paraquat for years. 

Tanner’s latest data indicated exposure to the herbicide increased the risk of Parkinson’s disease. Smith worried about the broad agreement among the scientists that environmental factors, and particularly pesticides, played a primary role in the disease’s development.

Following the conference, Smith wrote in an email to other high-ranking Syngenta employees: “Unless we are able to generate new data on the mechanism of toxicity of paraquat in the brain (…) we shall not halt or far less reverse the perception that paraquat contributes to some extent to the incidence of Parkinson’s disease.” 

In 2008, Syngenta internally re-evaluated paraquat’s safety. In its report, it listed several “major sources of uncertainty,” including the question of how long paraquat remained in the brain and the possibility the brain cell death caused by paraquat exposure could progress even without further exposure.  

Despite this, the evaluation concluded the margins of safety were adequate. The herbicide was, effectively, safe when used as instructed. 

2010 – 2012 — ‘Potential for future legal activity’

In 2010, paraquat was the second most-sold herbicide in the world after glyphosate, and represented $400 million in annual sales for Syngenta. By this point, Syngenta faced competition from competitors selling generic paraquat formulations for lower prices, and it was focused on protecting its brand identity and market share.

Syngenta organized its own epidemiology study of former workers at four shuttered paraquat production plants in Widnes, England, with the goal of determining whether a disproportionate number had died of Parkinson’s. The study, published 2011, only examined the listed causes on workers’ death certificates. Neither living workers with Parkinson’s nor deceased workers who may have had Parkinson’s but died of other causes were counted in the study, according to testimony given by one of the study’s authors. The study found no statistically significant increase in deaths from Parkinson’s.

A medical journal specializing in the study of workplace hazards and human health rejected the Widnes study because it did not examine living subjects. An update from 2021, which Syngenta cites on its webpage devoted to paraquat, also used only death certificates.

Syngenta considered alerting the Widnes workers that it was conducting a study, but elected not to. Philip Botham, Syngenta’s head of product safety, wrote in an email that “in spite of the positive health messages in the publication, this action could precipitate concern and the potential for future legal activity.”

One question that has been raised in litigation when it comes to paraquat’s neurotoxicity is how long paraquat remains in the human brain once it gets in. Paraquat typically gets into farmworkers’ bodies only in tiny amounts, but if paraquat that gets to the brain isn’t processed out quickly and instead accumulates there, then those many small exposures could build up and cause damage.

In 2011, Syngenta finished its analysis of a collection of brain tissue samples from spider monkeys exposed to paraquat. The samples were taken two, four and eight weeks after exposure. The amount of paraquat detected did not decline over time. 

This indicated the time paraquat remains in monkey brains without breaking down or passing out of the brain is at least six weeks — twice as long as in mice — and potentially much longer. In 2022, Syngenta’s corporate witness said that the company still does not know how long paraquat remains in primate brains. Studies on monkeys are generally, though not always, considered to be more accurate than other animal studies when it comes to predicting health outcomes in human beings. 

Syngenta considered reporting this finding to the EPA, but decided the findings of paraquat remaining in monkey brains “do not represent an adverse effect or a precursor to an adverse event,” and so did not meet the requirements to submit to the EPA, according to court documents.

The same year, Tanner published the results of her long-term research into paraquat and Parkinson’s. It found agricultural workers who had sprayed or been around paraquat had a 250% higher chance of developing Parkinson’s disease. (Tanner did not return requests for comment.)

Syngenta’s response to the Tanner study was immediate. It posted on paraquat.com that the study’s results were potentially flawed because it did not clarify whether its results were based on incidence — the number of new cases diagnosed — or prevalence — the total number of cases in a population at a given time.  

Syngenta acquired the underlying data from the Tanner study from the National Institutes of Health via a Freedom of Information Act request and hired a consulting firm to re-analyze it with incidence specifically in mind. The firm confirmed the data did contain numbers for both incidence and prevalence of Parkinson’s. Both were increased by 250%.

Present day — ‘One of the luckier ones’

Platt still owns and lives on the ranch he once sprayed with paraquat, although his ability to maintain the property has deteriorated due to his illness. His wife now has to do more of the upkeep. At one point, the Platts had hoped to sell the property to move into a smaller and more handicap-accessible home, but the plans fell through. Platt had to retire early from his job as a professor at the University of West Florida due to his disease. 

“I understand that I am one of the luckier ones, because I have the benefit of an education, and I could do a job that wasn’t impacted by the paraquat,” Platt said.

Platt said he wants programs to better support farmworkers, as well as to provide therapy for those with Parkinson’s disease. And he wants paraquat taken off the market. 

“There’s a lot of anger, in the way I feel,” Platt said. “I think that it’s sad that we have a country that has so much, and takes so much away.” 

The post Unsealed: Syngenta spent decades attempting to quiet health concerns about its profitable herbicide. appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

Election forecasters predict that 54 “battleground” races will determine who controls the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025, with numerous rural and agricultural districts in play. There are 435 seats in the House, which are now occupied by 220 Republicans and 212 Democrats. Three open seats are due to death or resignation. Republicans are expected to retain one of these seats (the Wisconsin 8th), while Democrats are expected to retain two (New Jersey 9th and Texas 18th). Either party needs to win at least 218 seats to control the House.

Cook Political Report rates 11 seats of the 54 battleground races as “Democrat-incumbent tossups” and 12 as “lean Democrat.” Thirteen seats are considered “Republican-incumbent tossups” and 6 districts “lean Republican.” In 2022, Republicans picked up 10 additional seats to win the House majority. This year, Democrats are expected to win back 2 seats, Alabama’s 2nd and New York’s 22nd congressional districts, due to redistricting.

The following table contains information about 10 rural or rural-related districts that Cook considers a “Tossup.” All 10 districts have incumbents who are members of either the Agriculture Committee or Agriculture Appropriations Committee. These committees are important in determining rural-related budgets and the still-stalled farm bill re-authorization process that is likely to be negotiated in the 119th Congress. Third party candidates are not included in the table.

