Rural news, late notice: the mail lag that quietly taxes rural life

American Samoa Post Office (2021) - Pago Pago, AS; Credit: Talanei News 

Without a post office in one’s community, one must resort to traveling farther and farther away in order to have access to this necessary element.

That quote was from a 2011 blog post about post offices as community lifelines. It highlights a rural baseline: when infrastructure is limited, distance becomes a cost paid in time, fuel, and coordination. In 2026, however, the issue seems less about whether a post office exists and more about whether mail arrives on time. The issue of slow mail delivery in rural America is partly policy-driven.

In 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission (“Commission”) described nationwide United States Postal Service (“USPS”) changes under its “Delivering for America” plan. This plan includes a concept called Regional Transportation Optimization (“RTO”). The Commission explained:

Under RTO, mail dropped off at Post Offices and collection boxes more than 50 miles from a regional hub is collected the next day instead of the same day.

The Commission warned that rural communities would face disproportionate negative impacts. That is, some mail originating in rural areas enters the USPS system later than mail from locations closer to processing centers. Hence, rural areas are more likely to experience the additional day and any subsequent delays. Reports from journalists like Sophie Culpepper help illustrate what that extra day looks like in practice for rural communities.

In Culpepper’s 2026 Neiman Lab Report, she described community newspapers facing mail delays that arrive late, go missing, or show up in batches. She interviewed publishers in Maine, Michigan, South Dakota, and Virginia, all of whom reported a significant increase in complaints about USPS delays last summer. 

In Maine, the Midcoast Villager – which serves Knox and Waldo counties – is the primary or only local news source for roughly 80,000 residents. Publishers told Culpepper that they have little visibility into, or control over, USPS’s delivery timelines:

When we’re fighting against something that we really have no control over, that’s terribly frustrating…because I can’t afford to lose a subscriber, let alone many.

Rural Post Office (2024) - Salvo, NC
Credit: Wikimedia Commons Contributors

For a weekly newspaper, punctuality is essential. Culpepper directly linked mail delays to rural livelihoods because local advertising relies on timely delivery. From auctions to open houses, legal notices to project bid invitations, if the newspaper is late, rural residents not only miss the news but also lose the opportunity to act while it still matters. 

The newspaper is just one place where mail speed influences rural life. The same issue appears differently in the business context. In a 2026 interview with the Federal News Network, Elena Patel described USPS more as a rural economic platform than as a news pipeline. 

Patel, a Brookings senior fellow and co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, argued that judging USPS mainly by profitability misses the role the postal service plays in rural economies. Patel pointed out that private carriers can impose geography-based surcharges of up to $20 per package – costs that can wipe out small margins for rural businesses trying to reach distant customers. 

Patel also highlighted the practical functions of post offices in rural areas: shipping goods for e-commerce, maintaining a reliable business address (including P.O. boxes), and accessing counter services such as certified mail. She concluded:

We need to rethink the Postal Service as a public good and fund it appropriately so that it can support rural economies.

Read together, these stories reveal why the mail delivery system is a rural livelihood issue. Rural areas suffer twice when mail slows down: once in time and once in opportunity. Time is spent on extra trips to town, more phone calls, and contingency plans just to complete basic tasks. Opportunities are missed: auctions and bids close, notices arrive too late, payments are delayed, and small businesses lose customers as shipping slows or becomes more expensive.

This is the quiet tax of a lagging mailbox: not a single dramatic shutdown, but a steady erosion of rural timing. When a national service like USPS is treated like a profit-and-loss problem, delay becomes an acceptable efficiency tradeoff.

Waterlogged boundaries, the case for bioregionalism, and its unfortunate demise

A bad idea, Grouse mountain, British Columbia, Summer 2021

If you’ve ever been in the Pacific Northwest, you've seen the local “uniform.” Amongst the water-resistant (nothing is water proof!) carhartt pants, flat-billed trucker hats, and the colourful spectrum of flannels, there is a waterproof jacket in the armoury. This jacket must have a hood so that you do not need an umbrella, a sin that only a tourist could make.

A worse idea, Squamish mountain, British Columbia, Spring 2022

The jacket is necessary, as in the wet winter months, any person caught on the scenic trails of Squamish would think that Noah’s flood was upon him, that the sun would never reappear, and that rain has so consumed reality that the conception of the world can only be found within a cloudy mist covering a canopy of pine trees. The water cycle of the PNW calls for the jacket.

In contrast, in a place like the Central Valley, any clothes would require taking into account the overhead sun and the dust. Therein lies the sans irony donning of cowboy hats and boots respectively (Read more about western apparel here). Continue further east on the Interstate 70 through the plains, and you will find the habit of tucking long sleeve shirts into pants, which are then tucked into socks, a necessity in the tick laden bushes of Appalachia. (A study from Nebraska Medicine about increased tick populations).

These outfits make sense where they are located, as culture reflects the ecosystem, hydrological and biological, of the region where people live. This understanding is one key tenet of bioregionalism. Bioregionalism (defined by one non-profit here) is a philosophy that political systems should reflect naturally definable, localistic regions rather than artificial political boundaries. (Read more about this philosophy as taught by a Bay area theatre here). These areas, known as bioregions, can instead be drawn by the natural lines drawn by watershed boundaries, topography, as well as the socio-cultural human histories of the area.

