40 hours or 60: Who decides what rural labor is worth?

Sugar beet worker in Colorado (1938). Source: Library of Congress 

In 2011, this blog post observed that farmworkers:

[R]eceive little protection from the law...[and] are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act.

The National Labor Relations Act gives workers the right to unionize, and the exclusion of farm workers is part of a broader pattern. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 similarly exempted agricultural workers from overtime protections; a carve-out that persists at the federal level today. As the National Employment Law Project has noted, Congress approved this exemption as part of a:

[G]rand compromise that excluded farm and domestic workers - who were overwhelmingly Black - from the protections being afforded to other workers.

Colorado is now testing whether states can succeed where the federal government has not; a move is afoot there to extend overtime protections to farmworkers without triggering the very harms those protections are meant to prevent. 

Here's some recent history. In 2021, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill ("SB") 21-087, the "Farmworker Bill of Rights," which brought agricultural workers under state overtime rules for the first time. The law was phased in gradually, initially kicking in at 60 hours per week, then declining over time. Currently, the law operates through a bifurcated system: workers harvesting outside the peak season are generally paid overtime after 48 hours, while peak-season workers receive overtime after 56 hours. 

Map of Colorado Counties. Source: David Benbennick, Wikimedia Commons

Now, five years later, Democrats in the state legislature are split over what comes next. One bill would lower the threshold to 40 hours, matching the standard for other industries. A competing bill would raise it back to 60, essentially returning to where the phase-in began.  

Senator Jessie Danielson has introduced SB 26-081, which would lower the threshold to 40 hours per workweek or 12 hours per workday, matching the standard for most other Colorado workers. Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez is expected to introduce a competing bill that would raise the threshold to 60 hours before overtime applies. 

Farm operators argue that a 40-hour threshold could be fatal. Don Brown, a Yuma County farmer and former state agriculture commissioner, told Colorado Politics that if the 40-hour bill passes, "we will have to figure out how to eliminate jobs and mechanize more."

Peach picker in Palisade, CA (2015).
Source: Library of Congress. 

Bruce Talbott, owner of Talbott Farms, is the largest fruit grower on the Western Slope: a portion of Colorado that is west of the Continental Divide (the mountain ridge that separates rivers flowing to the Pacific Ocean from those flowing to the Atlantic Ocean), and is home to the state's fruit-growing industry. Talbott Farms recently built a new bunkhouse to spread hours across more workers to minimize overtime. In response to the possibility of lowering the overtime threshold to 40 hours, Talbott stated: 

All businesses have to live within their means. In the end, it's the farmworker who gets hurt. 

The industry also faces broader challenges. The director of the Colorado Department of Agriculture's market division noted that net farm income is projected to drop to $1.8 billion in 2026 - $400 million lower than the previous year - citing fluctuating markets and low commodity prices. 

Farmworker advocates see the issue differently. Betty Velasquez of Project Protect Food Systems Workers argues:

[Farmworkers] are the people providing food on our tables. They should have access to earn more money as well. 

Advocates also contend that the industry has not produced data showing overtime rules specifically cause harm, and they point out that reduced hours have given workers more time with their families. Yet, the empirical picture is also contested. 

A 2023 study by UC Berkeley researcher Alexandra Hill found that California's overtime law led to reduced hours and earnings for farmworkers after employers shortened workweeks to avoid overtime costs. Hill's continued research found that by 2022:

[California farmworkers] earned about a hundred dollars less per week on average than they would have without the law in place. 

The Colorado debate exposes a structural tension in rural livelihood policy. Agricultural exceptionalism - the legal tradition of treating farm labor as categorically different - was born of a racist compromise in 1938. States like Colorado and California are now experimenting with alternatives. Those experiments produce uneven results, with some states like New York and Oregon offering tax credits to offset higher labor costs while others press forward without such cushions. Workers and operators each claim to speak for the rural interest. 

Senator Danielson insists the state should be doing more to protect farmworkers. Senator Rodriguez frames the dilemma as "death by 1,000 cuts" - death to farmers, that is - by water shortages, tariffs, and now labor costs. 