Democrat Incumbent Tossup Races

Republican Incumbent Tossup Races

The Democrat’s hopes for a House majority are based on retaining first-term incumbents Peltola, Caraveo, Davis, Vasquez and Gluesenkamp Perez. Each of these candidates, except Peltola, serve on the House Agriculture Committee.

Jared Golden has won Main’s very-rural 2nd district since 2018 despite the six-point Republican lean of the district’s voters. All 6 Democratic incumbents have tended to express their independence over party loyalty, whether by voting to move the Republican House Agriculture Committee farm bill out of committee or by disagreeing with President Biden on select issues, such as his support for additional U.S. military aid to Israel’s occupation of Palestine or his student loan forgiveness program.

Republican plans for retaining their current House majority are dependent on winning some of the less urban districts, such as those currently held by Gluesenkamp Perez, Davis, and Caraveo, along with retaining less rural but large industrial agricultural districts in California’s Central Valley. The Republicans are defending districts where President Joe Biden won with significant majorities.

Both party campaign committees are investing millions of dollars in each of the 10 rural tossup battleground races.

Control of the U.S. Senate is also in contention. Currently, there are 48 Democrats, 49 Republicans and 3 Independents in the Senate. All 3 Independents caucus with the Democrats, giving the Democrats a small majority. The closest races are expected in Ohio, Montana and Michigan, all with large rural voter constituencies. Cook Political Report rates the open Michigan Senate seat and Sherrod Brown’s (D) Ohio seat as tossups, while Montana’s Jon Tester (D) incumbent seat leans Republican. The Democrats will almost certainly lose another seat in West Virginia, with the retirement of incumbent Joe Manchin (I). 

Rural voters are critical in determining the outcome of many elections, though more battleground races are in urban or suburban areas. That said, with elections so close in many House districts and several Senate races, small marginal changes by rural voters can contribute to making significant contributions to election outcomes.

Here’s a brief look at a few House candidates:

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

In Washington’s 3rd district, incumbent Rep. Marie Gluesenkaamp Perez speaks with a member of Randle Veterans Coffee, which meets monthly. Her website proclaims: “Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s working class roots run deep in Washington State.” Gluesenkamp Perez, who with her husband owns an auto shop, graduated in 2012 from Reed College in Portland. In 2022 she was elected to Congress in a district that Donald Trump won 51 to 47 in 2020. This year she is again up against Joe Kent, an Army Special Forces veteran who claims the Covid-19 vaccines are an “experimental gene therapy” and who employed the consulting services of a Proud Boy member during his 2022 campaign.

Gabe Vasquez

In New Mexico’s 2nd District, Rep. Gabe Vasquez represents a district that is larger in landmass than the state of Pennsylvania. The Democratic incumbent is seen here kicking off Pride Month with Silver City PFLAG. Vazquez, a first generation Mexican American, is a former member of the Las Cruces city council. He is up against Republican Yvette Herrel, who in 2022 Vazquez ousted from Congress, defeating her by 1,350 votes. Herrel is campaigning to win back her seat by running on two issues: border security and crime. Albuquerque, one quarter of which is in the 2nd district, has a rate of violent crime that is almost double the national average.

Lori Chavez-DeRemer

In Oregon’s 5th District, Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is outside her party’s mainstream, being one of only six Republican House members to sign a pledge to respect the results of the 2024 presidential election. Politico has identified her as the second-most bipartisan member of Congress. This year Chavez-DeRemer is being challenged by Janelle Bynum, a member of the Oregon House who with her husband Mark owns several McDonald’s franchises in the Portland area. Bynum has twice gone up against Chavez-DeRemer in Oregon State House races, defeating her each time.

Don Davis

In North Carolina's 1st District, Rep. Don Davis has the distinction of being the lone Democrat in Congress to co-sponsor a GOP bill to limit Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices. He is seen here taking the mic at the Second Annual Pecan Pickling Film Festival in Bertie County. He is up against former defense contractor Laurie Buckhout. On X (formerly Twitter), Buckhout has voiced support for “the Jan 6ers” and identifies herself as: “Mom. Wife. Combat Commander. Business leader. America First Conservative Fighter.” She moved to North Carolina from Virginia in 2021 after selling her company, Corvus Consulting, described on a website for government contractors as a “cyber, spectrum and electronic warfare organization dedicated to providing defense-related consulting services.”

The post The 10 Rural Districts That Could Swing the House appeared first on Barn Raiser.

For the past half century, the Christian Right has been mastering the tools of electoral democracy in order to erode and end it. The methods and the players have evolved over time, but the goal of societal dominion has not. Today, leaders of the Christian Right have amassed considerable political power in many parts of the country and in the Republican Party.

Paradoxically, they have been remarkably open about their political strategy. This is the story of one key strategic initiative and how to counter it.

In March, Lance Wallnau, a leading strategist on the Christian Right who many consider to be a prophet and an apostle, told an audience of prospective activists at an Arizona church, “there are 3,143 counties in the United States and the Lord showed us that 19 are going to determine the future of America.” (Last year he said it was 14, but apparently the Lord’s plans changed.)

For more than a year, Apostle Wallnau and the America First Policy Institute, a think tank staffed primarily by figures from the Trump administration and his past election campaigns, have targeted these 19 counties, located in nine battleground states. Their “Project 19” campaign has triaged the target states into two tiers.

Their focus is on blue suburban counties where evangelical voter participation was proportionately less than elsewhere in 2020, and where the margin was only a few thousand votes. They are especially focused on ethnic and racial minority outreach to help make up the difference.

This summer, Wallnau organized multi-day events in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, that mixed old time summer tent revivalism with political indoctrination and training. Branded The Courage Tour, the events were aimed at making thousands of people at each venue feel part of a political and religious cause far greater than themselves. In Arizona, Wallnau trained activists in early voter engagement and targeted unregistered and infrequent conservative evangelical voters in Spanish-speaking precincts in Maricopa County.

By the time the tour got to Wisconsin in August, Wallnau and his allies had also begun recruiting and training election workers and poll watchers. The tour had also caught the attention of CBS Evening News, which aired a two-part profile of Wallnau in Wisconsin. Matthew D. Taylor, author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, reported that 2,500 people attended the Wisconsin event and 50,000 others watched the live stream on Facebook.