10% water capacity, Lake Hensley, California, 2025

Bioregionalists seek several core goals; including matching political boundaries with the aforementioned bioregions, prioritizing the usage of local resources and materials, and building regional sustainability and supply chains rather than globally. This local focus benefits the making of policy that is suited to local ecological needs, rather than the difficulty of federal or state systems that cannot consider all local conditions and ecosystems. (Read more about federal funding to rural water systems here)

Current political divisions force rural and urban communities into statewide policy frameworks that, through competing interests and compromise, can poorly fit either. Agricultural water use in arid basins is legislated alongside, and often in, coastal zones where the flow of rivers can power 98% of electrical grids (read more about BC Hydro here). Or consider the current issue of the banning or restriction of gasoline vehicles being impractical in rural regions that remain dependent on generators and offgrid vehicles (read more here).

Currently, the rural-urban divide is often framed within a structural power antagonism, where the cosmopolitan elites intrude on the traditional rural communities with their vastly greater urban resources. Geography sharpens these perceived differences. These urban elites live elsewhere from rural denizens, often in ecosystems vastly different. Consider the common epithet, “coastal elite.” (Read more about water disagreements between the rural and the urban here and here).

As the reasoning goes, how could someone in the the Bay understand the water struggles of the central valley? A bioregionalist approach would instead link governance between metropolitan and rural communities wherever and whenever they are linked by watersheds and water cycles requiring literal downstream cooperation.

Of course, bioregionalism is not without flaws. Even on this brief inventory of bioregions, readers will see issues with assuming histories and shared interests in fluid boundaries that are anachronistic, ambiguous, and would be contentious and complex to draw. Land-based identity idealizes lives that are pre-urbanization, occasionally even pre-industrialization, and is often isolationist and exclusionary of change as a result.

In a globalized economy, high technology requires supply chains that cannot be localized efficiently, or at all. Anything that would require national coordination (national defense, macroeconomic policy, large scale infrastructure projects) would be difficult if not impossible under bioregional governance. Of course, there is also the potential of extreme inequality between natural resource-rich and resource-poor regions. Without national redistribution and the needs of national and global economy, spatial inequality would be but guaranteed.

I finish with a point about Cascadia, the former bioregionalist movement stronghold within the PNW that spanned between Juneau, Alaska to San Francisco. Prior to the 47th American president, most money spent within Cascadia, (defined here, as in my heart, as Oregon, Washington, British Columbia), remained within Cascadia. Now with rising tensions between the United States and Canada, this seemingly unbreakable cross-border relationship is strained by the general boycott of American goods by Canadians (read more). Alas, the Cascadian identity, nascent if it ever truly existed, has yielded to national lines for now.

Superbloom, California, 2017

Sale of Loyalton Ranch and land return in California's historic gold country

Willows along the Creek at WélmeltiɁ Preserve.
Photo courtesy of Feather River Land Trust.

On February 10, the City of Santa Clara finalized the sale of Loyalton Ranch, a scenic 10,274-acre property located 35 miles north of Lake Tahoe, to the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California. The property will now be known as the WélmeltiɁ Preserve and will be held by the Washoe Tribe's newly-created Wašíᐧšiw Land Trust.

The City of Santa Clara purchased the property in 1970 for $1.6 million, with hopes for potential geothermal energy development. The projects never materialized, and in 2024, much of the property was razed by a wildfire. A heretofore divided city council came together to look for a buyer.

The deal came together with the help of a $5.5 million dollar grant from the California Wildlife Conservation Board, a state agency, and support from private foundations and donors. The acquisition results from a successful collaboration between the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, the Feather River Land Trust, the Northern Sierra Partnership, and other conservation organizations and public partners. 

This sale is significant for its status as one of the largest land returns in California history, and the largest in the Sierra Nevada. The land area contains over 30 protected-status species, herds of pronghorn deer, golden eagles, and mountain lions. Twenty-seven miles of creeks and numerous springs on the land feed the headwaters of the Middle Fork of the Feather River. Beyond the boundaries of the Preserve, this project represents a step toward re-establishing tribal management of lands in the fragmented landscape characteristic of much land in the Sierra Nevada. 

Map of Project Area reveals checkerboard land ownership
in the region. Photo courtesy of Sierra Sun.

To understand the significance of land return in the Sierra Nevada, it is useful to examine the federal policies that contributed to the fracture of tribal landholdings. In 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, granting millions of acres of public land to railroad companies to finance construction of the transcontinental railroad. The statute created a "checkerboard" pattern of alternating private and public sections along the rail corridors, permanently reshaping land ownership across the West. 

In California and throughout the Sierra Nevada, this pattern consolidated vast tracts in private hands, often without regard for existing tribal presence. The legacy of that policy remains visible today in the fragmented ownership patterns that complicate cohesive land management and habitat restoration efforts. 

This post examines the myriad potential benefits of land return efforts like the one here in the Sierra Nevada. First, returning land directly to ancestral stewards creates new opportunity for Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) practices to flourish. California wildlife agencies recognize TEK to some extent, and these practices are increasingly integrated alongside western conservation methods, but the ability of tribal land managers to direct conservation efforts means TEK and place-based management can take place more readily. Second, greater focus on opportunities for land return in the Northern Sierra Nevada presents a viable way out of the strange pattern of private inholdings and "checkerboard" arrangement of public and private lands. 

Map of checkerboard land surrounding Lake Tahoe.
Map courtesy of  Truckee-Donner Historical Society.

Returning land to tribal stewardship provides tribal community members with meaningful opportunities to reconnect with ancestral lands. In the case of the WélmeltiɁ Preserve, tribal leaders and conservation partners said the acquisition represents a major step toward addressing generations of displacement:

“The return of this land is deeply meaningful for our people,” said Chairman Serrell Smokey of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California. “These lands are part of who we are and have been stewarded by the Washoe people since time immemorial.” [. . .] "This return is about more than acreage," said Corey Pargee, executive director of the Feather River Land Trust. "It's about restoring stewardship to the people who have cared for this landscape for thousands of years." 

