When family farms disappear, the impact reaches far beyond rural communities. As agriculture shifts into fewer, larger operations, supply chains become less reliable, driving higher grocery prices for everyone. What may seem like a rural issue quickly becomes a shared challenge affecting food costs and access across the country.

When rural hospitals close, the consequences extend far beyond the communities that lose them. Patients must travel farther for care, local economies lose critical jobs, and regional healthcare systems absorb growing pressure. What may appear to be a rural issue quickly ripples across counties and cities alike, affecting healthcare costs, access, and stability for entire regions.

Rural stability supports urban stability. Urban strength supports rural opportunity. The future of both depends on recognizing what has always been true, even if politics tries to obscure it. We are not facing separate crises. We are experiencing one shared challenge, and solving it requires seeing ourselves not as opposing sides, but as neighbors living in the same system.

A year on, the anger makes sense. Like many of you, we are disgusted and disturbed by the actions of this administration. In addition to resistance today, we need a strategy for winning the future tomorrow. Trumpism didn’t appear out of nowhere  and if we don’t change the conditions that produced it, it will return, even if Donald Trump himself doesn’t.

If we care about racial justice, we have to see the full and complex reality of rural life.

Farmers across rural America have also joined the fight against Trump’s draconian immigration policies, including a number of state Farmers Unions such as those in Minnesota and Iowa. In Iowa, Aaron Lehman, the president of the union, warns that the current attacks on immigrants will likely lead to higher food prices and more stress on farmers already hit by tariffs and sky-high input costs.

The idea of “white rural rage” as the driving force behind the downfall of democracy is just one more example of how stereotypes are used to cast rural people as the “other,” dividing the working class from its natural allies while letting those with real economic power off the hook.

Rural young voters are showing up, reshaping participation patterns and challenging long-held assumptions about who engages in democracy.

A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, completed the Monday after No Kings, showed Trump’s approval rating has gone up by two points to 42%.  His approval ratings are now above those of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama at this point in their respective second terms. Apparently, the notion that Trump will destroy himself and his movement from within is wishful thinking.

Of equal importance is the fact that the opposition party, the Democrats, are far more unpopular than Donald Trump, with less than 30% approval.  Seventy percent of Americans view the Democrats unfavorably. Seven out of ten. And, although the GOP has so far caught more of the blame for the government shutdown, the gap is beginning to narrow.

Every year, politicians and pundits take to the airwaves to pronounce whether this next election cycle is about “turnout” or “persuasion”. More often than not, turning out the base ends up as the preferred strategy, driving both campaign dollars and on-the-ground strategy overwhelmingly towards getting “our side” to show up and vote. As one example of that, In advance of Aftyn Behn’s recent special election in TN congressional district 7, DNC Chair, Ken Martin apparently told Liam Kerr that the election is “not about persuading voters, it’s about turning them out.”

In most respects, however, turnout vs persuasion is a false choice, one that has contributed to shrinking the Democratic base over the long-term while doing little to help them win races in the short term.