“If at the end of the day,” Wallnau said under a circus-sized revival tent, “we haven’t activated you to either be a poll watcher, a poll worker, somebody involved in election integrity, or someone who can help someone else get out a vote—I’m not sure we have done what we have to do.”

The Tour’s election integrity expert, Joshua Caleb Standifer, who founded the 501(c)(4) organization Lion of Judah in January 2024, sounded more ominous. He says he wants “Christian Patriots” to be a “Trojan Horse” in the electoral system and reform “the mountain of government.”

Wallnau told the crowd in Wisconsin “January 6th was not an insurrection. It was an election fraud intervention.”

The Courage Tour moves to Pennsylvania next, with a revival in Monroeville, in Allegheny County near Pittsburgh on September 27-28. The lineup of speakers has not been announced as of this writing. But past events have featured speakers Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk, and other Christian Nationalist luminaries.

The American First Policy Institute, which is kind of a silent partner on the tour, publicly claims  several dozen “movement partners“ that are also engaged in on the ground election work, including, Early Vote Action, the libertarian Club for Growth, and such well known Christian Right organizations as Turning Point USA (TPUSA), Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, the Family Research Council, American Principles Project and the Family Policy Alliance.

New Horizons

One religious formation on the cutting edge of contemporary Christian Right politics is the New Apostolic Reformation—of which Apostle Lance Wallnau is one of its leading exponents.

The term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the late C. Peter Wagner, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. He observed that Pentecostal and charismatic churches that operate outside of denominational structures, were the fastest growing sector of Christianity in the United States and worldwide. In this movement, Wagner saw an emerging new paradigm that he and his close associates eventually sought to shape, organize and lead.

The movement comprises loosely organized, often international networks of independent or nondenominational churches and ministries. New Apostolic Reformation leaders believe that Christian institutions have mostly gotten it wrong for the last 2,000 years. They have sought to replace historically democratic church governance in Protestant churches with what they call “apostolic governance.”

To achieve this, they seek the restoration of modern-day apostles and prophets and the Church of the First Century, as they imagine it. The New Apostolic Reformation vision also draws on beliefs and practices from earlier religious movements, such as the post-World War II era Latter Rain movement in Pentecostalism—which popularized the idea, drawn from the Book of Ephesians, that the only legitimate church offices were apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher, known as the “five-fold ministry”—and Christian Reconstructionism, which emerged from Calvinism and helped shape the theocratic trend of the Christian Right in the 1980s and 1990s.

Pentecostal and charismatic Christians possess a range of what they call spiritual gifts, including speaking in tongues and healing by the laying on of hands. Apostles and prophets are said to be in direct communication with God.

The New Apostolic Reformation is spearheading an increasingly politicized movement that seeks religious and political “dominion“ in a biblically prophesied End Times, in which they believe themselves to be living. Their mission is to overcome the largely Satanically-controlled world via corporate prayer, political action, and very possibly become a supernatural army along with angels to sweep away all things demonic, and emerge as the ruling body in the U.S and the world.

In recent years, this variable movement has become overtly political, epitomized by the “Seven Mountain Mandate.” This is the idea that Christians—of the right sort—are supposed to take dominion over society by conquering “the seven mountains” of influence, or culture: government, religion, the family, education, arts and entertainment, business and the media. The seven mountain metaphor packages a lot of once complicated theology into a religious and political vision easily accessible to wide audiences—many of whom may never have heard of Wagner or the New Apostolic Reformation.

The notion of the seven mountains has, according to one 2024 scholarly poll, been spreading rapidly and “now dominate[s] evangelical Christianity even beyond the portion of evangelicals in the charismatic/pentecostal camp” with 41% of American Christian adults believing “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 mountains of society,’ including the government, education, media, and others.” The Seven Mountain Mandate has thus become a central theme in right-wing political organizing around the nation.

‘By their deeds you will know them’

The New Apostolic Reformation has been in the news this year because of its evident proximity to power. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who flies the movement’s Appeal to Heaven flag featuring a green pine tree outside of his Washington office. The New Apostolic Reformation flag was also flown outside the New Jersey summer home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Tom Parker, the Republican Alabama Chief Justice who cited biblical texts and Christian thinkers in his February ruling on in vitro fertilization, has publicly discussed his support of the Seven Mountain Mandate.

Another prominent New Apostolic Reformation leader is Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor, televangelist Apostle Paula White-Cain. In 2017, she delivered the invocation at his inauguration and is currently head of the Trump campaign’s National Faith Advisory Board and active in Project 19 as one of the chairs of America First Policy Institute.

In January, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington, White-Cain claimed to have prophesied his 2016 election in 2011, when he first approached her about running for president. According to White-Cain, Trump asked, “Well, what does God say?” After praying with dozens of pastors, she told him, “Sir, you’re going to be president someday.” 

According to the New Apostolic Reformation, standing in the way of Trump’s reelection are demons.

In March, Lance Wallnau said on Flash Point “the left is loaded with demons.” “I don’t think it’s people anymore ... I think you’re dealing with demons talking through people.”

Kamala Harris as Jezebel

Shortly after President Joe Biden announced in July that he would not seek reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Wallnau posted videos in which he warned that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel” and declared she is “the devil’s choice” for president.

The biblical figure Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel who, according to the Book of Kings, used her powers to seduce her enemies and had several Hebrew leaders put to death. Casting Harris as a “Jezebel” continues a long history of racist tropes.

What’s more, casting anyone as controlled by demons makes them potential targets of violence. That Wallnau and other Christian Right figures, past and present, have had the gall to characterize Harris as demonic, may not bode well for those who follow her leadership.

After the September 10 debate, Wallnau blamed Trump’s lackluster performance on “witchcraft.” Appearing on FirePower, a Youtube show hosted by his allies Mario Murillo and Todd Coconato, Wallnau said:

She can look presidential, that’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.

‘Chasing the vote’

In some states it is legal for someone to collect absentee ballots from individuals and cast them as a group at election offices or drop boxes. This is sometimes called ballot harvesting. The focus is usually on helping elderly voters or people who live in remote areas ensure their ballot gets in on time. But in some states there is greater flexibility, and ballots may be collected from any group of people.