Access to culturally significant sites strengthens intergenerational knowledge transfer and traditional practices tied to specific landscapes. Land return thus supports not only environmental restoration, but also cultural continuity and community health. 

Land return also removes administrative barriers that often limit the used of TEK as a primary conservation framework. When tribes hold title to land through tribal governments or land trusts, they can design management regimes that respond to local ecological conditions and long-standing cultural priorities. These strategies may even go on to inform and strengthen regional conservation efforts.

Finally, increasing the number of tribally managed acres in the Northern Sierra boosts possibility of greater habitat connectivity, more cohesive management regimes, and increased climate resilience. Larger contiguous areas under aligned stewardship reduce the inefficiencies created by fragmented ownership. Coordinated management improves wildlife corridors, watershed health, and fire resilience.

Land return efforts like the creation of the WélmeltiɁ Preserve demonstrate how restorative justice and environmental stewardship can move forward together. These projects have the potential to repair both social and ecological systems in the Sierra Nevada. In the Northern Sierra, land return offers a path toward a more equitable and ecologically coherent future. 

The robots are coming to the Salad Bowl

Pro-immigrant demonstrators in Omaha, Nebraska. Photo Credit: NBC News

In June 2025, President Trump paused immigration raids on agricultural workplaces after Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned that farmers were growing uneasy about the crackdown. As this blog noted at the time, the pause was short-lived. By October, the Labor Department’s own filing in the Federal Register admitted the crackdown risked “supply shock-induced food shortages.”

The federal government’s response was to lower wages. A new H-2A rule cut the pay rate for guest farmworkers across the country. In California, the rate for unskilled workers dropped from $19.97 to $13.45 per hour. The United Farm Workers sued. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that farmworkers stand to lose $4.4 to $5.4 billion annually.

This is the context in which agricultural automation is arriving in rural California. The question is who it serves and who it displaces.

The Salad Bowl goes synthetic

Salinas Valley, California (the “Salad Bowl of the World”) produces the majority of the nation’s lettuce, broccoli, and strawberries. Located in Monterey County, Salinas Valley is over 60% Hispanic or Latino, and the local economy depends on agricultural labor.

In 2025, a nonprofit called the Reservoir opened Reservoir Farms, the first on-farm robotics incubator in California, on 40 acres in Salinas. Backed by companies like John Deere and Driscoll’s, the incubator provides startups with fabrication shops, pre-planted test fields, and access to commercial growers. It has since expanded to Sonoma County for vineyard automation.

A “vineyard robot” at work. Photo credit: Cornell Agritech

The startups coming to Salinas Valley build machines designed to do what farm workers currently do by hand. Israeli startup DailyRobotics is deploying robotic strawberry harvesters in California starting April 2026, claiming two to three times the speed of human pickers.

One analysis estimated that strawberry automation alone could eliminate nearly 30,000 farmworker positions in California. The machines cost around $300,000 each, priced for large-scale operations out of reach of small family growers.

Fast advances in robotics means automated strawberry picking. Photo Credit: DailyRobotics

A manufactured crisis

The labor shortage driving this transition is real, but it is not natural. Over 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, according to the USDA and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has removed workers from the labor pool while cutting wages for the legal guest workers who remain. In Minnesota, for example, H-2A visa numbers dropped 12% in the first half of 2025.

A prior post on this blog documented this pattern through the 2008 Postville, Iowa raid: 389 arrests in a town of 2,500, the departure of another 1,000 immigrants, the loss of 7% of the county’s workforce, and the bankruptcy of the local factory. The void was eventually filled by a new immigrant workforce from Palau.

The pattern holds internationally. Another post on this blog examined Italy’s “Agro-Mafia,” where restrictive immigration policy has not reduced agricultural dependence on migrant labor but has driven it underground into exploitative networks where workers earn as little as 3 to 4 euros an hour. Punitive enforcement produces either exploitation or automation, depending on who has capital.

Who benefits?

Reservoir Farms says the right things about workforce transition. Its CEO has stated that “automation should augment the workforce, not replace it,” and the Reservoir has partnered with Hartnell College on retraining programs. But as one community organizer in Salinas noted: “We support training, but we also know not every displaced worker will become a robot mechanic.”

Farmworkers harvest strawberries at Lewis Taylor Farms in Georgia. Photo Credit: Lance Cheung

The farmworker communities that have sustained Salinas Valley for generations face a displacement that is social and cultural. Lisa R. Pruitt and Marta R. Vanegas have written about “urbanormativity,” which is the tendency for legal and policy frameworks to render rural populations invisible. Farmworkers in Salinas are doubly invisible: rural and immigrant, performing labor the nation depends on but does not want to see.

This echoes what I wrote about in a previous post on AI data centers in rural Arizona. In both cases, Silicon Valley capital arrives in rural spaces to solve urban problems. Data centers serve urban tech consumers, and harvesting robots serve urban grocery consumers. The costs fall on the rural communities that host the infrastructure.

The choice ahead

Agricultural automation is probably inevitable. Some of these technologies could genuinely improve conditions for farmworkers. But the federal government that paused immigration raids in June, reversed course days later, cut guest worker wages in October, and admitted to “supply shock-induced food shortages” in a Federal Register filing has offered farmworker communities in places like Salinas exactly nothing in return.

The robots are coming to the Salad Bowl. The question is whether anyone in Washington has thought about what happens to the people already there.

The disappearing place

British Columbia's Picturesque Highways, 1942

Photo Credit: Blizzy 63 Flickr 

Name: Helen Claire Frost

Identifying Characteristics: Caucasian female. Blue eyes and brown-blonde hair. About 5 feet 5 inches. 125 pounds. 

