Chris Wier is running to win.

They’re amongst dozens of Dirtroad Organizing training alumni on the ballot this November running for local seats in their county and state governments.

But for Chris and their peers, the impact of running for local office in their rural hometowns is not easily measured in “win/lose” terms come November.

^{Listen above for original testimony from Chris Wier}

A fourth-generation Oklahoman and Cherokee citizen, Chris hopes for victory later this year, and the opportunity to advance rural education, rural health care access, and tribal sovereignty issues at the state capitol on behalf of their Tahlequah community.

But they also hold one thing clear — the organizing power built as part of their electoral campaign and through their ongoing mutual aid work will far outlive any Midterm results and is just as much of a “win” as anything else.

A second-time candidate for their state seat, Chris knows better than most that the organizing momentum built over one cycle of campaigning doesn’t have to go away.

They arrived at this year’s race a more seasoned organizer with deeper community connections — relationships built over doing work that is helping fill in important gaps for neighbors: hosting events for seniors, fairs for families, organizing food pantries and sharing shelves, coordinating trash pickups and more.

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It’s these relationships — and networks of mutual support — that are creating durable change in rural communities across the country where everyday people are rising to local leadership.

Enduring civic infrastructure in rural communities is desperately needed and must be seen as a “win” too in our political dialogue.

“We really found a love and appreciation for community that is outlasting.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Minnesota candidate Heather Holmes, a former school board member and Dirtroad alumni also running a second campaign for public office in the state.

Heather has experienced first-hand how the scaffolding raised to support her first campaign has transformed into lasting infrastructure advancing rural representation, progress, and safety in her community.

What once started as 35 neighbors in her living room has since turned into a coordinated network of neighbors showing up to county commissioner meetings, statewide caucuses and conventions to advocate for rural issues.

^{Listen above for original testimony from Heather Holmes}

The networks built by Heather and her community have proved especially useful in emergency response moments, such as back in April when large-scale federal immigration enforcement operations were threatening the safety of their rural communities.

In spite of relentless accusations by the mainstream media that rural America is defined by rugged individualism, Heather and more than 100 of her neighbors coordinated across hollers and towns spanning their entire House District to protect one another.

As Melody and Brittany share on our last dispatch, for many communities, this type of response transcends political divides, and is but a return to the original fabric that has always defined rural disposition.

^{Listen above for original testimony from Heather Holmes}

Connecting with voters, organizing for local issues, rebuilding collective infrastructure for The Common Good — these are the victories Dirtroad leaders are already achieving heading into November.

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About Dirtroad Organizing

Dirtroad Organizing focuses on empowering the next generation of rural organizers, staff, and candidates via their network of 200+ rural leaders, with representation from 39 states. Through multiple election seasons and across party lines, these courageous organizers have had thousands of conversations with rural voters to help revive local democracies and understand what it takes to transform the possibilities of rural politics. Learn More and Apply for a Future Cohort

For Chris Wier (they/them), storytelling is a cultural practice. A fourth-generation Oklahoman, they are a member of the Cherokee nation and a local mutual-aid organizer. After experiencing the impacts of the housing crisis first-hand, Chris deepened their commitment to serving their community by pursuing an elected seat in the Oklahoma state House. It is Chris’s second time pursuing public office.

Heather Holmes (she/her) is a proud tortoise guardian — and a scientist, and a former school board member, and a second-time candidate for an elected seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives. She got her start in local politics at the behest of her local community and neighborhood teachers, who first urged her to run in the Byron Public School District race. She’s back in the race because she thinks it’s time rural communities got a seat at the table again.

Melody Cunningham is a dedicated public servant.

She introduced three bills that were signed into law by the governor her first year in office while a freshman in her state’s minority party.

But she didn’t start out as such. Or in the business of bills and parties. She started out listening.

Before winning her bid for public office and serving a first term as a State Representative for the Montana Legislature, Melody dedicated her life and career to attending to the needs of children and families as a pediatric oncologist.

It was her ability to engage in a certain type of active listening that allowed her to connect with rural voters while door-knocking for her first campaign for State Representative.

^{Listen above for original testimony from Melody Cunningham}

Idaho candidate Kathryn Larson — featured in last month’s dispatch — shares a similar story from her experience canvassing for her own campaign in her district.

^{Listen above for original testimony from Kathryn Larson}

Melody and Kathryn’s stories mirror those of hundreds of Dirtroad alumni organizing for progressive power in some of the country’s most rural districts.

Across regions and geographies, their insights are consistent —if you stay in conversation long enough to get past media-driven issues, rural voters share clear alignment on local needs and common-sense policy.

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Brittany Newton, a fellow Dirtroad alumni and U.S. Army veteran running her first campaign for public office in North Carolina, talks about mainstream media’s role driving political polarization. Ultimately, for voters in her district, many are just happy to be part of the conversation.