Since the Covid crisis made in-person voting risky, policies expanding early voting by mail, access to absentee ballots and ballot harvesting have spread widely in the states, even as the pandemic has receded. Twenty-four states and D.C. now allow someone chosen by the voter to return their ballot, and 15 states specify who may return ballots on behalf of voters (such as a family member or caregiver), according to Ballotpedia.

During the 2020 election (and sometimes since) proponents of the Big Lie claimed these methods contributed to voter fraud. Not only was this not true, but Christian Right groups had been using these methods since at least 2020. The Washington Post reported that Christian Right activist Ralph Reed told a meeting of the secretive conservative leadership group Council for National Policy in February 2020, that his Faith and Freedom Coalition “is going to be harvesting ballots in churches.” He said, “We’re going to be specifically going in not only to White evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches, and collecting those ballots.”

The folks behind Project 19 call this strategy “chasing the vote” by which they mean organizing voters to vote early and by whatever means the law allows. TPUSA claims to have employed a “ballot chasing army” in 6 states: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. This is significant because, according to the Wall Street Journal and CNN, the Trump campaign appears to have largely outsourced their get out the vote efforts to allied nonprofit organizations like TPUSA. (Concerns have been raised, however, about ineffectiveness and corruption on the part of TPUSA in past elections.)

Opportunity knocking

As disturbing as all this may sound to people who are concerned about the Make America Great Again and New Apostolic Reformation movements, the same electioneering options being deployed by Apostle Wallnau and his allies can be used by everyone else. And while they are not a panacea, they provide potentially powerful and empowering tools for those opposed to the Christian Nationalist political agenda.

While every citizen can use these tools to counter the Christian Right’s 19-county strategy. Such campaigns help citizens build the knowledge and skills needed to participate more fully in our democracy.

Early voting typically means that wait times and lines are shorter, and voters need not worry about extreme weather events that are due to climate change. For community organizers, the longer voting periods provide an opportunity to bank early votes rather than rely on last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts.

To underscore how much of an advantage this can be, let’s look at when early voting begins in just the Tier 1 states.

In Pennsylvania, early voting by way of mail-in ballots, cast in-person or at drop boxes, begins on September 16—50 days before the election. One can apply for absentee or mail in ballots as early as April. However, implementation of when you can receive and cast them, varies greatly by county. In the four counties targeted by the Christian Right, “absentee or mail in” ballots will be available in Bucks County, Montgomery County, Allegheny County early to mid-October. In Chester Country, “Mail-in ballot drop boxes open: October 22.”

Other states are less complicated. In Wisconsin, early voting begins 14 days preceding the election and ends the Sunday before the Tuesday election, but that  may also depend on where you live. Nevada early voting, begins Saturday, October 19, and runs through Friday, November 1. In Arizona, early voting begins 27 days before the election, and ends the Friday before the election.

While many nonprofit organizations and government agencies provide generally excellent voter information, those that mention early voting may tell you when it ends, but few say when it begins. New Georgia Project stands out as one that does. Early voting in Georgia begins on October 15 and ends on November 1.

In most states, you may not need an excuse to vote early, although in some states you do and in others you may need to request an absentee or “mail in” ballot well in advance. 

Looking ahead, expanded voting options will need to be woven more deeply into our political culture in order to sustain and increase democratic participation and accessibility.

Caveat emptor!

Voting laws, rules and practices sometimes unexpectedly change, and unfortunately, dirty politics can invade even the most basic of civic activities from voter registration to casting a ballot.

Alabama has made ballot harvesting a crime. The law is being challenged in court as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Voting and disability rights advocates say that the ban is a restriction of free speech and makes the ballot less accessible to those who are unable to visit polling places in person. The state’s GOP officials maintain they are protecting “election integrity.” Moreover, in some states registered voters have been purged from the rolls without their knowledge. It is wise to check your voter registration status from such authoritative sources as Vote411.org or Vote.gov. And if you believe you have been improperly removed from the voter roll, you can file a complaint with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

What’s more, the hacking of personal information has invaded this civic space. One such hack was led by none other than Elon Musk, the owner of the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. CNBC reported that the Musk-founded America PAC is collecting personal data from people in swing states under the guise of helping them register to vote online. This scheme is under criminal investigation in Michigan. America PAC’s main purpose is to promote the candidacy of Donald Trump.

The opportunity here is that people can do these things without having to wait for permission or leadership from political parties or interest groups. They can educate themselves and their close associates, as well as encourage organizations to figure out how to incorporate these expanded methods of voter engagement into organizational culture.

Swing Left is an activist group with ties to 400 local organizations around the country that seek to have electoral impact in opposition to the MAGA movement.

“We know that the elections up and down ballot will be very close and likely come down to a few thousand votes in a few key states and districts,” Swing Left executive director Yasmin Radjy, told Salon.com in July. “But we have a fighting chance … There is just too much at stake to do anything but lean in as hard as we can to take action.”

The good news is that there is a lot of democratic spirit among us—even among those who disagree on matters of party and policy. And there are many more who believe in the values of a pluralistic society than those who yearn for a more conservative Christian and authoritarian society. It is a historic struggle that will continue to fight on. The Christian Right of the 18th century didn’t like (and actively opposed) the Constitution when it was written. They dislike it even more now, in light of the many advances in civil and human rights we have achieved since then. They lost in the 18th century and there is every reason to believe that they will lose again. But only if we decide to make it so.

Here are some reliable voter resources:

• The United States Election Assistance Commission links to official state and county election sites, which in turn provide comprehensive information about such matters as voter eligibility, registration, absentee ballots, and early voting. You can also find out about how to become an election worker.
• The National Conference of State Legislatures has resources on online voter registration, the state by state rules for in person early voting and drop boxes. 
• Vote411.org, a project of the League of Women Voters, has a state by state chart of the rules on voter eligibility, registration, absentee ballots, and early voting. It does not have this information on ballot harvesting—but Ballotpedia does.
• Campus Vote Project has a guide for student voters. VoteRider helps eligible voters to get the appropriate ID they need to vote. The National Coalition for the Homeless explains how you do not have to be housed to be able to vote. The Federal Voter Assistance program assists overseas citizens and military service members and their families.
• Accessible Voting is an excellent and reliable non-partisans resource intended to aid people with disabilities find accessible voting options. U.S. Vote Foundation also has a guide to voting access for people with disabilities.
• NonProfit Votes has the do’s and don’ts for non-profit tax-exempt organizations that want to engage in voter education and mobilization. The National Council of Churches has published a Voting Matters 2024 Empowerment Guide. The guide includes theological grounds for voting, scriptures, critical IRS information for churches, outreach activities and tips for navigating conversations about elections.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post The Christian Right’s Playbook to Elect Donald Trump in November appeared first on Barn Raiser.