Occupations: Table busser, berry picker, painter, laborer. 

Status: Missing for 55 years, 4 months, and 7 days. 

In the fall of 1970, Helen Claire Frost slipped her arms into the sleeves of a navy nylon parka, wiped cold coffee from the corners of her mouth, and set out for a short walk from the Prince George apartment she shared with her sister Sandy. Authorities know she made it as far as the Husky gas station. They know she was four days shy of her eighteenth birthday. They know she had recently given birth to a daughter, Sandra Jeanette.

What they don’t know, is what happened next.

Theories flourished. Runaway. Suicide. Accident. Homicide. Answers, however, proved less abundant. In 2009, Sandy Frost disclosed that her father had told her, “I really hope I know what happened before I die.” Dennis Roy Frost died on July 20, 2014. Helen remains missing.

Highway of Tears Corridor

Photo Credit: OpenStreetMapContributors

The highway of tears

Chronologically, Helen is the first recorded disappearance along what Florence Naziel coined as “The Highway of Tears” in 1998. Described as a warm and eccentric Elvis-loving character with bleached blonde hair and a fondness for leopard print, the term came to the Wet’suwet’en mother and grandmother during a vigil walk in memory of the disappeared.

Specifically, it refers to a 720-kilometer-long span of Yellowhead Highway 16 that connects the towns of Prince George and Prince Rupert in British Columbia, Canada. Since 1970, this tract of land has been the site of eighteen documented disappearances, although local indigenous groups believe the number is closer to fifty. As of 2026, nearly every case remains unsolved.

Highway 16

Photo Credit: Kevin Dooley

“Another drunk Indian”

A series of explanations has been proposed to elucidate how this small stretch of pavement became a place of nightmares, how an entire country came to cultivate a years-long toleration of crime and stifled progress. Rampant poverty leads to low rates of vehicle ownership, making hitchhiking the only form of mobility for many rural British Columbians to access work, school, and medical treatment. Additionally, the region is plagued by drug abuse and domestic violence, scars of the now infamous Canadian Indian residential school system.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Reserve Constable Wayne Clary, who has worked these cases for decades, believes racism has played the central role: 

“Racism? Absolutely. Along Highway 16, we have vulnerable women because of what the Canadian government did to Indigenous peoples and their history. How they tore out a generation, how they weakened a family structure [through residential schools] - that doesn’t get fixed overnight.”

In the words of Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee, the stench of death in rural BC blossoms from the earliest roots of colonialism: “This goes along with 152 years of colonization. Our women are looked at as ‘another drunk Indian’."

TCH-Yellowhead 16

Ryan Craig

The finding place

There are still those who are trying to change the narrative surrounding Highway 16, from a place of loss to a place of resilience. In 2005, the RCMP founded the Project E-Pana Task Force to determine whether a serial killer, or killers, is responsible for murdering young women traveling along major highways in BC. In 2023, billboards sponsored by the families of the missing and murdered were erected along the highway to raise awareness and warn women not to hitchhike. In 2025, five cell towers were installed along the corridor to aid resource extraction efforts, which activists hope will have the unintended benefit of improving communication and safety for travelers.

Highway 16

Photo Credit: Gripso_Banana_Prune Flickr

The lost ones

More than fifty years after Helen Frost vanished into the chill night air, Chelsey Amanda Quaw’s body was discovered in a wooded area just north of Highway 16, one month after she disappeared while stepping outside for a cigarette. Her murderer has yet to be found.

To some, she will just be a name on a list. Another entry in the ‘quirk’ that is Highway 16. But she was also a beloved member of her Saik’uz First Nation community. A daughter and sister whose family will miss her dearly. Mary Teegee, a leader from the Highway of Tears Governing Body, laments that efforts to solve the case appear to be conforming to old patterns:

“Why were there not RCMP helicopters, why weren't there RCMP dogs, why wasn't there more RCMP boots on the ground?...I don't think that Pam [Heron] should have had to prove that Chelsey was not a drug addict...Imagine if this was a young white girl out of West Vancouver. Would the mother have to be [calling for] more RCMP involvement, for more of an investigation?"

Zoom court: Problems and solutions

A meeting celebrating Wikipedia's 20th birthday, conducted on Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Today you can do almost anything remotely. Want to tie the knot with that special someone in your life? You can do it through Zoom. Want to earn your degree? You can do that remotely now, even a law degree. Have you met your ultimate demise, and your relatives are saying goodbye one last time? Zoom has got you covered there, too.

Despite how much of our world has moved to myriad uses of optic fibers running underground, it seems like the legal system has been particularly resistant to opportunities associated with this new reality. This especially impacts rural communities, which often find themselves unable to hire and keep enough public defenders and prosecutors willing to live nearby and keep the criminal justice system running.

Background

Before getting to how the legal profession can step with both feet into the digital age, let’s zoom out a bit. Before the days of Zoom—and even before the days of the now defunct Skype—courts around the country toyed with the idea of remote assistance by counsel. Some efforts date to the 1990s. Back then, the technology was clearly nowhere near where it needed to be for it to be a reasonable alternative to in person attorney appearances. Most efforts were thus limited and they ended in the early 2000s.

Despite improvements in technology in the 2000s and 2010s, it was not until the 2020s that the idea of remote appearances by counsel made a comeback. When that happened, it wasn’t just a product of technological innovation, it was also a product of necessity. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shook the entire world, and our criminal justice system along with it. States around the country scrambled to find ways in which essential processes of life that required close quarters contact between people could be performed at a time in which we thought such contact could prove lethal.