Both are Democrats. Both represent rural livelihoods. Neither has a clean answer.

Rural morality and the left

Western Norway

Source: Wikimedia Commons (2016)

Internationalism, the idea that people and states should organize across borders, is a popular organizing principle on the political left. It takes two related forms. Liberal internationalism promotes rule of law, open markets, and free trade as a path to peace through multilateral governance. Socialist internationalism emphasizes solidarity among workers across nations, rather than competition between them. Both tend to replace an emphasis on local community with an abstract political identity that isn’t rooted in any particular place. 

International governance creates a layer of authority that communities cannot meaningfully influence. The resulting cosmopolitan governing class (sometimes pejoratively referred to as “globalists”) are socially and geographically distant from communities affected by their policy. Meanwhile, international economic integration guts local economic prospects so that multinational firms can thrive. After China's accession to the World Trade Organization, imports of Chinese furniture surged, leading firms that once anchored the manufacturing economy of High Point to shut local factories and source production abroad

This process spreads similar models of education and culture, eroding distinct regional identities and traditions. In the name of internationalism, many have advocated for cultivating cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.” Within this frame, local or regional culture is something to be overcome, not preserved. Is rural culture something that needs to be overcome in pursuit of a more equal society? 

French philosopher Jean-Claude Michèa offers a critique of liberalism that bears directly on this question. Until recently his work was unavailable in English. Michael Behrent, a History Professor at Appalachian State University, published a collection of his works titled Toward a Conservative Left. Don’t let the title put you off. What the title evokes is the way in which Michèa combines a critique of capitalism with a suspicion of "progress". Michèa says little about American politics in his work, but his analysis maps uncomfortably well onto the contemporary Democratic Party, which has become a party of urban educated professionals. 

Michèa’s personal background is relevant too. Born in Paris in 1950, he was raised in public housing by parents who were both members of the French Communist Party. The Party was central to his childhood. It employed his parents, with his dad working as sports reporter for the Party newspaper. It was a community of working-class people who looked out for one another. Today, Michea lives on a farm in southwest France. 

At the center of Michèa’s work is Orwell’s concept of “common decency,” developed in the 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier.  For Orwell, common decency is the moral intuition observable in tight-knit communities built around face-to-face interaction. In his 1939 essay on Dickens, Orwell argues that Dickens owed his popularity to a rare ability to give comic, memorable expression to the native decency of the common man. It is the instinct “that makes a jury award excessive damages when a rich man’s car runs over a poor man.” 

Michèa takes this concept further,  giving it anthropological character. Working people, because of their way of earning a living and social status, tend to exhibit a form of solidarity and spontaneous ethics. Working people rely on one another out of necessity. It is a set of habits that arise through family life, neighborhood association, and shared work. Common decency requires social relations through which people experience themselves as dependent on and responsible for one another. Capitalism, Michèa argues, is breaking down this social fabric. As the market relentlessly expands into every area of life, relationships once governed by reciprocity become self-interested transactions. 

This maps directly with the concept of high density of acquaintanceship associated with rural communities. In a small agricultural community, a neighbor’s failed harvest is visible. Decency is not an abstract value, but a material reality that rural people navigate on a daily basis.  Michèa argues that modern society has removed people from the social relations that foster this common decency. 

Here is where Michèa’s argument becomes uncomfortable. He contends that economic liberalism, meaning the spreading of free markets, free trade, and global integration of markets-- are not in tension with cultural liberalism . He believes these two liberalisms actually operate in concert. He writes, “a right-wing economy cannot function in a lasting way without a left-wing culture.” It is well documented that economic liberalism has devastated rural communities by financializing land, offshoring manufacturing, and consolidating agricultural markets. 

Cultural liberalism, for Michèa, works in parallel. It elevates individual autonomy and the right to choose one’s lifestyle over inherited social norms or traditions. Institutions that once anchored rural life: stable family, religious practice, the local community, have all been delegitimized over time in the name of individual emancipation. Rural communities are left with a social and moral vacuum at a time when economic liberalism has taken away their material foundations. For Michèa this is not a coincidence, capitalism prefers autonomous individuals without a sense of rootedness to a place and an inherited way of life. The tech worker who relocates for opportunity is a more compatible economic subject than the farmer who will not leave because his family has worked the same land for three generations. 