The nomination of Gov. Tim Walz as the Democratic candidate for vice president has put a bounce in the step of almost every rural Democrat. For many years now, the Democratic brand has become toxic in rural America. The party of Jackson and Roosevelt has, with few exceptions, turned its back on voters in the hinterlands. As the Minnesota governor, and native son of Nebraska’s Sandhills, Walz has excited Democrats in the countryside. The question is: Will this be just a rural moment, or does it signal a real, long-term commitment by the Party to compete for and win rural votes?

Several recent books have tried to decode the Democrats’ dilemma by looking at what makes rural and white working-class voters tick. Some have been good; others not so good. With White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, authors Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman use stale stereotypes and tired tropes to paint rural whites, as Schaller said on MSNBC, as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” The book was widely panned this past spring by a number of critics.

A counterbalance to Schaller and Waldman comes from two political science professors at Colby College in Maine, the nation’s second most rural state. In The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea have produced a valuable contribution to understanding why the widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious political fault line of our times.

What makes Jacobs and Shea’s work special is their exhaustive research. Over the past four years, they have created of one of the largest historical data sets on voting patterns in the United States, combining census reports and community and economic data dating back to 1824. Moreover, they conducted three of their own polls with the Rural Voter Survey project, which encompassed interviews with more than 10,000 rural voters and 4,000 non-rural voters. The conclusions that Jacobs and Shea draw about rural voters come from data, not anecdotes.

The authors write that “rural Americans are different because they see themselves as different,” and that “increasingly, ruralness matters more and more each election year.” With their new measure of “county ruralness,” combined with their collection on presidential voting data, readers get the first in-depth national measure of partisanship in rural America since the early 19th century.

The authors argue that while place is still important, “place is no longer local or regional.” Instead, rural voters have become nationalized as rural America has become drawn under a unified identity. They show how the “cultivation of this rural identity was part of a deliberate strategy on the part of elected officials within the Republican Party” from 1980 to the present, as the GOP went about manufacturing the myth of rural folks as the “real America.” While this was playing out, Democrats “struggled to react to the GOP’s growing dominance in rural communities throughout the country, as traditional regional or state loyalties succumbed to this new, national message about rural America.”

Jacobs and Shea walk through how the rural voter emerged during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in connection with Republican concerns about big government as well as racial, cultural and economic grievances. A range of factors contributed to this, from the expansion of universities and the baby boom of the 1960s, to the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s that accelerated “the Great Agricultural Transition” (a term coined by sociologists Linda Loabo and Katherine Meyer) as family farms struggled to survive amid increasing farm consolidation and foreclosures.

The exodus of Americans from farming “fundamentally altered rural life,” Jacobs and Shea write, as uneven economic development “exacerbated inequality in rural communities between those who barely survived and those who created farming industrial empires.” Between 1960 and 1980, rural areas lost nearly a quarter of their overall population, as the decline of small-scale farming forced families to take off-farm jobs, kids moved away to attend college, and rural America grew older and less educated.

By associating ruralness with “small town values” and a life of “thrift and hard work,” Reagan found a powerful way to exploit the political precarity of farmers and rural communities. Jacobs and Shea argue that by presenting rural communities as under attack by an out-of-control bureaucratic government, Reagan’s conservative philosophy offered a message that combined cultural war grievances—reactions to feminism, racial equality and immigration—with a sense of powerlessness, distrust of the federal government and a nostalgic return to American “roots” and simpler times.  

Bolstered by a newly organized conservative evangelical movement, and with much of rural culture under attack in the media and by Hollywood, Democrats were painted as out of touch with rural denizens, their policies hostile to the rural way of life.

The book has chapters that make for compelling reading. It explores pervasive notions about rural people: whether or not rural Americans are in fact “down and out,” clingers to their guns and religion, “irredeemably racist” and “radicalized by Fox [News].” The picture that emerges is more nuanced and complex than the sensationalized articles reported by pundits from large cities who parachute into “flyover country” and interview “rural rabble-rousers” who make for colorful copy but are not representative of their communities.

For example, the authors take issue with Thomas Frank’s thesis in What’s The Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America that rural people vote against their own economic interests. According to Jacobs and Shea, “Economic deprivation does very little to explain the lock that the Republican Party has in these communities. They are not voting against their interests, if you understand that their interests are very different from what others may think, especially those who do not live in rural communities.” In contrast, the authors note that “rural voters have developed a sense of shared, place-based destiny” and that “feelings of resentment and anxiety are an extension of rural grievance.”

Jacobs and Shea point out that income inequality (where poverty and economic precarity are much more integrated into rural places than large cities or suburbs) amplifies feelings of rural decline, which Republican politicians have exploited into an “us” versus “them” narrative, especially since the 2016 election of Donald Trump. This anxiety, they write, which is highest in the rustic precincts, has allowed politicians to turn “rural America’s economic vulnerability into a deeply felt grievance toward government, urban elites, intellectuals, and, in a word, Democrats.”

In their final chapter, “Bridges Across the Rural-Urban Divide,” the authors state that their intention is not to “detail a prescription for the ailments” of the Democrats, other than to point out that they need to show up and compete.

Despite outperforming John Kerry’s 2004 numbers with rural voters in 2008, Barack Obama was not fully committed to voter outreach in rural areas. The electoral carnage from the 2010 midterms to the end of his second term was catastrophic for rural Democrats, as well as for candidates up and down the ballot. It will take more than just showing up, however, for Democrats to change the red tide. It will require a robust investment of financial resources to build lasting rural electoral infrastructure on the part of Democratic campaign committees, state parties, super PACs and 501(c)(4) organizations. As Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said at the August 20 gathering of the Democratic Rural Council meeting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, “You win in rural America when you decide you want to win in rural America.”

