Rural Democrats and liberals face at least three big challenges: First, they have a bad brand. Second, opportunities for community engagement seem limited or intimidating. Third, local Democratic Committees struggle, particularly to bring in new folks and young people.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had effective ways to overcome these problems? We do! A new study analyzing the impacts of Community Works, along with extensive on-the-ground experience from rural Virginia, Georgia and elsewhere, demonstrates that CWorks makes strong positive impacts across all three of those challenges. Meredith Dean and Anthony Flaccavento discuss the results of the study and other lessons learned from the field.

Erica Payne, Founder and President of Patriotic Millionaires, joined us to discuss The MONEY Agenda — a four-part policy package aimed at restructuring the tax code and wage floor to work for working people, not just the wealthy.

In this timely conversation, we explore new research on what’s often called “voter apathy” and uncover a different story: many people who don’t vote aren’t disengaged from their communities, they’re disengaged from a political system they experience as distant, unresponsive, and built for someone else.

Swarthmore sociologist Daniel Laurison, who led the study, walked us through findings from his latest research, Understanding the Political Disconnect, which examines why trust in political institutions is low among lower-income Americans, how feelings of exclusion shape participation, and what meaningful engagement might actually require.

What does it mean to run for office from a working-class background in rural America? This panel featured candidates who are challenging assumptions about who gets to lead and whose voices matter. We explored how life experience shapes political priorities, relationships with constituents, and approaches to governance. Together, panelists Nathan Sage (IA), Melissa Bird (OR), and Paul Nolley (IL) discussed how working-class leadership can strengthen democracy and build durable power across rural and urban communities.

Citizens' Assemblies bring together residents across lines of party and ideology to create home-grown, bottom-up solutions. They are a form of "deliberative democracy," a growing movement that engages communities in practical, collective problem-solving. Watch to learn how to put the "d" back in democracy.

Alejandro Salazar is the Executive Director of Unify Montrose. The first in his family to graduate from college, his civic path began in 2023 when participating in Montrose’s Citizens’ Assembly showed him how ordinary residents could meaningfully shape their community. That experience motivated him and several peers to build a lasting, locally grounded model of representative democracy that bridges the divides that separate Americans.

This briefing presents a bold new strategy for states to use their long-standing authority to define the corporations they charter to no longer grant political-spending powers to their corporations, effectively making Citizens United irrelevant. By reframing the debate around state-granted powers rather than constitutional rights, this strategy opens a novel path to curb corporate money in politics while grounding reform in deeply established corporate law principles.

Tom Moore is a senior fellow at American Progress, where he focuses on democracy and government reform.

Barbara Kingsolver joined RUBI’s Anthony Flaccavento for a conversation about Appalachia, the challenges working people face every day, and her most recent book, Demon Copperhead. Barbara also discussed the concrete work she is doing to fight the drug epidemic in the region, and how those efforts have been joined by people across the ideological spectrum.

In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, fear and loathing and the us versus them mindset make RUBI's bridging work harder and more important than ever. Two depolarization experts share their thoughts on the connection between toxic polarization and political violence and what can be done to bring down the temperature without abandoning our political goals and projects. Kristin Hansen is the co-founder and executive director of the Civic Health Project, an organization that uses technology to foster healthy discourse and social cohesion. Zachary Elwood is a former content strategist for Builders Movement, an organization committed to overcoming toxic polarization. Zachary is the author of Defusing American Anger and host of the People Who Read People podcast.

Millions of Americans have participated in a resistance movement, fighting the anti-democratic, unjust and cruel actions that the Trump Administration has perpetrated. It’s been well organized, with several national progressive organizations providing help and guidance to thousands of local protest efforts. But something has been almost entirely missing, from the protests themselves as well as the broader media and social media discussion: Working people, whether farmers, miners, factory workers or union rank and file. In RUBI’s September 3rd briefing, Jared Abbott, Director of the Center for Working Class Politics, and Anthony Flaccavento, RUBI’s director, talked about why this is so essential to stopping Trump, as well as strategies for how we can broaden the resistance.