And so, the legal system went remote in the way that prisons, schools, funeral homes, churches and most other institutions of American life did so. That is to say, hastily and inadequately. In her 2025 article, We Need to Talk: Modernizing Attorney-Client Jail Communications, Texas A&M School of Law Professor Cynthia Alkon reports the results of a nationwide survey of lawyers she conducted shortly after the start of the pandemic. Many of the respondents were criminal defense attorneys.

A bus somewhere in Bodega Bay, a village in Sonoma County, CA. Reaching Sonoma County's Superior Court from this starting point would probably take multiple buses and hours of time.

Some problems

The overwhelming majority of the attorneys responding to Alkon's survey reported concerns about the confidentiality of their remote meetings with their clients. This was not an abstract, unsubstantiated fear. Some of the article respondents reported incidents of guards and prosecutors listening in on their remote communications, of inmates not being in private rooms during their remote communications with their attorneys, and of deputies recording the calls and forwarding them to the police and to prosecutors.

Confidentiality, however, was not the only issue. Respondents of Professor Alkon’s survey also noted the difficulty of building rapport with clients when discussing private and sensitive subjects when they were not face to face. It was not only lawyers and clients who were having trouble connecting due to remote interactions, but also defendants and judges. In its 2020 report, The Impact of Video Proceedings on Fairness and Access to Justice in Court, the Brennan Center cites a 2010 study which found that defendants whose hearings were conducted over video had substantially higher bond amounts set than those who appeared in person (with the increases ranging from 50% to 90%).

Having all parties physically present in the courtroom also reinforces the gravity and seriousness of the proceedings. In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been multiple reports of criminal defendants being punished for not understanding the seriousness of their situation. For example, a St. Joseph County, Michigan, man found himself in trouble with Judge Jeffrey Middleton when he logged into virtual court with a colossaly inappropriate username. The man was called "an idiot" by the judge, and was placed in a Zoom breakout room as a punishment). In another tragic episode of Zoom court, a man from Washtenaw County, Michigan, found himself in hot water with Judge Cedric J. Simpson when he logged into virtual court from behind the wheel of a moving vehicle to answer to charges of driving with a suspended license (in an astonishing turn of events, the judge realized the man had never had a license, an ordered him to walk himself to the county jail). In perhaps the most extreme case, a Sacramento, California, surgeon logged into virtual court while operating on a patient. These are but a few examples of how the informality of remote platforms caused defendants to behave in ways that did not rise to the seriousness of their situation. Skeptics of remote court appearances and client counseling could certainly argue that defendants may not assist their attorneys with their own defense as effectively when the attorney is just a small picture in a computer.

Another issue that may affect outcomes for criminal defendants who are assisted by an attorney who is working remotely is that of the subtle communications that happened between client and attorney during court appearances. In an episode of the Center for Justice Innovation’s podcast In Practice, the hosts noted that public defenders who joined one of their virtual panels expressed concern about their ability to communicate with their clients through video conferencing. The panelists noted that public defenders often exchange quick whispers and other communications with defendants. The inability to do so can severely undermine outcomes for defendants.

Alpine County's Courthouse in Markleeville, CA. As of late 2024, everything was being conducted via Zoom.

Some solutions

The issue of confidentiality, while the most serious, may also be the most straightforward to solve—at least theoretically. In her article, Professor Alkon suggests that:

prosecutors’ offices should clearly, as a matter of policy, prohibit anyone in their offices from using information gathered through recordings of privileged attorney-client conversations.

In practice, these prohibitions must be enforced. How might that be achieved? They should be enforced exactly as they are enforced when there are intrusions upon face-to-face private communications between attorneys and criminal defendants. Potential remedies include suppressing evidence dervied from such intrusions, disqualification of the involved attorneys, sanctions, suspensions, or even disbarment. Perhaps this seemed difficult to implement while the world was scrambling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is no reason why it should be an insurmountable challenge today.

The rapport problem between lawyers and clients is a serious one, and it is one that might not have a simple solution. Perhaps video conferencing technology will eventually improve to the point where it is able to fully capture human presence and feelings, enabling lawyers to build affinity with clients across the state as if they were mere feet from each other. Until then, we might find solace in the fact that uncongenial assistance of counsel is a lot better than no assistance at all. Similarly, I think lawyers and courts can take extra efforts to impress the need on defendants to assist in their own defense.

As for the issue of the small interactions between client and attorney that are crucial to the process, this might be an area where courts can accommodate the needs of an evolving society. This would not be the first time the courts have had to be innovative and accomodating. For example, no one will argue that the need for interpreters in court does not slow down the process, or that it does not require some extra effort from judges and juries. Yet, it is clearly a cost worth bearing. With that in mind, I do not think that having a court appearance that takes a few more minutes due to the need to quickly go into a private breakout room is too high a price. Courts can experiment and find ways to make the process more agile, while always prioritizing the ability of defense lawyers to assist their clients.

Finally, it is perhaps best that defendants appear remotely as little as possible, to eliminate the potential prejudice that is hinted at by the more negative outcomes they face when they do so. At the same time, judges should receive training on the inherent biases that humans have when they hear and see a person through a screen as compared to face-to-face. Technology has progressed quite quickly in the last few decades, and it is normal for people's instincts and intuitions to lag behind such fast-paced development. This is no reason to discard the idea. Perhaps judges and juries today deliver more negative outcomes when parts of the process are conducted remotely. This need not be the case in the future. Part of the solution, as with many other things, may be education.