While Michèa’s argument is not without its blind spots, he invites the left to take working class culture seriously. To be clear, I don’t believe the left should abandon a commitment to individual freedom. However, a politics aimed toward a more just society cannot organize against rural morality. To me, this is what is intended by the provocative title. The social fabric that allows for the cultivation of common decency is worth conserving.

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." 

Bridging the dirtroad divide: Progressive politics in rural America

A sign in Plumas County in 2013. © Lisa Pruitt

Rural America votes Republican. This statement has been true since the 1990s, when a sharp rural-urban political divide emerged. In fact, it's been a frequent discussion on this blog; read more here, here and here. Donald Trump won 93 percent of rural counties in 2024, which clearly demonstrates how strong this divide has become. Rural America hasn't always been such a Republican stronghold, however, and some rural progressive thinkers are devising ways to return rural places to their more left-leaning days. 

How did it get like this?

In the 1930s, rural progressivism was at its peak. The Great Depression and a farm crisis in the 1920s had left rural America completely sidelined. Franklin Delano Roosevelt noticed this unrest and centered his initial campaign around the issues affecting lower and middle-income Americans, rural and urban. He planned a "rural renaissance," focused on rural electrification and raising crop prices. This was incredibly popular, and rural voters, who had previously voted Republican, largely backed Democrats for the next 40 years.

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, rural and urban America voted in relative sync. Trevor E. Brown and Suzanne Mettler explored this trend in their 2023 article Sequential Polarization: The Development of the Rural-Urban Political Divide, 1976–2020. Their research shows that until the 1990s, rural Americans were barely more likely to support a Republican candidate than their urban counterparts. Now, the partisan gap between rural and urban voters ranges from a 21-point difference in the Midwest to a 14-point difference in the Northeast. 

What changed? 1992-2004 were marked by political and economic upheaval in the United States as urban areas prospered and rural areas suffered from divestment and shrinking job markets. No longer feeling seen by the Democratic Party, rural voters defected to the GOP in droves. Brown and Mettler contend that the divide from 2008 to 2020 was primarily driven by nationalist sentiment. They point to anti-Black rhetoric during Barack Obama's campaign and presidency, and the lack of higher education, led rural voters to identify themselves in opposition to "urban" ideals. 

These trends have led to the highly partisan United States we have today, a hyper-divided United States, where the majority of rural America is Trump country. It should be noted, however, that rural voters aren't all happy with their representation either. A March 2020 poll revealed that 87% of non-metro voters feel like the government does not represent people like them. 

So, what now?

When Democrats lost the popular vote in 2004, they initiated a major party platform shift. Steve Inskeep of NPR writes in 2024 that, during that time, the party focused on shoring up both rural and urban voters and turning red districts into purple ones. Inskeep points out that the trend has reversed over the last decade, with Republicans succeeding in turning purple districts red.

Some progressive thinkers and leaders have noticed this trend and want to reverse it. They believe that rural Americans might still return to their more progressive roots; they just need to hear the right messaging. 

One program seeking to mend the divide is the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. Founded by Anthony Flaccavento, a farmer and former U.S. Congress candidate from Abingdon, Virginia, their goal is to help America think differently, talk differently, and act differently. They reach out to urban political leaders and ask them to consider how to meet the needs of rural communities. 

Their website primarily focuses on convincing left-leaning leaders of the problems in rural areas and how they can help solve them. Their guide cites political scientists and legacy media to explain why rural voters don't take progressives very seriously. There is little in the way of talking points, but it provides plenty of resources for someone just beginning to consider rural issues.

Similarly, Dirtroad Organizing forms yearly cohorts of rural candidates and staffers. They "provide in-depth, personal, community-oriented, long-term support to ensure vitality, stability, and integrity in rural organizing." They focus on free training and supporting progressive rural candidates and staffers. The organization was founded by Chloe Maxmin, former Maine State Representative and State Senator, and Canyon Woodward, her campaign advisor.

