At Least One Dem Group Understands the Party’s Failings
The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative is giving good advice to blue politicians.
Republicans should start worrying—and not just about a difficult midterm election season. A small Democratic organization may have figured out the reason for the party’s failures among rural, post-industrial, and non-college educated voters (shorthand here: the Midwest) and devised a way to win them back.
In Ohio, I saw the Democrats’ failures happen in real time: their abandonment of the Midwest. Factories and mills closed down, and family farms were consumed by mega-agricultural concerns. The people who had made their livings in those ways were simply left behind, like the now-rusted machinery strewn across the landscape. Generations of solidly Democratic voters were bewildered. They had done the right thing. They had voted Democrat. Now, who in government even knew they existed?
Not Hillary. On September 9, 2016, Clinton explained Donald Trump’s political appeal. She divided his supporters into two groups. One group felt the government and the economy had failed them. The other, she said, constituted a “basket of deplorables”—racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, everything her coastal supporters and media champions were not. She added that some were “irredeemable,” leaving open the question of how they might fare under another Clinton administration (Midwesterners remembered what NAFTA—a legacy of her husband’s presidency—did to the region). Hillary argued Trump gave legitimacy to dangerous people and ideas. That was bad, but it was the succinctness of the term “deplorables” that for practical purposes ended Clinton’s campaign that afternoon. She and her supporters did not just hate Trump’s politics, they deplored his voters as people. Clinton changed politics by transforming a political disagreement into a judgment about the character of millions of Americans.
Democrats did not suddenly abandon the Midwest. They gradually lost their cultural and political connection to large portions of it (recall Barack Obama’s 2008 remark that economically frustrated voters there “cling” to guns and religion). The Dems deprioritized most of the heartland, confident in their ability to win elections with just the coasts and some blue patches inland. It did not work.
Vitriol toward Trump voters is the default attitude among the “resistance” and many progressive politicians today. Hypocritically, Democrats never held Obama to the torch for his murder of hundreds of civilians by drone, yet those same Dems blame Republican voters personally for drug boats being blown up in the Caribbean. They wish ill on the Midwest not only because of who they voted for, but who they actually are as people. The term “MAGA” as a pejorative has been expanded to all Republican supporters and construed to mean opposition to democracy and even basic decency. I should know. It is a helluva thing to be shunned at Thanksgiving by my own liberal relatives.
But now, a political organization is seeing clearly how wrong the Democrats played all this—and wants to fix the problem. A newsletter from the group declares: “holding individual voters accountable for the egregious things Trump has done might feel like an act of justice, but it’s a strategic pitfall.”
The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) is a Democratic organization which seeks nothing less than to transform the default position of most progressives. They know that personal animosity toward Trump supporters repels voters who might otherwise switch sides for a new-style Democrat, a no-nonsense heartland state governor perhaps. They see the hatred of the person, not the idea, as a failed moral posture, one that threatens our core rights of speech and debate. Albeit for selfish reasons (to get more Democratic votes), they abhor the banning of controversial speakers on campus, the one-sidedness of modern media, and the nasty glee over the assassination attempts on the president. Never mind the actual killing of people like Charlie Kirk.
The founders and principals of RUBI are media unknowns, albeit with biographies that span from old-school Democrat to near-libertarian. Many are (or were) farmers. They are trying to produce handbooks and talking points to guide blue politicians looking to gain ground in red and purple districts. Their goal is not to turn the Midwest all blue again, but to turn the tide in elections where victory and defeat are separated by only a few percentage points.
One of their products is the 2026 Rural and Factory Town Candidate Toolkit. The guide reminds Dems of some rough math. “Criticizing the opposition,” it says,
[BLOCK]is insufficient when only 39 percent of the electorate has a favorable view of Democrats. In most rural and factory-town districts, working-class voters are the majority…. It’s not possible to win without regaining working-class support and, as of July, only 31 percent of high school grads and 42 percent of voters with some college said they planned to vote for Democrats in the midterms.[/BLOCK]
What to do? There’s a lot of general helpful information in the Toolkit, but a key point is this:
[BLOCK]Focus on what’s important to voters in your district. Talk like a neighbor, not like a politician or activist. Talk less about Trump/GOP/saving democracy and more about what you will do… Voters need a reason to vote for you. Democrats cannot win simply by getting more votes in cities and suburbs. Somebody has to build a bridge.[/BLOCK]
That last one captures the group’s overall political strategy.
Much of the guidance from RUBI is not new, albeit worthy of reiteration: Talk about local issues. Meet people where they live. Build trust. Hold community events, like park cleanups, at which Democrats and Republicans can work together. Don’t hold voters personally responsible for things politicians do. Respect free speech and viewpoint diversity.
RUBI cites a poll of factory town voters which found that 59 percent perceived Democrats as being “obsessed with LGBT issues instead of focusing on kitchen table economic issues.” RUBI urges candidates to avoid bolstering that impression. It seems like common sense until you look at the likely 2028 presidential candidates, like Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, all of whom often seem to have not gotten the memo.
So, will it work? Park clean-up projects can make pot-luck friends of political adversaries, but relationships do not automatically translate into votes. No amount of improved messaging, however sincere and clever, can entirely eliminate the genuine disagreements that divide us over guns, abortion, immigration, climate change, and traditional values.
There is also the problem of scale. Creating a new form of political organization in thousands of rural communities requires money, buy-in from compelling candidates, volunteers, and sustained effort. It is much easier to spend millions on anti-ICE advertising in mostly-blue agreeable suburbs than to build relationships in small towns. There is clearly not enough time left before the 2026 midterms to do that, nor even before 2028 if you consider the heavy lift of winning back lost votes in the Midwest. It just may not be possible to build those bridges.
Many national-level Democrats have lost the ability to talk to people they once knew how to represent. But for conservatives, it’s worthwhile to keep an eye on RUBI as, nearly alone among liberal groups, it has the right idea.
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