Conclusion

The potential issues examined in this article are not the only ones that may arise from the practice of remote criminal defense. A further examination may reveal others. However, what I hope this post can impress upon readers is that there is absolutely no reason to give up in the face of these challenges. These are, mostly, technical challenges. America has put a dozen men on the surface of the moon; it must be capable of putting two people in a confidential Zoom breakout room.

Rural voters and presidential policy packages

In 21st century politics, there has been the sense that rural populations are to blame for the election of figures such as Donald Trump. A full two election cycles before Donald Trump ran for president, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama attempted to explain small town Americans' frustration while attending a San Francisco fundraiser. 

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady of Arkansas, called then-Senator Obama "divisive and elitist" over his comments, prompting a row about Clinton's authenticity in courting rural voters. A mere eight years later, Hillary Clinton commented that half of then-candidate Trump's supporters fit into a "basket of deplorables" while the other half felt the "government let them down" and were "desperate for change." In light of her defense of small-town America eight years prior, it's not unreasonable to think Hillary Clinton put rural voters in the latter category. Nonetheless, rural voters felt maligned, even in spite of sympathetic voices from the left. Rural voters did not defect to the Republican Party overnight in 2016. Rather, a prolonged process of vote defection occurred as the New Deal and Great Society coalition of the Democratic Party inevitably broke up. 

I. Rural Populism in the Gilded Age

The rapid urbanization which made rural communities their own distinct sub-class in spatial terms occurred in the first part of the 20th Century, accompanied by the industrial revolution and the type of populist social consciousness not yet seen in Western countries. The period between the American Civil War and World War One was marked by explosive economic growth, the benefits of which were not distributed equally among the socio-economic classes of America. It is now known as the Gilded Age. Likewise, one look at the current stock market's all-time highs and another look at median wages will say something similar about the present moment. With many calling the present moment marked by extreme wealth inequality a new Gilded Age, it's important to look at the first one.

Emblematic of rural people's interests in the Gilded Age was William Jennings Bryan, who ran in 1896 against William McKinley. While McKinley ran on a platform of high tariffs and maintaining the gold standard, Bryan delivered his Cross of Gold speech, outlining a platform of shifting to a more inflationary silver standard to aid indebted people, support for the descendants of "those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness" away from the Atlantic Coast, and against government favoritism toward business interests. A populist, Bryan insisted that the "attorney in a country town," the farmer, the miner, and the "merchant at the crossroads store" are just as much businessmen as their urban counterparts. The topic of Bryan's speech included calls for inflation, praise for laborers, and denunciation of idle capital holders.

From an economic perspective, modern audiences would equivocate William Jennings Bryan with left-wing political views. However, he was also a Fundamentalist Christian who promoted the criminal prosecution of the teaching of evolution even as late as 1925. Bryan also held complex, seemingly contradictory views on race and religion, extending religious pluralism to Catholics, Jews, and Native Americans while at the same time advocating for the exclusion of East Asian immigrants and Black Americans. 

Ultimately, William Jennings Bryan lost his election, the nation split on then-traditionally partisan lines with the industrialized Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast voting Republican. The South, frontier prairie states settled in the late 1800s, and Washington State voting Democrat. William Jennings Bryan attempted to run again "in 1900 and 1908, before serving as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson." He would be the last presidential candidate of either the Democratic Party or Republican Party to run on an explicitly pro-rural platform, although many candidates have since made overtures to rural communities as a mere part of their election coalitions rather than the mainstay of their coalitions. 

Credit: 270towin.com

1896 candidate William Jennings Bryan may seem like ancient history, but some parallels may be drawn from his appeals for the sake of rural populations to modern-day political appeals to rural populations in political coalition-building. 

II. The Great Party Switch

In the years succeeding the start of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt built a New Deal Coalition of working-class voters that secured a steady flow of Democratic presidents from 1932 to 1980. While Southerners and rural voters were included in the coalition and benefitted from the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration, Roosevelt's "prototypical coalition member was a white worker in a unionized factory. " Rural voters were a part of the Democratic Party's big tent rather than being the center that William Jennings Bryan envisioned thirty-six years prior. 

Starting in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson released another policy package to rival The New Deal: The Great Society. The overarching goal of the Great Society was to combat poverty and inequality in the United States. Among the package were provisions that specifically extended aid to rural areas of the United States. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 sought to mobilize volunteer workers through the Job Corps to both urban and rural areas. The act's Title III provisions also eased the issuance of loans to those living in rural communities. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 served the dual purpose of giving aid to Americans living under food insecurity and bolstering the agricultural economy. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965's Title X provisions extended insured rural housing loans, an interest rate capped at 5%, an extension of housing authorizations, and provided an expanded statutory definition of both under "2,500 inhabitants" or under "5,500 if it is rural in character."  The act also extended financial assistance to nonprofits constructing water distribution and treatment facilities in "smaller municipality or rural areas."

Historical data compiled by a 2014 article by Drew DeSilver at the Pew Research Center from the Census Bureau indicated marked success in reducing poverty rates among children and the elderly. From a regional perspective, anti-poverty measures yielded the greatest percentage decrease in the American South, although the region still outpaces the West, Midwest, and Northeast in terms of poverty. The continuing disparity may be indicative of why American Southerners continue to feel left behind going into the 2010s.

Delineating further from a regional view to a population density view, the US Department of Agriculture compiled data on the decline of poverty rates in metro and nonmetro populations from 1959 to 2019. The data indicated a sharp decline from 1959 to 1974, followed by stagnation, an increase going into the 1980s, and then an unsteady decline before rising again in the mid-2000s. Although the decline in poverty clearly begins at least starting in 1959, during Eisenhower's penultimate year in the White House, it is a reasonable presumption that the Great Society's economic measures were not counter to the material interests of rural populations. The Great Society being a continuation of the New Deal makes more sense of the chart.

