Heartland Democrats

Jess Piper is a Democratic activist in rural Missouri who shares important insights on grassroots politics, especially in rural areas. She recently wrote:

It’s frustrating to hear folks say that rural Missourians vote against their self-interest when 66 of Missouri’s 163 House Districts had no Democratic nominee on the ballot in 2022 and in cycles previous to that. Nearly 2.5 million Missourians live in those uncontested districts and didn’t have the option to vote for a Democrat for the State House and many other races because there wasn’t one on the ballot.

More candidates ran in 2024, but we still had way too many uncontested seats.

The good news is that we have changed that metric…by a massive amount. When I ran in 2022, over 40% of seats were uncontested. In this cycle, only 2% are uncontested.

That’s the first step in clawing back democracy. (1)

She cites Howard Dean’s main theme during his time as Chair of the Democratic Party (2005-2009), the 50-state strategy to actively contest election in “red” Republican-dominated states. As one might expect, Democrats who successfully contested election in red states during that period tended to be more on the centrist part of the political spectrum than on the left. But at the very minimum, forcing the Republicans to spend more of their campaign funds on what they had been able to consider safe Republican districts was an advantageous effect.

The essential idea of the 50-state strategy was to build active Democratic Party organizations everywhere. As the title of Jess’ article states, “The Only Race We Can’t Win ... Is the one we don’t run.” During his first Presidential campaign, Barack Obama relied heavily on a community-organizing model with his Obama For America group that was doing essentially that kind of organizing.

But the party let that approach drop after Obama was elected. As Michele Hornish observes, “after the 2008 election we scrapped a national 50 state strategy that put funding and support into the hands of Red State Democrats and Democratic parties and helped deliver huge victories.” (2)

Despite the Republican approach that relies even more than the Democrats on big-money donations to drive campaigns with advertising, they have at least a robust grassroot get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation based on conservative Christian churches.

This has left the Democrats in places like Nebraska, for instance, not even bothering to put up a Democratic candidate in the current Nebraska Senate race. Instead, they are backing an independent named Dan Osborn. As Michelle Cottle writes in the New York Times:

“I don’t like either party,” he told me over pizza and beer in the town of Albion recently, after a morning of campaigning. “I think they both kind of suck.” His goal, as Mr. Osborn tells it, is to infiltrate the Senate and start breaking the unhealthy two-party death grip on the system.

Given this pox-on-both-their-houses posture, it might seem strange that the Nebraska Democratic Party is backing Mr. Osborn’s candidacy, that national Democrats have given him their tacit blessing and that his campaign events tend to be packed with more die-hard Democrats than fence-sitting unaffiliateds. (3)

As Cottle notes, “by not running its own candidate, the party might give some voters the impression that it has given up on rural America.” But to Cottle, it apparently seems obvious that this is merely a “second-tier concern” when “compared with the fierce urgency of rural America’s antipathy toward Democrats - an antipathy unlikely to be improved by the ongoing crusade of the party’s left flank to drive out moderates.”

Who those among “the party’s left flank” it is who have as their goal “to drive out moderates,” she doesn’t specify. In the real world of 2026, it’s one of the notable features of this year’s politics that after party primaries, both progressives and more traditional Democrats have closed ranks around Democratic nominees.

But somehow, she finds it obvious that it’s better for the Democrats to back candidates who aren’t Democrats at all than to build up their own party brand by nominating, you know, actual Democratic candidates! The mysterious insights of inside-the-Beltway political commentary are sometimes difficult to comprehend …

She even rolls out one of the hoariest Beltway political clichés that what voters really want in a political representative is “a guy [sic] you’d like to have a beer with.”

As opposed to, say, a “guy” who thinks billionaires should be required to pay taxes to support their country. Or one who thinks that everyone having affordable health insurance would be a desirable thing. Or one who thinks completely unnecessary Forever Wars are a bad thing.

But Cottle assures us that not only would you want to drink a beer with Osborn, he’s also “loose, chatty, goofy and prone to saying stuff that would give the average campaign consultant a heart attack.” Of course, standard-issue Beltway political commentators feel heart attacks coming on when they hear the phrase “Medicare for All.” Which Harry Truman was promoting in his 1948 Presidential campaign (though by another name).

As Cottle notes, the Democrats in Montana, Idaho, and South Dakota have been leaning in the same direction. She closes by saying that such a trend “could make for a more dynamic, maybe even less polarized, Congress.” Presumably because a Congress in which a united Democratic Party would be consistently “polarized” against unnecessary and illegal wars, massive corruption, and masked ICE goons shooting people in the streets for no good reasons, would not be conducive to Democratic and Republican Senators and Congresspeople getting drunk with each other.

Notes:

(1) Piper, Jess (2026): The Only Race We Can’t Win ... Is the one we don’t run. The View from Rural Missouri 10/01/2026. <https://jesspiper.substack.com/p/the-only-race-we-cant-win> (Accessed: 2026-09-10).

(2) Hornish, Michele (2026): Not Far Enough. Everywhere Means Everywhere. Small Deeds Done 09/29/2026. <https://michelehornish.substack.com/p/not-far-enough-everywhere-means-everywhere> (Accessed: 2026-09-10).

(3) Cottle, Michelle (2026): He’s Not a Democrat. Democrats Love Him Anyway. New York Times 08/11/2026. Gift link: <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/11/opinion/dan-osborn-nebraska-independent-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HVE.C5cR.rOnf3z-f_HOF&smid=url-share> (Accessed: 2026-09-10).

This post originally appeared in the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.