The factors and mindsets behind what she calls “place-based partisanship” are the subject of How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics by Stephanie Ternullo. I found this book disappointing for several reasons. The author looks at three Midwestern small cities that are blue collar and mostly white to assess how local contexts have increased or decreased their rightward electoral shift.

The first problem is that Ternullo gives each city a made up moniker instead of using their real names. This does not serve the cause of helping the reader better understand and appreciate the political geography of the chosen locations of study. There was no need to do this. In her acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Arlie Russell Hochschild is right up front about the fact that the area she spent five years leading up to the 2016 election is Lake Charles and the communities of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. Katherine Cramer’s excellent book The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker does not hide the names of the rural Wisconsin places she visited.

So, using what Ternullo calls “diagnostic frames” to chart the “narratives of community identity,” off we go to “Motorville,” “Lutherton” and “Gravesend.” Motorville is somewhere in Wisconsin and due to its strong labor legacy and the presence of unions, is one of just 4% of U.S. counties that have reliably voted for Democratic presidents since the days of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Motorville, folks see politics as between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” To redress inequities they push for more support from the federal and state governments.

By contrast, Lutherton, in Indiana, went Republican back in the 1980s as manufacturing left, organized labor died out and the evangelical movement began to power the candidacies of Ronald Reagan and the GOPers who came after the Gipper. Settled by German Lutherans, Lutherton has a church on practically every corner, and folks first size you up by asking what church you attend. Unemployment is not a problem, but many of the jobs in the service sector go unfilled. They also don’t pay that well. In Lutherton, problems such as hunger and food insecurity, homelessness and the ravages of the opioid epidemic are handled by church group volunteers and nonprofits. No need for government to get involved, thank you very much.

Then there is Gravesend, the Minnesota municipality that is divided between the two political parties. Gravesend has never fully recovered from the fire and closure of the Rivervalley Foundries, which was the town’s largest employer. There are some loyal Democrats here but a good chunk of voters have swung to Republicans in the age of Trump.

Ternullo conducted dozens of interviews in the field and online (during the Covid-19 pandemic) in the run up to the 2020 election. But the book reads like the qualitative research findings from a series of focus groups. I found it tedious as she plowed and harrowed over familiar ground. Surprisingly, none of the good burghers of Lutherton get asked how—if they hold Christian and family values so near and dear—they can square their morality with their support for Trump, whose womanizing, misogyny, racial animus, endless lying and cheating violates the Golden Rule. I would have enjoyed hearing why these Hoosiers don’t consider themselves hypocrites.

The conclusion of the book, “The Future of Heartland Politics,” is somewhat of a letdown. If the reader is expecting some recommendations for how this critical region of the country—which includes both battleground states and states that are trending away from Democrats—can be made more competitive for Democrats, or if Republicans will at some point break the night sweats that have kept them in thrall to Trump, they will be disappointed. Ternullo takes the academic way out, suggesting that “future research should examine the extent to which other elements of social context shape partisan attachments; for example do social networks shape partisan ties, do partisan ties shape social networks, or both?”

I wish Ternullo had given readers some insight into how Democrats can better capture the allegiances of rural voters based on her field research besides the now dog-eared mantra of “show up and listen.”

The post What Makes Rural Voters Tick? appeared first on Barn Raiser.

This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.

“You see that new building over there with the roof and red barn?” asks Bob Walton as he guides me through the dirt roads of Isabella County in mid-Michigan, where he serves as a trustee for Isabella Township. “I know of at least three new buildings that were put up for agriculture that are being basically paid for by windmill money.”

Walton took a break from compacting soil recently planted with soybeans to show me the tall structures, blades rotating slowly in the breeze, now visible from every angle on his land and neighboring properties. The silver towers look incongruous next to the red barns and outbuildings that would fit perfectly on a postcard from rural America. It feels almost as if you’ve landed on the set of a science fiction movie—or time-traveled into the future.

It took a while to catch up with Walton, a third-generation farmer, working some 400 acres, mostly on land that once belonged to his grandfather. Now in his 70s, he’s turning the business over to his daughter and son-in-law. That does not keep him out of his tractor, which is where I found him one afternoon in May.

“I feel bad for the people that think they’re so ugly,” he says, looking at the wind turbines near his home. “I just think they’re majestic. I love the red lights at night.”

It was not love at first sight. When a private firm called Apex Clean Energy came calling in 2018, Walton recalls, “Our first thought was, how can we stop this?”

Energy developers and utility companies began breaking ground on a significant number of big wind projects in Michigan in 2008, after a bipartisan agreement requiring 10% of the state’s electricity to be generated from carbon-free renewables. A new law passed last year by Democratic majorities in the state legislature boosted that requirement to 60% by 2035.

Most of Michigan’s early wind turbines were located north of Detroit, on the eastern side of the state that Michiganders call “The Thumb” (because it’s shaped like a thumb on a mitten). Walton and his neighbors got in touch with farmers and residents who had been living with—and collecting revenue from—wind farms for several years.

Eventually, they decided they liked what they heard. One piece of advice was to lock down compensation for any impact to productive farmland.

“If 10 years down the road we find out there’s tile damage, they still have to pay for it,” says Walton, referring the underground system of pipes, called drain tile, that protect crops from heavy rains or floods. “That’s the other thing we learned, you got to write everything in.”

‘We need energy!’

Walton, a Republican, does not often agree with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. He is skeptical about electric vehicles, is not vaccinated and did not agree with Whitmer’s enforced lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the strictest in the United States. Walton’s family property, in addition to hosting a windmill built by Apex, is also home to an oil derrick.

Oil deposits are dotted throughout Michigan farmland. Decades ago, it was common for land agents to canvass local farmers—as wind and solar developers are doing now—and offer lease payments in exchange for siting an oil or gas well on their property. Many of these wells have been capped, but the one on Bob Walton’s family farm is still active, with the revenue going to his sister.

