The Party That Left You Behind

How Democrats Abandoned Rural America, How Republicans Exploited It, and Why Both Have to Answer for What They Have Done

Thomasville Regional Medical Center, a brand new hospital in Thomasville, Ala., closed in September 2025 after fewer than five years in operation. Town leaders are hoping new owners will reopen it and help it become a regional health care hub. (Anna Claire Vollers/Stateline)

Last week, the Democratic National Committee finally released its long-awaited 192-page autopsy of the 2024 election.^[1] DNC Chair Ken Martin had originally promised to release it, then kept it under wraps for months because, as he later admitted, he was worried it would be a distraction. He apologized for withholding it. Then he released it.

Here is what it said about rural America, in the DNC's own words: "Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate. The math doesn't work. You can't lose rural areas by overwhelming margins and make it up elsewhere when rural voters are a significant share of the electorate. If Democrats are to reclaim leadership in the Heartland or the South, candidates must perform well in rural turf. Show up, listen, and then do it again."

That last sentence is either a turning point or an empty promise. The Democratic Party has been making versions of that promise to rural America for at least thirty years. It has not delivered. And the consequences of that failure are not just political. They are measured in closed hospitals, poisoned water, empty main streets, and communities in freefall that have concluded, correctly, that no one is coming to help them.

This article is for two audiences simultaneously. It is a direct indictment of the Democratic Party's abandonment of rural America, with the receipts. And it is a direct conversation with rural Americans who have been written off, lied to, and left behind, not just by Democrats, but by the entire political system that was supposed to represent them.

Make no mistake: both things can be true at once. The Democratic Party failed rural America. And the Republican Party has been actively making rural America worse while convincing rural Americans that Democrats are the problem.

Let us deal with both, honestly, with facts.

Republicans currently control both the House and Senate. In 2025, according to CQ Roll Call's annual vote studies, they voted with †rump 96 percent of the time in the Senate and 95 percent of the time in the House on every vote on which he took a position, the most partisan congressional year ever recorded. Everything documented in this article happened with their votes, by their deliberate choice.

Section 1: The Scale of What Has Been Left Behind

Before we talk about politics, we need to understand what is actually happening in rural America right now. Because if you live in a city, you may not know. And if you live in rural America, you may have been told that what is happening to you is your own fault.

It is not.

First, the baseline. The gap between rural and urban poverty has existed since the 1960s when poverty was first officially recorded, and it has never closed.^[2] Rural median household income has remained approximately 25 percent below the urban median, a structural gap that defines the economic foundation of rural communities.^[3] The most recent federal data from the USDA's Economic Research Service puts the rural poverty rate at 13.7 percent, covering approximately 5.9 million people, compared to a metro poverty rate of 10.2 percent.^[4] Rural America has been poor for generations. What is happening now is that it is being made deliberately poorer.

The healthcare collapse

According to the 2026 Chartis Rural Health State of the State report, 206 rural hospitals have either closed or converted to models that no longer offer inpatient care since 2010, and 417 are currently vulnerable to closure.^[5] In Tennessee alone, the percentage of vulnerable rural hospitals jumped from 44 percent in 2025 to 61 percent in 2026. Forty-one percent of all rural hospitals are now operating in the red.

When a rural hospital closes, the ambulance transport time to the next nearest emergency room increases by an average of 76.4 percent. Not 10 percent. Not 20 percent. Seventy-six percent. That is the difference between living and dying from a heart attack, a stroke, a car accident, or a difficult childbirth. It means the elderly stay stranded in places that can no longer care for them, watching their communities die in slow motion.

A 2025 GoodRx Research report found that 81 percent of U.S. counties are now healthcare deserts, meaning areas with limited or no access to pharmacies, primary care, hospitals, emergency services, or community health centers. More than 120 million Americans live in counties with at least one major gap in healthcare access.^[6] 48.5 million people now live in pharmacy deserts, a significant jump from 41 million in 2021, meaning the nearest pharmacy is more than a 15-minute drive away. Nearly 90 percent of those living in pharmacy deserts are in rural areas.^[7] In rural communities with no reliable transportation, that is not an inconvenience. That is an impassable barrier.

22.3 percent of rural Americans lack coverage of fixed terrestrial broadband, which means no telehealth, no remote work, no access to the digital economy that has replaced the physical one, with no ability to use the innovative solutions that policymakers in Washington keep proposing as alternatives to the infrastructure they refuse to fund.