^{Listen above for original testimony from Brittany Newton}

Beyond a top layer of fabricated division, schools and jobs and healthcare matter more to most people than bathrooms or “illegals”.

Like so many of her peers, Brittany is stepping into civic leadership not out of personal ambition — but out of dire need to serve her community, neighbors who have been left behind by the whole of the political establishment more than any one party.

When your neighbors are dying from hospital closures, or your kids and grandkids are forced to move away from the only place they’ve ever known, it matters less whether the person in office is a Republican or Democrat, as long as they’re at your door and listening to your issues.

While working in rural emergency medicine, Melody experienced the urgency of lack of rural representation in decision-making processes firsthand, and it has deepened her commitment to curiosity, compassion and collaboration when it comes to representing her constituents.

^{Listen above for original testimony from Melody Cunningham}

As she pursues a second term in the Montana Legislature — once again aiming to knock almost every door in her district as part of her re-election campaign — Melody is feeling energized with a sense of hope from voters.

She shares this with Brittany — and Kathryn, and Jess, and Wayde, and Michelle, and Maria, and so many other everyday people building their skills with programs such as Dirtroad’s leadership training, and taking back control of their local and state governments in a profoundly rooted fight for survival.

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About Dirtroad Organizing

Dirtroad Organizing focuses on empowering the next generation of rural organizers, staff, and candidates via their network of 200+ rural leaders, with representation from 39 states. Through multiple election seasons and across party lines, these courageous organizers have had thousands of conversations with rural voters to help revive local democracies and understand what it takes to transform the possibilities of rural politics. Learn More

The trope of uninformed rural voters incapable of representing their own interests in the voting booth has dominated political commentary from mainstream media for years. Among many nuances often omitted from sound bytes and news headlines is the role of uncontested races.

As fourth-generation farmer Maria Hettel reflected in the latest HomeGrown dispatch and fellow Dirtroad Organizing alumni Kathryn Larson reiterates now, rural America is full of brilliant, creative, community-oriented people working hard to ensure a better livelihood for themselves, their families and each other.

^{Voice of first-time Idaho candidate Kathryn Larson}

And while there are other important factors that account for a widened urban-rural political divide in recent years, HomeGrown storytellers share (and results show) that ultra-conservative, corporate-backed candidates aren’t winning rural races by majority vote, but often, by lack of opposition on the ballot.

In 2024, despite being a presidential election year, up to 38% of state legislative seats were uncontested, and 19 chambers were guaranteed simple majorities due to lack of major party competition.

For dozens of Dirtroad Organizing alumni, including first-time Georgia candidate Whitney Echenique, the lack of political choice in local races has been enough of a motivator to take on a leadership role in their community and put up a bid for public office.

^{Voice of first-time Georgia candidate Whitney Echenique}

Whitney’s testimony touches on a significant byproduct of the phenomena of uncontested races in rural areas. Aside from driving extremism in local policy, these “default victories” are responsible for massive political disengagement within the voting class of these regions, a self-perpetuating cycle that keeps uncontested incumbents in office and strengthens political power against workers, families, ecosystems and everyone living on the margins of U.S. society.

^{In 2024’s presidential election, non-voters outnumbered ballots cast for eligible candidates.}

And the “phenomena” of uncontested races can hardly be called that — at least certainly not a natural one. The cycle of unopposed victories and eroding democratic participation has an origin — it is the result explicit decisions to give up on rural America.

^{Voice of Dirtroad Alumni and elected official Wayde Lawler}

The centrist political establishment has moved on to what it deems the greener pastures of suburbs and big cities, focusing on turnout in the most populous areas at the expense of meaningfully contesting the narrative in rural communities. For years rural areas have been deemed either logistically too hard to canvass, or ideologically “a lost cause.”

Dirtroad alumni and now Wisconsin elected official Wayde Lawler reflects on the impact of, not just neglect from institutional parties towards rural communities, but the active extraction that occurs from these areas.

^{Voice of Dirtroad Alumni and elected official Wayde Lawler}

Organizing infrastructure has been neglected, exploited and eroded in rural America, and it’s paved an open road for corporate politicians to dominate local and state races, painting an overly-simplistic picture of rural areas as a conservative monolith while massively disengaging the voting class.

And as MAGA and corporate-backed candidates have continued winning elections due to a lack of political infrastructures that can meaningfully support opposing candidates, a self-fulfilling cycle in rural areas continues, further alienating could-be progressive organizers and voters.

^{Voice of first-time Idaho candidate Kathryn Larson}

Dirtroad Organizing alumni are counteracting this crisis with a tidal wave of organizing, good ol’ door-knocking and real conversations with neighbors.

On the next dispatch of HomeGrown, we hear from Dirtroad alumni storytellers about how they’re overcoming real and perceived political divides in the communities, and how voters are receiving their campaigns.