Musa al-Gharbi shares his analysis of why Democratic candidates have faltered in recent electoral cycles. al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

For much of the twentieth century, unions were more than just workplace institutions or collective bargaining units; they shaped the daily lives and worldviews of working-class families by building collective ties that extended into the civic and political fabric of small-town America, especially in the American Rust Belt. As union power declined, so too has this shared political and social identity. Many former union towns now have significant influence from Republican-aligned networks and narratives. This presentation concludes with a discussion of how lessons from the heyday of Big Labor -- when labor was deeply involved in community -- can inform current practices.

Tariffs are, literally, all the rage these days. Are they always bad? Can they ever be useful? How do they impact rural industries and communities? Trade attorney Lori Wallach tells us how we got into this mess and discuss how we can understand tariffs in the context of global trade agreements going back to 1944.

In a state Trump won by 20-points, Independent Dan Osborn came within six points of unseating a two-term Republican incumbent Senator. Dan talks about his campaign, what he ran on, and how, when and where Independents can run to win rural races.

Why did some deindustrialized mid-western factory towns make a right-wing turn while others retained their Democratic allegiance? Stephanie Ternullo interviewed working class residents in three very different small post-industrial cities in Wisconsin, Indiana and Minnesota. Her learnings open up new possibilities for candidates to reach voters many assume have been lost for good.

Democrat Sarah Keyeski defeated the Republican incumbent in her rural Wisconsin state senate race. Sarah will talk about their campaigns, what they ran on, and what they see as the keys to their success.

A conversation with Arlie Hochschild about her new book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right. Arlie has spent the last few years talking with blue collar men in Pikeville, Kentucky about their lives, their dreams and their disappointments. The men in her book wonder whether or not their jobs, their region, and their self-worth have simply been lost or—as Donald Trump tells them about the 2020 election—have been “stolen.”

Our panelists crunch the numbers and analyze voting behavior to get a picture of who voted, how they voted, and why. We examine national rural voting patterns and then zoom in for a closer look at North Carolina, Montana, Penn, and mid-western factory towns.

Meet the man who "brought the class war to the DNC." John Russell, a self-described "dirtbag journalist", is a labor and class politics reporter for More Perfect Union and has his own Substack called The Holler ("class politics for rednecks and hippies"). An Appalachian, Ohio Valley native who ran for Congress, John made his way to the 2024 DNC mainstage where he gave an electrifying speech calling on working class Americans to come together for control of our government and workplaces. John has also produced a viral video where he interviewed Trump supporters at a rally in Erie, PA.

RUBI's own co-founder and Communications Director, Erica Etelson, shares highlights from two new RUBI resources: The Back Road to 2024: 8 Ways to Depolarize Rural Electoral Campaigns and Talk Like a Neighbor: Communication Tips for Rural Candidates. In this era of peak polarization, left-leaning candidates who can defuse partisan hostility stand a better chance of appealing to soft Republicans, swing voters, and the "exhausted majority" of the electorate. Erica is the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide and co-writes the Rethinking Rural column for The Nation.

As we get closer to the November election, many progressive and Democratic strategists advise a focus on “turning out the base,” while others prioritize persuading independents and other potentially movable voters. But what if “the base” for progressive and Democratic candidates is shifting? And what if one of the biggest blocs of potential voters for Joe Biden and Democratic candidates – working class and rural people – is showing signs of shifting their votes away from MAGA Republicans towards more populist progressive representatives? In this presentation, Sarah Jaynes, Founder and Executive Director of the Rural Democracy Initiative, provides an overview of fascinating new rural polling and the work of more than 100 organizations and initiatives making headway in rural America. Sarah also highlights some candidates running in rural districts with a strong chance of winning.

In 2000, Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly told a Washington Post reporter, “We’re the only show from a working-class point of view.” Liberals and progressives found this laughable. O’Reilly’s show and Fox News constantly boosted a party inflicting deep wounds on working-class people: undermining unions, blocking more affordable health care, and starving public services through tax cuts on the rich. How could he possibly represent a working-class audience? In this presentation, communication scholar Reece Peck explains how conservative media producers learned to effectively brand political conservatism as blue-collar by appealing to working-class taste, knowledge, and morality.