The food crisis

15.9 percent of rural households are food insecure, higher than the already troubling national rate of 13.7 percent, and still rising. 84 percent of U.S. counties have a child hunger problem. In the communities most devastated by economic decline, children are going to bed hungry while their parents work jobs that do not pay enough to cover both rent and food.

The diseases of despair

One rural Democrat who ran for office and spent years talking to rural communities across the country put it plainly: manufacturing and natural resource job losses, lack of infrastructure investment, skyrocketing food prices, and living in healthcare, childcare, and food deserts have led to anger and frustration. The diseases of despair ravage families and communities.

Diseases of despair. That is the clinical term for the epidemic of drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide that has been eating through rural America for two decades. The opioid crisis did not happen because rural people are weak. It happened because the jobs left, the hospitals closed, the mental health centers shut down, and the only thing left that reliably numbed the pain was cheap, available, and deadly.

The Medicaid crisis

In July 2025, †rump signed the One Big Fugly Bill into law. Among its provisions: a 15 percent cut to Medicaid spending. Medicaid covers more than 18 percent of rural adults under 65. It is the financial lifeline keeping many rural hospitals open. The Chartis 2026 report warns that impending Medicaid reductions from the One Big Fugly Bill will hit rural hospitals for nearly $140 billion over multiple years. The Medicaid cuts did not happen because of Democrats. They happened because rural America voted for the party that cut them.

Rural America was already the poorest, sickest, most underserved segment of the American population before January 2025. What has happened since is not neglect. It is deliberate extraction.

Section 1B: The Full Cost of Living Squeeze and What Rural America Is Paying Right Now

The poverty numbers and hospital closure statistics are the foundation. But they do not capture the full picture of what rural Americans are experiencing right now, in 2026, at the kitchen table, at the checkout counter, and at the doctor's office. Every essential cost of life is rising simultaneously. And rural households, who were already earning 25 percent less than urban households before any of this started, have less room to absorb any of it.

Gas

Gas prices rose 52 percent between February 27, the day before the Iran war began, and May 14, from a national average of $2.98 to over $4 per gallon.^[20] Rural households are paying at least $26 more per week at the pump, because rural Americans drive farther and spend 26.7 percent more on gasoline than urban households on average. As of May 27, 2026, the average additional cost to American households from Iran war fuel prices is $332.75, with summer projections reaching $870 per household.^[NEW1] Goldman Sachs expects higher energy prices to erode consumers' spending power through the rest of 2026, hitting lower-income rural households hardest.^[NEW2]

Groceries

The USDA's own Food Price Outlook predicts all food prices will increase 2.9 percent in 2026, with food away from home rising 3.6 percent.^[R1] But those averages obscure the real damage at the grocery store level. Beef and veal prices were 12.1 percent higher in March 2026 than in March 2025. Fresh tomato prices are up 50 percent. Blueberry prices are up 29.3 percent. Raspberry prices are up 4.9 percent. Lettuce is up 7.5 percent.^[R2] Fuel, fertilizer and other farm inputs have risen 20 to 40 percent since the Iran war began, according to CoBank, and grocery prices rose by the most in nearly four years in April 2026, with economists warning the full impact of the Iran war on food prices is still working its way through the supply chain into summer.^[R3] Rural households, which have longer food supply chains requiring more diesel to transport food, are absorbing disproportionately larger grocery price hikes than urban consumers. The Commerce Department found overall inflation hit 3.8 percent in April 2026, its highest in nearly two years, with 79 percent of Americans saying they are concerned about the war's economic impact.^[NEW3]

Healthcare premiums and out-of-pocket costs

The expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, combined with the Medicaid cuts in the Big Fugly Bill, has produced what the Century Foundation calls the largest premium increase in American history with no historical precedent for this large a number of Americans.^[R4] Average total premiums for ACA marketplace plans have skyrocketed by 26 percent. Out-of-pocket premiums have more than doubled for marketplace enrollees. For individuals earning between $23,000 and $31,000 per year, out-of-pocket premium spending has risen by 400 percent, from $180 to $905 per year on average. In rural Tyler County, West Virginia, the average monthly premium increased by $1,339 in 2026. In rural Pope County, Illinois, it increased by $1,258.^[R5] Medicare Part B premiums rose 9.7 percent, more than three times the Social Security cost of living adjustment, meaning seniors on fixed incomes are being effectively cut. More than 2.2 million rural Americans are directly affected by premium increases. Consumers now identify healthcare as their top affordability concern, above food, rent, and utilities, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. Many of the rural counties facing the steepest premium increases are the same counties with the highest concentrations of Christian nationalism adherents, according to PRRI's state-level mapping. Communities that were told their faith would be defended received instead a 400 percent increase in out-of-pocket health costs and a Religious Liberty Commission in Washington.