^{Voice of first-time Georgia candidate Whitney Echenique}

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About Dirtroad Organizing

Dirtroad Organizing focuses on empowering the next generation of rural organizers, staff, and candidates via their network of 200+ rural leaders, with representation from 39 states. Through multiple election seasons and across party lines, these courageous organizers have had thousands of conversations with rural voters to help revive local democracies and understand what it takes to transform the possibilities of rural politics. Learn More

Hardly anywhere is the spirit of interdependence more alive than in a small town rebuilding after a storm. Yet, “rugged individualism” has been a moral identity projected onto rural America since the very beginning.

While the solidarity and resilience alive in a community bridge re-build is as real as the columns once holding it, the conditions that allow bridges to fall – and stay down –, while public dollars go unspent, speak less on the perseverance of rural grit, and more on a policy decision to leave people behind.

The truth is — “rugged individualism” has not stopped rural places and people from embracing a true sense of self-determination, both on a personal and community level. But it has excused decades of extraction, neglect and chronic divestment from rural America.

“Everyone deserves pride of place.” Jess Limbird, a Tennessee-native and longtime Alaska-resident on a homecoming journey back to the South, speaks with HomeGrown about the real issues that leave people “feeling stuck” in their hometowns. A mounting desire to rectify these conditions through local governance has been one key motivator for her down-ballot race in the town of Lewisburg this year.

^{Voice of Jess Limbird}

Despite the phenomena of “brain drain” – and in active resistance to it – many of us are on a homecoming journey back to the land and people who’ve tended to it for generations, workers whose lifelong devotion to growing the food we eat, regenerating ecosystems, maintaining local economies, and building communities in every sense of the word, has often remained unshaken by shifting political landscapes and media-driven polarization.

Maria Hettel, a fourth-generation farmer returning to her family farm in Ohio, speaks of the joy of being welcomed by land tended to by her forefathers. And yet, as a Filipino-American, she yearns for community that can hold her cultural identity just the same.

^{Voice of Maria Hettel}

She too, is on a journey of rebuilding civic ownership in her local community, alongside Michelle Higgs, who shares that returning to her hometown felt like putting on a perfectly-worn pair of jeans in the back of her closet, and started the Indiana Rural Summit to help revive local democracies across her home-state, and in turn build organizing infrastructure that prioritizes rural voices and choices.

Michelle shares the tension between a pervasive legacy of anti-government sentiment in rural communities, and the collectivism that once also embodied them – a shared chainsaw per holler, a rotating toolbox passed around in emergencies.

“Older generations remember,” she says.

^{Voice of Michelle Higgs}

A mounting desire to reclaim pride of place through local leadership is the starting point for many Dirtroaders taking the charge to build a progressive working class in rural America – not only because it is our love for the places we call home that drives us, but because the very absence of the conditions that create pride of place so keenly represents the cycles we must work to break and reverse.

The road to rural revitalization, and a democratic revival in rural America, starts with a rejection of rugged individualism – reclaiming ownership over our shared destiny and the interwoven outcomes of our communities, because our youth deserve to see a future in the places they grew up, our elders deserve to age in the communities they’ve built, and the workers who’ve kept our country running deserve to live and rest with dignity.

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Learn more about the HomeGrown storytelling cohort here, and Dirtroad Organizing below.

Dirtroad Organizing focuses on empowering the next generation of rural organizers, staff, and candidates via their network of 200+ rural leaders, with representation from 39 states. Through multiple election seasons and across party lines, these courageous organizers have had thousands of conversations with rural voters to help revive local democracies and understand what it takes to transform the possibilities of rural politics. Learn More

But what’s really going on in rural America, beyond presidential elections and corporate-backed media? What’s the truth of rural-urban political polarization? Who’s behind it? And most importantly, who’s in front of it?

HomeGrown by Dirtroad Organizing is a multimedia series answering these questions through real-time insights and first-hand accounts from dozens of everyday people turned rural organizers running campaigns in this year’s mid-term elections.

They are parents, farmers, medical professionals, scientists and business owners working to revive a movement of class-conscious rural progressives. HomeGrown is an opportunity to hear and learn from them, as they have heard and learned from voters.

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Released bi-weekly this summer, dispatches will focus on specific insights shared by HomeGrown’s Cohort of fifteen Dirtroad Organizing alumni, and will be accompanied by video interviews and case studies from them and a growing community of HomeGrown storytellers.

The future of progressive power depends on investing deeply in rural organizing, and that means supporting and uplifting the leadership of those at the vanguard of this work. Follow along as we cover the hard-won lessons and opportunities about what’s working — and what the work is leading to — from those taking on a democratic revival in the country’s most rural corners.

Meet the HomeGrown storytellers:

About Dirtroad Organizing

Dirtroad Organizing is empowering the next generation of rural organizers, staff, and candidates via their network of 200+ rural leaders, with representation from 39 states. Through multiple election seasons and across party lines, these courageous organizers have had thousands of conversations with rural voters to help revive local democracies and understand what it takes to transform the possibilities of rural politics. Learn More