More than 40 graduates of this program have been on the ballot, and some are making real headway in their elected positions. For example, Sarah Keyeski, a Wisconsin State Senator, has sponsored over a dozen bills in her first year in office. Several bills relate to healthcare access, an issue that deeply affects rural populations.

Whether either of these programs will create meaningful change in 2026 and beyond remains to be seen. It's clear, however, that many liberal and progressive thinkers haven't completely written off rural America as Trump-land. Platforms focused on economic resilience and healthcare access can reach rural voters and help them feel seen. Candidates from rural areas can lead their communities in ways that represent their unique needs and backgrounds. Ultimately, it seems Democrats have turned their attention back to rural areas and look to level the playing field this cycle. 

When a broken tractor becomes a legal issue, the right to repair is critical

For farmers, the ability to repair equipment quickly is more than just a convenience; it's essential for making a living. Yet, as farm equipment has become more technologically advanced, the legal and contractual rules governing the right to repair ("RTR") have changed, restricting when, how, and by whom repairs can be done. What was once a mechanical issue has increasingly become a legal matter. 

Photo Credit (2026): John Deere Utility Tractor

RTR is the principle that owners should be able to repair products they lawfully purchase or choose who repairs them, without being forced to use the manufacturer's authorized services. This seems like a straightforward concept that would benefit both rural and urban consumers by preventing a manufacturer's monopoly in the repair market. However, in a 2022 paper on RTR legislation, researcher and Assistant Professor Luyi Yang cautioned that: 

[RTR] legislation can potentially lead to a lose-lose-lose outcome that compromises manufacturer profit, reduces consumer surplus, and increases the environmental impact despite repair being made easier and more affordable. 

Yang's argument complicates the idea that expanding repair rights automatically helps consumers. For rural communities, this raises the question: even if broader RTR legislation changes markets, who is paying the price for limited RTR access right now, and who benefits from it?

These market dynamics are not overlooked by the federal government. In its 2021 report, Nixing the Fix, the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") addressed concerns about RTR in the auto industry. While acknowledging the manufacturers' justifications, the FTC noted that many restrictions lacked empirical support. The report concluded:

Although manufacturers have offered numerous explanations for their repair restrictions, the majority are not supported by the record...[R]epair restrictions have made it difficult for consumers to exercise [the RTR].

The FTC's stance indicates a willingness to view RTR access through the lens of fair competition, rather than through contractual obligations or restraints. 

While much of the early debate over RTR focused on consumer electronics and automobiles, similar conflicts have occurred in rural America. A 2023 blog post explains that farm equipment owners have long resisted companies like John Deere, seeking the ability to repair their own machines instead of relying solely on manufacturer-controlled repair networks. 

This conflict mirrors rural legal battles over water access, as discussed in a 2026 blog post, where formal legal rights exist on paper but are limited in practice by geography and concentrated market power. In both contexts, laws interact with rural conditions in ways that can weaken rural economies. 

Steelhead Creek - Sacramento, CA (2024)

In 2025, the FTC sued John Deere over its repair practices. Plaintiffs alleged that the company's RTR restrictions created unfair barriers to competition by limiting access to diagnostic software and tools. FTC Chair Lina Khan stated:

Illegal repair restrictions can be devastating for farmers, who rely on affordable and timely repairs to harvest their crops and earn their income... The FTC's action... seeks to ensure that farmers across America are free to repair their own equipment or use repair shops of their choice. 

Here, the law is seen not just as a neutral enforcer of contracts, but as a way to shift bargaining power between manufacturers and farmers. For the latest update on the FTC's suit against John Deere, click here.

Farm Action, a farmer-led advocacy group, expressed views similar to Khan, stating that manufacturers have taken away farmers' meaningful repair autonomy by withholding diagnostic software, stating:

By withholding the software to diagnose and repair, manufacturers force farmers to go to the nearest authorized dealership, which might be hundreds of miles away. 