Housing and rent

The housing affordability crisis is accelerating fastest in rural America.^[R6] The median home sale price in rural counties has risen 61 percent since before the pandemic, outpacing both suburban (49 percent) and urban (46 percent) price increases. A rural homebuyer now needs to earn $74,508 per year to afford the typical home, up 106 percent from the $36,206 needed before the pandemic. But rural median household income has only grown 33 percent over that same period, less than the income growth in suburbs and cities. Real rents in rural areas have increased 31.2 percent since 2000 while median rural renter income grew only 5.5 percent. The result: nearly a third of rural renters are now cost-burdened, meaning they spend at least 30 percent of their income on rent. The poorest 20 percent of rural households spend more than half their income on housing, leaving almost nothing for food, healthcare, transportation, or childcare. And †rump's 2026 budget proposed eliminating the USDA Section 502 home loan program that has helped more than 2 million rural families buy homes over 75 years.

Childcare and daycare

The average cost of center-based infant daycare in the United States is now $1,230 per month, up 13.3 percent from last year alone, and the total estimated cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 has jumped more than 25 percent since 2023.^[R7] The country is missing an estimated 4.2 million childcare slots, and the childcare gap is 32 percent in rural areas compared with 27 percent in urban ones.^[R8] In sparsely populated rural states like Nebraska, Montana, and Wisconsin, early childcare costs have jumped by more than 23 percent because of the lack of options and high demand. Child care now consumes 10 percent of a married couple with children's median household income and 35 percent for a single parent. In most states, families now pay more for childcare than for rent, mortgage payments, or in-state college tuition. This is not a lifestyle inconvenience. It is a structural barrier that forces rural parents, particularly mothers, out of the workforce entirely, deepening the poverty cycle rather than breaking it.

Education and schools

†rump's proposed budget cut the Department of Education's funding by 15 percent, eliminated $1.3 billion in support for English language learners and migrant students, and proposed collapsing 18 funding streams including dedicated rural school funding, civics education, and support for at-risk youth, from $6.5 billion down to $2 billion. NPR reported that after Education Department layoffs, the Rural Education Achievement Program, which sends federal dollars directly to rural schools, is at risk of not being able to deliver funds to schools for the 2026-2027 school year.^[R9] Rural districts, which lack the wealthy property tax base of suburban districts, are forced to cut after-school programs and elective courses while their suburban counterparts turn to private fundraising to fill gaps. Inflation has simultaneously driven up transportation, utilities, and staffing costs for rural school districts, squeezing budgets from both ends.

Utilities

Residential electricity prices have risen more than 36 percent since 2020 and are projected to keep rising through at least 2027. The Iran war drove diesel and natural gas prices to their highest levels since 2022, and rural households use around 14 percent more energy than their urban counterparts, meaning they absorb a proportionally larger share of every energy price increase. The AI data center buildout, detailed in Section 8, is projected to push electricity bills up a further 8 to 25 percent in the most affected regional markets, with rural communities disproportionately impacted. Rural households that are already cost-burdened on housing, already paying more for groceries, already facing catastrophic healthcare premium increases, have no financial cushion left to absorb any of it.

Gas. Groceries. Healthcare. Housing. Childcare. Education. Utilities. Every essential cost of life is rising at the same time. Rural households, earning 25 percent less than urban households to begin with, are being compressed from every direction simultaneously. This is not a cost-of-living problem. It is a policy-driven extraction of what little economic security rural America had left.

Section 2: What the Democratic Party Did and the Documented Record

Here is where accountability requires honesty, even when it is uncomfortable.

†rump won 93 percent of rural counties in 2024. Rural voters made up 36 percent of all votes cast for †rump compared to just 16 percent of voters for Harris. In more than half of rural counties, the Democratic presidential candidate received under 25 percent of the vote. Many state legislative districts across rural America went entirely uncontested, with no Democrat on the ballot at all.

Only 31 percent of Americans now view the Democratic Party favorably, its lowest rating in decades. Barely half of self-identified Democrats express optimism about the party's future.

How did it get here?