Walton doesn’t see a new generation of energy projects as a threat to rural life. Instead, he sees a steady stream of wind turbine income—free from drought, flood or fluctuations in crop prices—that will help his daughter and son-in-law create a sustainable 21st century farm.

“I called my grandkids, and they all said, ‘Grandpa I think it’s a good thing,’ ” Walton says. “Because we need energy!”

Lawyering up

Walton was first elected trustee for Isabella Township in 2016. “The reason I got on,” he says, “is I didn’t want somebody moving out from the city telling us farmers what the hell we’re going to do now.”

Apex’s proposal to build wind turbines in Isabella and nearby townships surfaced during Walton’s first term. Opponents of the project, working under the banner of a group called Isabella Wind Watch, accused him of a conflict of interest. Walton signed a lease with Apex as a private landowner and also voted to approve the project as a public official.

Activists who wanted to block the turbines, says Walton, “fought us like crazy.” In 2018, he beat back three recall campaigns. “I lawyered up. We stopped them at the county” where recall petitions must be approved for clarity.

Walton stood for re-election in 2020 and won handily, along with other township officials who had backed the wind farm. “They put somebody up against all of us,” he says, “and we beat them two and three to one.” He was renominated for another term in an August 6 Republican primary and will be re-elected in the fall. Democrats are not contesting any Isabella Township positions, as often happens in rural Michigan.

“I’ve told my friend Albert, who’s a liberal, if it wasn’t for us conservatives in this county, they wouldn’t have got this,” says Walton.

That would be Albert Jongewaard, senior development manager for Apex, who is now based in Minnesota. From 2007 to 2010, Jongewaard raised money and managed campaigns for Democratic candidates in the Deep South. In Michigan, he spent several years working for Apex and burned a lot of shoe leather talking to farmers, landowners, residents and local officials in Isabella and Montcalm Counties.

Jongewaard likes to quote Rich Vander Veen, an early pioneer of wind energy in Michigan: “It takes ten-thousand cups of coffee to build a wind farm.”

Getting off the ground in Gratiot

Years of patient, caffeine-fueled persuasion has paid off for several development companies in Gratiot County, located in mid-Michigan just south of Isabella County. The first wind farm in Gratiot County began operating in 2012; there are now six of them, with over 400 turbines generating more than 900 megawatts of electricity. That’s roughly enough to meet the annual energy needs of 300,000 households.  

These big projects pay big taxes on windmills, which cost up to $2 million per turbine. Greater Gratiot Development, Inc., a nonprofit serving Gratiot County, created a spreadsheet showing $93 million in tax revenue collected from wind farms between 2012 and 2023. That’s more than $7 million a year, a significant boost for local governments in a county with just over 40,000 inhabitants.

Jongewaard and the team from Apex also hit paydirt in Isabella County—but not so far in Montcalm County, which sits just south of Isabella and west of Gratiot. In 2022 and 2023, there were 26 successful recall campaigns against local officials who backed solar and wind projects in Michigan. Eleven of them were in Montcalm County, enough to stall a proposed Apex wind project.

“It is true in Michigan there is organized opposition to these projects. That’s a fact,” says Jongewaard. “People are right to ask questions, you should be asking questions.”

The issues raised by Montcalm County Citizens United, a group opposing the project, included a decline in property values, sleep deprivation from turbine noise, “damage to wildlife, domestic and farm animals, bat and bird kills, [and] massive government handouts.”

Jongewaard insists there are solid answers to these and other objections. “These projects aren’t dangerous,” he says. “They don’t have adverse health impacts. We know that through science and lived reality.”

Such arguments carried the day in Isabella County, where Apex won approval to build 136 wind turbines spread across 56,000 acres and seven townships. In 2021, Apex sold the project to DTE for an undisclosed sum. The press release announcing the sale projects $30 million in tax payments to local units of governments over the next 30 years, along with a whopping $100 million in lease payments to some 400 farmers and landowners.

That works out to about $250,000 for each leaseholder over the next three decades, an average of more than $8,000 a year. The actual payment varies, depending on how many turbines and transmission lines are sited on each property. Don Schurr was director of Greater Gratiot while wind farms were being constructed and began operating there. As one farmer told him, the annual lease payment from turbines “pays my taxes, pays my insurance and it [pays for] a nice vacation.”

Thanks to taxes paid by Michigan wind and solar farms, rural police and fire departments are getting new equipment and adding new shifts. Schools are being upgraded, and local roads are finally getting long-needed repairs. Farmers, meanwhile, are driving new pickups, building new barns and repairing and replacing aging farm equipment.

While all households can benefit from increased public spending, private payments to leaseholders are not universally distributed. The 400 farmers and landowners receiving lease payments from the Isabella wind farm, for example, are just a fraction of the more than 4,000 households in the seven townships where the project is located.

Sarah Mills, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has closely studied the siting of renewable energy projects in rural communities. Energy developers, she says, have started to use “good neighbor” agreements, which provide at least some payments to everyone in the footprint of a project. The compensation, she says, is “for access to wind that blows over your property.”

“There are townships in the Thumb where 85% of the property owners are participants in a wind farm,” says Mills, even if some of them have no turbines or transmission lines on their land.

Big money, big headaches

The recent influx of energy developer dollars—lots of them—into Michigan’s rural communities has real benefits, but also causes real headaches. According to Colleen Stebbins, a longtime official of Winfield Township in Montcalm County, wind farm opponents “were so afraid if I put a turbine on my property, I’d make a million, while they, with a little piece of lake property, would get nothing.”

While serving as township clerk, Stebbins declined to sign a lease with the company on her personal property, seeking to avoid any conflict of interest. Seeing benefits for the township, she voted to approve Apex’s bid to site a wind farm. As a result, opponents of the project organized a recall election and won a majority to remove her from office in November 2022.

Stebbins eventually did sign a lease with Apex, she says, “after I got recalled.”

The politics of energy production in Michigan has played out differently in three adjoining counties. Isabella, Gratiot and Montcalm are all home to hundreds of small farms, averaging a few hundred acres each. The population is overwhelmingly white—88% or more—in all three counties, with a tiny share of foreign-born residents. Donald Trump won all three counties in 2016 and again in 2020.