Despite its focus on urban renewal, the Great Society's economic package hardly abandoned rural communities. Government support and economic liberalism won over white working-class voters, many of whom called rural communities their home. However, the social revolution of the late 1960s made it difficult for the Democrats to hold their coalition together. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 resulted in another split between the Democrat Party and its Southern constituents during the 1964 election. Although predominantly rural states in the Midwest and Great Plains rallied for Johnson in 1964, the Democratic Party lost the Deep South to Barry Goldwater. 

Credit: 270towin.com

In the 1964 election, the particular history of segregation in the Deep South resulted in a defection from the Democratic Party while every other characteristically rural state remained with the Democratic Coalition.  

Now would be an important time to mention, although it is beyond the scope of this paper, that rural communities have their own regional and cultural traits. The predominant religious denomination of a community will also influence the political leanings of that community. The traditionally English-American Calvinist (i.e. Reformed Church, Baptist, Methodist, etc.) rural South will carry their own political beliefs separate from rural German-Americans in the Lutheran Upper Midwest. The presence of Catholic communities not usually associated with the rural United States adds its own political flavor. The difference in local cultures is one explanation for why distinctive regions of the United States associated with rurality may vote for comprehensively different candidates in the same election cycle. 

The Democratic embrace of social movements "such as feminism, the anti-war movement, environmentalism, and social libertarianism" caused a rift between the party and their socially conservative and economically progressive white working-class constituents.

On the dimension of economic sustainability, Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society policy package lifted an enormous amount of Americans out of poverty. However, it contributed heavily to deficit spending. The fiscal costs of the ongoing Vietnam War added even more to the budget deficit. 

Republicans interrupted the Democratic winning streak in the 1952, 1956, 1968, and 1972 victories of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Although victorious in their respective elections, Eisenhower and Nixon both operated under the overarching social welfare economic paradigm set by the New Deal and Great Society policy packages. However, as more Southern Americans began defecting from the Democratic Party in the late 1960s, President Nixon was able to exploit the growing social rift among the Democratic Party and working-class white Americans. Among Nixon's supporters were a geographically diverse array of Manhattan construction workers frustrated with college-educated protesters, Native Americans seeking self-determination, and white Southerners disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Among his other seemingly contradictory acts, Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in spite of his private disdain for counterculture environmentalists. Like William Jennings Bryan, the social conservatism of Richard Nixon was complex and difficult to caricature. 

By the time President Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon following the latter's resignation, concerns about economic stagnation and inflation forced both parties to shift toward fiscal austerity. The types of policy aid packages delivered to the working poor under the New Deal and the Great Society became increasingly rare. Both the social and fiscal aspects of the Great Society's policy package fell out of popularity. President Ford was the first to attempt to address inflation with his "Whip Inflation Now" plan, amounting to a call to American households to limit spending in an effort to keep prices down. Unsurprisingly, the plan was unpopular and was likely a contributing factor to Gerald Ford's defeat at the hands of Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter. An observation gleaned from the 1976 election map is that America's Southern states had not irreversibly defected to the Republican Party. When presented with a Democratic candidate from Southern agrarian roots, Deep South Americans were willing to vote Democrat; this pattern would later be repeated in 1992 and 1996 with the election of Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter continued Ford's efforts to halt inflation, appointing Paul Volcker to be the chair of the Federal Reserve. Although at the price of high interest rates and the resulting double-dip recession of 1981 and 1982, the Carter appointee finally defeated the inflation scare by the early 1980s. 

Credit: 270towin.com

In December of 1979, after over two years of preparations, Jimmy Carter announced his Small Community and Rural Development Policy, an effort aimed at reducing the type of rural material deprivation he experienced as a young man and establishing local councils to inform state decisions on agriculture and rural development. Unfortunately, the nature of the short four-year term of the presidency makes long-term projects difficult to manage. In 1980, Carter polled unusually well in the rural South, carrying the vast majority of rural black voters. Reagan carried only 60% of the most rural 90% white majority counties in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Nonetheless, Carter lost the election in an electoral landslide. The Reagan Revolution put an end to Jimmy Carter's designs in the next year. 

Credit: 270towin.com

III. The Reagan Revolution

Where rural Americans benefitted from the New Deal and Great Society's left-leaning economic package, they felt alienated by the increasing social liberalism of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution offered the opposite: fiscal conservatism and social conservatism. The government would begin investing in financial institutions and businesses rather than directly into communities. Factors from within and without the United States in the 1970s culminated in the 1980s Farm Crisis. Reagan's Food Security Act of 1985 attempted to mitigate the effects of the farm crisis by temporarily reducing interest rates to 1988, expanded the list of eligible rural utility borrowers, set price supports for particular crops, expanded the eligible use of food stamps, and set government purchase quantities for many of those same crops. Two years later, Congress and Reagan passed the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, which sought to extend financial aid to agricultural financial institutions. Although Reagan is criticized for failing to stop the continued loss of small farms, it is worth mentioning that farm centralization held a steep trend starting in the 1930s with that trend tapering off only by the mid-1970s. 

Credit: Katherine Lacy

In the election of 1988, Vice President George HW Bush capitalized on the popularity of the Reagan administration and won election to the presidency against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. However, H.W. Bush would only enjoy one term due to the poor aging of Reagan economic policies, his reversal on his promise not to raise taxes, and his lack of popular appeal in comparison with Bill Clinton. 