It was not inevitable. In 2008, Barack Obama made major inroads with rural voters, winning 9 million votes from rural America and flipping 179 rural counties that had voted Republican in 2004. He did it using Howard Dean's 50-state strategy, the idea that Democrats should compete everywhere, not just in cities and suburbs. Then Democrats abandoned the strategy. As Washington Monthly documented in January 2026, the data is unambiguous: material neglect fuels disconnection, which in turn deepens strategic withdrawal.^[8]

Research from the University of Akron's Bliss Institute documented what followed: when consultants parachuted into rural communities with pre-baked strategies and no local knowledge, local party chairs stopped trusting them. One chair told researchers: the consultants were nice, but they clearly did not know anything about our voters. They talked past us, not with us.

The DNC's own autopsy confirmed what rural Democrats have been saying for years. And one rural Democrat who ran for office said it plainly: Democratic neglect enabled Republicans to seize the opportunity to build political power and blame Democrats for all that has gone wrong.

That sentence is the entire story. Democrats left. Republicans showed up with an explanation for why everything was falling apart. The explanation was wrong. But it was an explanation. And it filled the vacuum. Part of what filled that vacuum was the language of faith. Republicans showed up in rural churches, at Christian radio stations, at faith and freedom conferences, speaking the language of values, God, and cultural identity. Democrats did not. They ceded the entire moral vocabulary of rural life to a party that used it to win votes while systematically closing the hospitals, gutting the wages, and stripping the safety nets of the very communities they claimed to be protecting in God's name. That was not a values victory for rural Christians. It was a con performed in their language.

Section 3: What Republicans Did to Rural America

Rural hospital closures accelerated under Republican governance. According to the Chartis 2026 report, Texas has lost 27 rural inpatient hospitals since 2010, Tennessee has lost 18, and Oklahoma, Kansas, and Mississippi have each lost more than 11.^[5] Many of these states refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, a decision that directly caused rural hospital closures by eliminating the reimbursement rural hospitals depend on to stay financially viable. The Chartis data is explicit: rural hospitals in Medicaid expansion states have a median operating margin of 1.5 percent. In the ten non-expansion states, the median is negative 1.5 percent, with 53 percent of rural hospitals operating in the red.

The Medicaid cuts in the Big Fugly Bill will close more rural hospitals. Every Republican senator voted for it. Every Republican House member voted for it.

The opioid crisis was exacerbated by Republican deregulation. The Sackler family's Purdue Pharma flooded rural America with OxyContin while lobbying Republican-controlled legislatures to prevent oversight. The communities hit hardest, including Appalachia, the rural Midwest, the rural South, are the same communities that vote Republican by the widest margins.

The local news crisis is being made worse by private equity and by deliberate federal action. Large swaths of rural America no longer have access to independent local news, while right-wing media conglomerates have bought many of the rural outlets that remain. Sinclair Broadcast Group alone owns approximately 200 television stations reaching 40 percent of U.S. households and requires its local anchors to air nationally produced pro-†rump propaganda segments, so that millions of rural viewers receive regime talking points from the face they trust as their local news anchor, without knowing it is scripted from Washington. †rump's FÇÇ has simultaneously dismantled the media ownership limits built over decades of bipartisan policy, clearing the path for further consolidation of local broadcasting into a smaller number of right-wing controlled companies. The result, documented by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, is a rural media landscape where independent journalism has been replaced by propaganda disguised as local news, and where the regime responsible for the policies harming rural communities controls the information environment those communities rely on to understand what is happening to them.

And the regime has gone further than deregulation. By the end of 2025, the Freedom of the Press Foundation documented at least 32 arrests and 170 assaults on journalists in the United States, 160 of them carried out by law enforcement. The †rump regime banned Associated Press reporters from White House press events, implemented Pentagon rules prohibiting reporters from publishing anything not cleared by the Defense Department, a move courts ruled violated the First Amendment, and conducted an ƒBI raid on the home of a Washington Post reporter, seizing her phone and computers. Federal agents arrested journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort while they were covering a news event, with two separate federal judges refusing to sign arrest warrants for lack of evidence of any crime before the Jus†ice Department pursued a grand jury indictment. Press freedom advocates called it a direct assault on the First Amendment right to cover matters of public interest. The United States now ranks 57th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index, its lowest ranking in history. This is not coincidence and it is not a side issue. A president who is actively suppressing independent journalism while building a government-aligned propaganda infrastructure is a president who does not want rural Americans to know what is being done to them.