Efforts to improve RTR access through state legislation have produced uneven results. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 33 states and Puerto Rico considered RTR legislation during the 2023 legislative session. As of today, Colorado is the only state to have enacted legislation extending RTR protections to agricultural equipment, setting an example for other states considering similar measures. 

The legal frameworks governing RTR access have obvious impacts on rural livelihoods. As the RTR movement advances, the ongoing question is whether legal systems will recognize RTR access as essential to rural economic independence or continue to frame it as an optional feature within privately controlled equipment markets. 

Can farmers' markets help bridge the rural-urban empathy gap?

I have spent the last several days at the Rural Sociological Society's Annual Meeting (its 86th!), held this year in Madison, Wisconsin.  It's been fabulous, and it gave me the opportunity to visit the Dane County Farmer's Market, also known as Saturday on the Square.  The market takes place every Saturday from 6:15 am till 2 pm on the sidewalk around the state capitol grounds periphery.  This makes it an enormous market because the Capitol complex is huge.  

An elaborate honey display.

In this post, I'm primarily going to share photos of the market (all are (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024), though I also want to note how emotional I found the experience of watching farmers lovingly present their wares.  Later in the morning, I was participating in a panel about Ann Eisenberg's new book, Reviving Rural America, and the issue of bridging the rural-urban divide came up.  The question was raised:  how do we cultivate the relationships and empathy along the rural-urban continuum to make workable treating rural America as a commons, which is one of Eisenberg's proposals.  The conversation got me thinking about how farmers markets have the potential to help us build those relationships, to cultivate understanding and appreciation.  

Corn was the exclusive focus of this vendor

The market included several extraordinarily 
colorful mushroom displays.

Photo taken just after 6:15, when some vendors were just getting set up.

Rhubarb was a seasonal focus of several vendors.

These last two photos are of the same tomato vendor's display.

Prior posts about farmers markets are here.  

My Rural Travelogue (Part XXXV): A farmer's market in Prague

Ok, it isn't exactly "rural," but the farmer's market I visited last week in Prague brought the rural to the urban, which is what many (if not most) farmer's markets do.  (About a decade ago, I blogged about farmer's markets before, this one in my home town and this one in posh Telluride, Colorado).

Last Saturday, I visited the much touted Naplavka Farmer's Market, in Praha 2.  At least I thought that is what I was visiting.  It appears on reflection that I didn't travel far enough south on the Vlatava River embankment, because when I reached the intersection of the embankment with Na Morani at about 7:45 am, I saw vendors setting up in the little park and stopped to peruse the goods.  It featured perhaps a dozen stalls, which included a few flower stalls, a cherry stand, a strawberry booth, a coffee stand, a few bakeries, one egg stand, one chicken stand, a stand dedicated solely to kolach (the sweet Czech pastry), one with wine, and several with a variety of vegetables.  

Lots of potatoes and onions, along with
more colorful vegetables and herbers.

The egg vendor had 
a photo her chickens 
roaming free.

The poultry vendor from Holysov had photos of 
the types of poultry he was selling. He chopped 
the chickens in half right in front of customers, for those
who didn't want an entire bird.  
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2023

A dairy stall, with yogurts, cheese and milk

The coffee stand was popular.  There were no disposable cups so a 50 kr. deposit was required for those who didn't bring their own cup.  Only whole milk available for lattes and such.

The wine stall was guarded by a friendly dog. 

One of several bakeries. 
(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2023

The name and address of each
vendor was displayed.  This was 
for the baker.  

This sign was at the juice stand.

Milovice is northeast of Prague, perhaps an hour away

This vendor had beautiful white and green asparagus, 
the former in its short season right now.
"Chrest" is the Czech word for asparagus.

This stand was all Kolach.

The cherry vendor had a few varieties. 

Strawberries in season from this farm, which has an address on
the southeastern edge of Prague 

Oh, and there was a woman and what appeared to be here two teenaged children selling various pestos, as well as what her sign called "fried green bread."  This was toasted bread smeared in the pesto(s) and herb butter of the patron's choosing.  She made me the striped one below, so I didn't have to choose.  The pale green at the top was with horseradish.  The bottom stripe is the melting herb butter.