One-hundred years from William Jennings Bryan's 1896 election, rural communities were once again in play. In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton, former Arkansas governor and expert saxophone player, won two consecutive elections against World War Two veterans George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. The Southern States appeared split between the candidates while the Great Plains region predominantly leaned toward Bush and Dole. Like Carter before him, Clinton's Southern roots led Southerners to see in him a trustworthy candidate. Clinton accomplished his victories by capitalizing on discontent with the Republican Party's tax advantages given to the rich during the Reagan Revolution and defending against seemingly reckless spending cuts to education and Medicaid. Nonetheless, Clinton operated within the prevailing paradigm of the social and fiscal Reagan Revolution, giving concessions to Republicans in the form of police union-approved crime bills and welfare reform limiting recipients to two years before assistance would be rescinded. His relative social conservatism won him points with rural communities, although his willingness to embrace the new financial professional class and globalized economic order ultimately proved disastrous for the economies of rural communities.

Credit: 270towin.com

Credit: 270towin.com

Clinton went on to split rural voters again with the Republican Party again in 1996 before George W. Bush won predominantly rural regions of the United States in 2000 and 2004. The split between urban and rural residents for Gore and Bush was measured at 34 percentage points, only to be outstripped by "Jews and white Christians" at 40 points and "other voters and the religious right" at 36 points. Al Gore's environmentalism in particular made him appear threatening to communities dependent on coal mining and power generation. The election of 2000 proved to be a massive reversal of Clinton's gains in rural counties, and it was the final party reversal of most rural states to date. 

Credit: 270towin.com

In his first year of office, George W. Bush announced his opposition to the Agriculture, Conservation, and Rural Enhancement Act of 2001 due to concerns about overproduction, price depression, a regressive tax on milk consumption, subsidies going to the largest of food producers, and the risk of "subsidies exceeding limits under WTO rules." Much like Clinton and Reagan before him, George W. Bush openly embraced the bipartisan consensus around the globalization of trade. Unlike previous iterations of agricultural bills, Bush seemed to be opposed to subsidies, ultimately relying on his trust in free trade and the free market. Ultimately, the bill was not passed. In 2004, Bush went on to solidify his lead in his election against John Kerry. By 2008, years of free market and free trade principals came to a head. The 1999 Repeal of Glass-Steagall significantly deregulated the banking sector, encouraging the mingling of commercial banking and investment banking interests. The opening of international trade to developing markets allowed US employers to shut down largely rural manufacturing centers in favor of cheap labor elsewhere during the leadup to the 2008 recession. After working-class America felt the brunt of the recession, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 seemed to reward major corporate and financial institutions. Working-class Americans were left to their own devices. 

Credit: Sarah Low

The rise in income inequality due to the recession, where the upper income bracket recaptured the vast majority of the income share lost by working class families, started to fuel an increasingly loud movement of political populism. This brings us to the moment described in the introduction of this post: the 2008 landslide victory of Barack Obama without any need to appeal to rural voters. By election day 2008, rural communities were already thoroughly disillusioned with both parties. Rural turnout declined massively from 2004 in many locations. By 2012, Democratic priorities fully shifted away from the Clintonian 1996 strategy. 

IV. The End of History

While social conservatism may have been the cause of rural defection to from the New Deal Coalition starting in the 1960s, it does not fully account for the now uniform changes starting in the 2000s. 

With the fall of the Soviet Union, world leaders announced a new economic world order defined by commercial interconnectedness. The 2001 accession of China to the World Trade Organization was already met with suspicion of non-compliance from the start. The increasingly global nature of economic competition hit rural areas hard. In spite of the credit Reagan enjoyed from rural voters, his NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico deprived rural areas of the manufacturing appeal they previously enjoyed when compared to the previous manufacturing sites in larger cities. The trend, starting in the 1980s, only intensified with the introduction of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 2000s further deprived rural areas of "about a quarter of their manufacturing jobs due both to overseas competition and increases in productivity."  Left-behind working-class communities ultimately sought out both progressive and protectionist economic policies to scrape back what their leaders gave to multinational corporations and foreign workforces. 

V. The Present Moment

The United States does not have its modern-day William Jennings Bryan. Desperate for change, rural voters swung in favor of New York reject Donald Trump.

Credit: 270towin.com

The 2020 election yielded similar results as far as predominantly rural states went, looking almost like a reversal of the 1896 map. Although Joe Biden won victories in the Rust Belt, states which saw their hay-day during America's industrialization, rural-coded states in the late-to-be settled Great Plains and late-to-industrialize South largely held for Trump. 

Credit: 270towin.com

In the absence of Scranton Joe from the end of the 2024, the Democrats lost a number of blue-collar communities in the Rust Belt.

Credit: 270towin.com

The subtext in the last three elections is this: rural America was not the deciding swing factor in Trump's victories and defeat. They have swung Republican in every election since 2000. Rather, the Rust Belt states in the Upper Midwest were in the balance. The rural political appetite, disillusioned with the establishment of both major parties, would have better stomached the economically left political outsider Bernie Sanders than Clintonian party establishment figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 

Recent polling from the 2024 election was conducted across 1,713 interviews and ten battleground states. The poll attributes economically populist policies to rural voter preferences and attributes the unwillingness to vote for, at the time, Joe Biden to the lack of appearances and messaging directed toward rural communities. When poll answers were phrased without party attribution, responses trended toward more economically left and populist policies calling for elite and corporate accountability. Contrary to expectations, conservative social topics did not predominate the concerns of rural voters. Given more polling, Democratic Party strategists may come to understand that rural areas are not unwinnable so long as they refer to historical winning strategy of letting fiscal progressive messaging take center stage in the party platform. Although he partially got rural America into this mess, Democrats should still heed the immortalized words of Bill Clinton: "It's the economy, stupid."