That is what Republican governance has delivered to the communities that trust it most. And it was not accidental. Republicans currently control both the House and Senate. In 2025, according to CQ Roll Call's annual vote studies, †rump had the support of 96 percent of Senate Republicans and 95 percent of House Republicans on every vote on which he took a position. Ninety-nine percent of House Republicans voted with the White House at least 95 percent of the time. Senate Republicans won 93.7 percent of all party unity votes, the highest rate ever recorded in the history of congressional vote studies. This is not a party that was dragged reluctantly into harmful policy. This is a party that chose it, unanimously and repeatedly, with full knowledge of what it would do to the communities they represent.

Now look at what the current regime is doing in real time, because it is worse than anything in the historical record.

Section 3B: The Cross and the Con, How Christian Nationalism Weaponized Rural Faith and Delivered Rural Betrayal

There is one more piece of the Republican machinery that rural America needs to name plainly, because it is the piece that made everything else possible. It is the deliberate weaponization of Christian faith as a political tool, used to win rural votes, justify authoritarian power, and keep rural Americans loyal to a party that has spent thirty years systematically dismantling the institutions those same communities depend on to survive.

This is not an attack on Christianity. It is an accounting of what has been done in its name.

Three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers, according to a February 2026 national survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, conducted across all 50 states.^[CN2] Among white evangelical Protestants, that number is 67 percent. Among Republicans overall, 56 percent qualify as Christian nationalism supporters. The states with the highest concentration of Christian nationalism adherents are, without exception, the same states that voted for †rump in 2024 by the widest margins, and the same states losing the most rural hospitals, the most rural newspapers, and the most family farms.

Christian nationalism is not the same as Christian faith. It is a political theology that holds that the United States was founded as and must be governed as a Christian nation, that true Americans are by definition Christian, and that political power exercised in the name of Christianity is legitimate regardless of constitutional limits. It is, as PRRI president Robert P. Jones has documented, a dangerous political theology that has established itself as an ideological keystone in both the Republican Party and American evangelical churches.^[CN1]

†rump did not create Christian nationalism. He cultivated it, exploited it, and is now using it to justify executive overreach. At a White House National Day of Prayer event in May 2025, †rump said of the constitutional principle of church-state separation: "Let's forget about that for one time." He then signed an executive order creating a Religious Liberty Commission stacked with conservative Christian clerics and political allies, with a mandate to identify "anti-Christian bias" in the federal government.^[CN7] By September 2025 he was speaking at its meetings, announcing an "America Prays" initiative urging Americans to gather weekly for prayer ahead of July 4, 2026. His 2026 State of the Union was described by First Amendment scholars as replete with Christian nationalist rhetoric that weaponized religion. On May 17, 2026, thousands gathered in Washington for "Rededicate 250," a †rump administration-supported day of prayer explicitly catering to white evangelicals. The theme was "one nation under God." They meant one nation under their God.^[CN5]

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance has repeatedly insisted the United States is a Christian nation, a statement that raises unavoidable questions about whether Americans of minority faiths or no religious faith have been relegated to second-class citizenship. Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed laws mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Federal agencies are pushing overt Christian messaging to federal workers, with government meetings opened by Christian prayers listed on official agendas, making participation feel compulsory to non-Christian employees. The result, documented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is a systematic policy-making effort to dismantle the First Amendment's guarantee of religious neutrality and replace it with government-endorsed Christian identity.^[CN3]

Now look at what rural faith communities received in exchange for their loyalty.

The Big Fugly Bill, signed on July 4, 2025 by a president who has claimed the ability to convey God's wishes and who displayed a Bible during a federal photo opportunity, cut Medicaid for more than 10 million rural Americans who rely on it.^[5] It slashed food assistance from families in the communities that vote most heavily Christian nationalist. More than 16,000 Christians signed a petition organized by Faithful America rebuking the Medicaid cuts, stating plainly that the agenda is the antithesis of Jesus's teachings. The petition went unheeded.^[CN6]

Rural evangelical communities have been given culture war victories, government-endorsed prayer, and the promise of a Christian nation. They have been given the Ten Commandments in their children's schools and a Religious Liberty Commission in Washington. What they have not been given is a hospital. What they have not been given is a living wage. What they have not been given is a functioning food system, a local newspaper, or a future for their children that does not involve leaving the only community they have ever known.

The cross was used to win their votes. The con was in what came after.