So why did conservative township voters in Gratiot and Isabella accept renewable energy projects, while Montcalm voters joined a rebellion against them?

Farmers vs. lakers 

One factor could be geography. Montcalm has more interior lakes than either Gratiot or Isabella. That means more homeowners own lakeside, non-farm holdings and would not receive the windfall in lease revenue from wind turbines or solar farms, sometimes by choice.

“This is just not a land use they think is appropriate, and it’s not worth it to them,” says the University of Michigan’s Sarah Mills. These homeowners, who often relocated precisely to enjoy a peaceful rural environment, are especially sensitive to disruptions that may be caused by utility-scale energy projects.

Ryan VanSolkema was elected supervisor of Winfield Township in rural Montcalm County in November of 2022, during the heart of the controversy over Apex’s proposed wind project. He won a recall election during the same 2022 campaign which saw Colleen Stebbins lose her position as township clerk. He is running, unopposed, for another term this year.

“I had just moved up here and bought a house on the lake,” says VanSolkema. “I wasn’t looking to lose 30% of the value of the home I just purchased.” Nobody wants to buy a home, he says, that looks out on 600-foot-tall wind turbines—and he’s not convinced there is any need to burn less carbon while generating electricity.

“Climate change is a hoax,” he says. “It’s just a way for government to spend money and regulate. Almost 50 years I’ve been alive, what has changed? Literally nothing.”

The intense opposition to wind and solar farms that developed in Montcalm County is far from unique. “We’ve had projects blocked all over the state,” says Ed Rivet, executive director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, a group that supports an “all-of-the-above” free market approach. The group receives backing from foundations and energy developers through the nationwide Conservative Energy Network. Rivet estimates that in the past five years, as much as two gigawatts of solar energy production in Michigan has been blocked by local activists. That’s the equivalent of two nuclear power plants worth of energy. 

Pushback is by no means confined to the state of Michigan. Researchers at Columbia Law School have found nearly 400 “laws and regulations to block or restrict renewable energy facilities” in 41 different states, with hundreds of projects encountering “significant opposition.”

Turning the tide

In Michigan, players on all sides of the controversy are recognizing the changed reality created by Public Act 233, part of a package of clean energy laws passed by Democrats and signed by Gov. Whitmer last November. It puts final siting authority for large-scale solar and wind projects in the hands of the three-member statewide Public Service Commission (PSC).

“Local authorities don’t have any impact,” says Kevon Martis. “You’ll see fewer recalls of local officials.” A home remodeler and county commissioner in Lenawee County, Martis has been involved in campaigns against renewables since he blocked a wind project in his community of Riga Township back in 2009.

After an unsuccessful petition drive this year to overturn P.A. 233 by statewide referendum, Martis is ready to try again in 2026.

On August 6, he was renominated by GOP voters for a second term as county commissioner and will face no Democratic opposition in the fall. Martis’s primary opponent, Palmyra Township Supervisor David Pixley, was endorsed by Private Property Rights PAC (PPR PAC) a new independent expenditure committee, or Super PAC.  

This summer in Michigan, PPR PAC endorsed 20 local candidates in Republican primaries in Montcalm, Ionia and other counties where there has been controversy over siting solar and wind projects. Nine of their endorsed candidates won their primary elections, some by small margins.

The PPR PAC website makes no mention of solar, wind or renewable energy. The group backs candidates, it says, who support “policies that reduce excessive regulation and oppose broad governmental overreach into property rights.”

Cabell Hobbs, treasurer of PPR PAC, is also treasurer of the Apex Clean Energy PAC. He has served in similar roles for GOP candidates, including George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and John Bolton.

Apex PAC’s election filings show contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates, a $2,500 donation to the Pennsylvania Solar PAC in 2021 and a $5,000 donation to the D.C.-based Community Solar Action Fund in 2024. There is no record of disbursements in Michigan. 

Apex’s Albert Jongewaard says he is not familiar with PPR PAC, nor are his colleagues currently working on the company’s Michigan projects. An email to PPR PAC resulted in an automatic reply from Rural Economic Development PAC (R.E.D. PAC), a Texas-based super PAC which also touts protecting private property among its top priorities.

R.E.D. PAC, where Cabell Hobbs is also treasurer, has received over $1 million from Conservatives for a Clean Energy Future (CCEF). Larry Ward, CCEF’s president and CEO, is a former political director of the Michigan Republican Party. The group was formed, he says, as the advocacy arm of the Conservative Energy Network.

“We like a whole list of energy sources,” he says, including advanced wind, solar and nuclear technologies. What his organization doesn’t like, he says, is government—or angry neighbors—“telling farmers what they can and can’t do with their property.”

CCEF is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Donations to the group are not tax deductible, and it is not required to disclose its donors. “Everyone who contributes to us,” says Ward, “would rather it be that way.”

This is the topsy-turvy world of renewable energy in Michigan. Republicans backing the conservative cause of private property rights are using a dark money loophole to help farmers and landowners participate in green energy projects, a liberal priority supported by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. These strange bedfellows, plus a few others, may now be finding a way to live together.

Although the state’s PSC has the final say to site renewable projects, utility and energy developers still have the option of trying first to work directly with local authorities. That’s taking place now—in Montcalm County, of all places. DTE Energy broke ground there in June on a 554-acre solar farm.

At a public hearing on the project last December, Evergreen Township Supervisor Andy Ross observed that with P.A. 233 in place, local governments are better off getting involved with renewable projects to make sure local concerns are addressed. These include issues like setbacks from adjacent properties, noise limits and a $5 million bond secured by DTE, which guarantees funding to decommission the project.

“If we were to deny their [DTE’s] application and they went through the state siting process, our restrictions are tighter than the state’s,” he told the Montcalm/Ionia Daily News. “What we’re working together on is way better than what the state siting would be.”

“I think there is a path forward for developers to work with local governments,” says PSC chair Dan Scripps, an energy attorney and former Democratic state representative from Northern Michigan. He was appointed to the commission in 2019 by Whitmer, who named him chair in 2020.

“I’m not going to be disappointed,” he says, “if we never get a case.”

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