There are Christians across rural America, in rural Black Protestant congregations, in rural Catholic parishes, in rural mainline Protestant churches, who have consistently rejected Christian nationalism and consistently voted against the party exploiting it. Their faith has not been weaponized. It has been overridden. The Christian nationalism being imposed by the federal government and state legislatures is not the Christianity of the rural poor. It is the Christianity of power, dressed in the language of the rural faithful.

Rural Americans of all faiths and none deserve to name that distinction. You were not served by this. You were used by it.

Section 4: What †rump Is Doing to Rural America Right Now and the Immigration Destruction

This section deserves its own space because it is both breaking news and one of the most direct and documented ways the regime is actively destroying rural American communities while telling rural Americans that immigrants are their enemy.

The Green Card Policy Announced

For over half a century, foreign nationals with legal status in the United States, including people married to U.S. citizens, holders of work and student visas, and refugees with humanitarian protection, have been able to apply for and complete the entire green card process without leaving the country. That ended in May 2026.

The regime announced on May 23, 2026 that all foreigners temporarily in the U.S. who want to apply for permanent residency must now return to their home countries and apply from there, with exceptions only in extraordinary circumstances decided by USCIS officers on a case-by-case basis, with no defined standard for what qualifies.

This affects people married to American citizens. It affects doctors and nurses working in rural hospitals on work visas. It affects agricultural workers on H-2A visas. It affects people who have lived in America legally for years or decades and who now must go to countries they may barely remember and wait in a consular system that, in some countries, has appointment wait times of over a year.

The USCIS backlog has tripled from 3.5 million pending cases in 2016 to 11.6 million in 2025. People are being told to leave and reapply in a system that cannot process the cases it already has. Citizens of 39 countries face outright bans or restrictions on re-entering the U.S. under the expanded travel ban. A separate †rump policy has paused all immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries. For many of the people now being told to leave and reapply, leaving is a one-way door.

This is not immigration enforcement. This is the deliberate destruction of the legal immigration system that rural American communities, hospitals, and farms depend on to function.

IÇE, the Militarized Enforcement Machine, and What It Is Doing to Rural Communities

The regime's immigration enforcement apparatus has become something rural America should recognize and fear not just as a threat to immigrants, but as a threat to every constitutional right rural communities have historically valued most.

Workplace raids have gutted rural economies with a speed and finality that no tariff or hospital closure can match. In Ottumwa, Iowa, 200 workers at a meatpacking plant who held legal status under the previous administration were terminated overnight after †rump stripped their status. In Omaha, Nebraska, after a DH$ raid on a meatpacking plant where half the employees were arrested, recruitment collapsed and the plant cut production at a time when ground beef was already at record prices.^[ICE2] In rural Minnesota, Operation Metro Surge expanded beyond the Twin Cities and chilled economic activity in meatpacking towns where immigrant workers were the backbone of the local economy.^[ICE4] On September 4, 2025, IÇE conducted what DH$ called the largest single-site worksite enforcement action in its history, arresting approximately 475 workers at a Hyundai battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia, the majority of them South Korean nationals with legal work authorization. The United Food and Commercial Workers union filed a class action against IÇE alleging violations of its members' Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.^[ICE3] During a raid at a cannabis farm in California in July 2025, George Retes, a disabled U.S. citizen and military veteran, was pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, forcibly dragged from his vehicle, and held for three days without charges, without legal counsel, and without explanation before being released. He was a citizen. That did not protect him.

The 287(g) sheriff deputization program is the piece of this machinery that most directly threatens rural communities and rural constitutional values. In January 2025, there were approximately 135 total 287(g) agreements between IÇE and local law enforcement agencies nationwide. As of May 29, 2026, there are 1,882, an increase of over 900 percent in just 16 months.^[ICE5] IÇE is now paying the full salary, benefits, overtime, and performance bonuses of any local officer who participates, with bonuses calculated based on how many immigration arrests the officer makes. The regime is estimated to distribute between $1.4 billion and $2 billion to local and state law enforcement in 2026 through this program alone.^[ICE6] Cash-strapped rural counties, the same counties losing hospitals and schools and broadband infrastructure, are being financially incentivized by the federal government to turn their local sheriffs into immigration enforcement agents.^[ICE7] The sheriff your community elected to know your name, protect your property, and maintain trust with your neighbors is now being paid by Washington based on his arrest numbers. The Task Force model, which was discontinued by the Obama administration in 2012 after Department of Jus†ice investigations found it produced illegal racial profiling and civil rights violations under Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona, was revived by †rump in January 2025. IÇE drastically reduced training requirements for officers overall while expanding the program to more than 10,000 officers.^[ICE8] Under it, a routine traffic stop for a broken tail light can result in indefinite detention and permanent family separation. For any rural resident, documented or not, citizen or not.

The regime has also deployed the U.S. military to American cities for domestic immigration and law enforcement operations, a direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, the law that has prohibited the use of military force against American civilians since 1878. A federal judge ruled on September 2, 2025 that the regime had illegally sent troops into Los Angeles. The Supreme Court rejected the regime's emergency appeal of a lower court ruling blocking the National Guard deployment to Chicago. The Congressional Budget Office found these deployments cost $496 million in just six months in 2025, money that could have funded rural hospital stabilization, rural broadband, and rural housing programs for years.^[ICE9] Independent human rights monitors documented federal agents committing racial profiling, unlawful arrest, excessive use of force, arbitrary detention, and denial of due process against citizens and noncitizens alike during these operations.^[ICE10] The apparatus being built here was pointed first at immigrants. Apparatus built this way does not stay pointed in one direction.

What This Means for Rural America Specifically

More than 70 percent of American farm workers were born overseas. More than 40 percent are undocumented. The dairy farms, fruit orchards, vegetable operations, meatpacking plants, and poultry processors that feed rural America, and that are often the largest employers in rural counties, depend on immigrant labor to exist.

A regime attorney stood up in federal court in March 2026 and conceded, on the record, that there are not enough Americans to take these jobs, while defending a policy that cut the minimum wage for immigrant farmworkers on H-2A visas by $1 to $7 per hour depending on the state.

Investigate Midwest documented that agricultural employment dropped by 155,000 workers between March and July of 2025 alone compared to a 2.2 percent increase in the same period in 2024.^[9] Across California, farmers reported that as many as 70 percent of their workers were absent in the wake of immigration raids. One dairy farmer in Idaho said plainly: my business and every agriculture business in the U.S. will be crippled if they want to get rid of everybody who does the work.

By February 2026, Investigate Midwest reported that DH$ was pushing the boundaries of probable cause and due process to fuel the farm labor crisis further, with about 75 percent of DH$ detainees having, in the department's own words, "no threat level."^[10] The regime itself acknowledged by early October 2025 that its immigration crackdown was causing worker shortages and potentially food shortages. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins pushed †rump to pause farm enforcement. A few days later, the raids resumed.

The promise that mass deportation would create better jobs and higher wages for American workers was not just wrong. The regime's own attorneys confirmed it in open court.

The Constitutional Violations

As of May 2026, the Just Security litigation tracker documents that 225 judges have ruled in more than 700 cases that the regime's rapid deportation procedures violate the constitutional right to due process.^[11] 358 lawsuits were filed against the regime in 2025 alone, more than any president in history.

†rump's executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, the constitutional guarantee enshrined in the 14th Amendment, was immediately found blatantly unconstitutional by multiple federal judges. †rump's voter registration executive order was ruled unconstitutional in October 2025 and again in January 2026, an attempt to impose burdensome documentation requirements that would have disproportionately suppressed rural voters.

DØGE illegally fired hundreds of USDA Rural Development employees, the federal staff who help rural communities access loans for hospitals, broadband, water systems, and housing. Courts ordered the rehiring of those employees with back pay, ruling the firings unlawful.

†rump's 2026 budget proposed eliminating the USDA Section 502 direct home loan program, one of the federal government's oldest housing programs for low-income rural families dating to 1950, along with rural business programs, self-help housing grants, telecommunications loans, and rural housing vouchers. The Daily Yonder documented total proposed USDA cuts of $4.58 billion.^[12]

This is what is being done to rural America by the regime that rural America voted for by 74 percent margins. These are not abstractions. They are the doctors on work visas who staff your rural hospital being told to leave and reapply. They are the farmworkers who harvest your food being raided and deported. They are the USDA staff who helped your county build its water system being illegally fired. They are the home loan programs your neighbors used to buy their houses being zeroed out in a budget proposal.

And the Democratic Party has been silent. No sustained campaign. No aggressive rural outreach. No plain-language explanation of who is responsible for the raids, the green card destruction, or the farm labor collapse. Rural Americans deserve to hear it. They are not hearing it. That is the demand this article is making.

Section 5: The Big Fucking Ugly Bill and What It Does to You

The regime called it the One Big Fugly Bill Act. It was signed into law on July 4, 2025. Here is what it actually does, sourced from the Congressional Budget Office, the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The bill makes $1.2 trillion in cuts to social assistance programs over the next decade.^[13] It is the largest rollback of federal support for health care in American history. It is simultaneously the largest cut to food assistance in the history of the SNAP program. And it funds those cuts with tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest Americans. Taken as a whole, this is the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history.

What it does to food assistance

The bill cuts $186 billion from SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, through 2034. One in eight Americans relies on SNAP. One in five children. 22.3 million families will lose some or all of their SNAP benefits under the new law. The average affected family loses $146 per month. In a rural county where median household income is already $28,000 below the national average, $146 per month is the difference between eating and not eating.

Children who lose SNAP benefits also lose their automatic eligibility for free school lunches and summer food programs. Brookings found the bill makes SNAP structurally unable to respond to recessions, meaning the next time the economy crashes, the safety net will instead contract, hitting the hardest-hit communities first and hardest.

What it does to healthcare

The Congressional Budget Office projects 11.8 million Americans will become uninsured by 2034 as a direct result of the Medicaid cuts in this bill.^[14] New work reporting requirements for Medicaid expansion adults, which must be met by December 2026, will knock millions off their coverage not because they stopped working but because they could not navigate the paperwork requirements of a bureaucratic system that is simultaneously being staffed down by DØGE.

The combined Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the bill are economically comparable to increasing the national unemployment rate by one-sixth. That is a Commonwealth Fund analysis of job losses, reduced consumer spending, and state budget strain caused by the withdrawal of federal dollars from local economies.

Who actually benefits: the wealth transfer in numbers

This is where the bill shows its true face. An average household making less than $15,000 a year will see a tax increase of over 9 percent in 2027.^[15] By 2033, when many temporary provisions expire, that same group will experience a 56 percent tax increase. Working-class people get no tax cut under this bill, and in some cases a direct tax increase.

Now look at what happens at the other end of the income scale. Over the next decade, the bill will cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year per household, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation.^[16] People making over $1 million a year receive $114 billion in tax cuts for 2027 alone, more than double what the 2017 tax cuts delivered to that same group.^[15]

The top 1 percent received $117 billion in tax cuts in 2026 alone, part of a $1 trillion reduction over the next ten years. That $117 billion is more than the combined budgets of the Department of Education, the Department of Transportation, and several other federal agencies.^[17] At the same time, the regime eliminated more than $40 billion over ten years in IRS enforcement funding specifically earmarked for investigating tax evasion by the wealthy.

As Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, put it: "This really is a big, beautiful bill for billionaires, but for the poor and the working class in this country, you are actually poorer."^[14]

Every Republican senator voted for it. Every Republican House member voted for it. Not one broke ranks. Not one stood up for the rural hospitals being driven toward closure. Not one objected to cutting food assistance from families already paying more for groceries than at any point in four years. The vote was a choice, made in lockstep, by a party that voted with †rump 95 to 96 percent of the time across the entire 2025 legislative year, the highest congressional party unity ever recorded. It passed on a party-line vote and was signed on the Fourth of July by a president who said he loves and cherishes Medicaid while signing legislation that will strip it from nearly 12 million people.

In the nearly a year since July 4, 2025, the Democratic Party has failed to put the wealth transfer at the center of its message to working Americans. Every town hall. Every press conference. Every campaign stop. The numbers are there. The argument is airtight. The silence is a choice, and rural Americans are paying for it with their health and their children's food.

Section 6: The Tariffs and What They Did to Rural America

†rump promised farmers that his tariffs would open new markets, bring manufacturing back, and make rural America great again. Here is what the documented record shows happened instead.

U.S. agricultural exports to China were cut by more than half during the first six months of 2025, falling from $11.8 billion in 2024 to just $5.5 billion.^[18] China shifted its soybean purchases to Brazil in direct retaliation. The world is making contingency plans that exclude American agricultural markets entirely, and winning back those buyers is not a priority for a regime too prideful to admit it was dangerously wrong.

The agricultural trade deficit hit $41.5 billion in 2025, a massive increase from the previous five years. A North Dakota State University analysis found that tariffs extracted $110 million from fertilizer imports alone between February and October 2025, with costs passed through to farmers at rates far exceeding the effective tariff rate. Fertilizer, seed, chemicals, equipment, fuel, and land costs were already elevated before the tariffs. The tariffs added another layer on top of a farm economy already under severe strain.

In February 2026, the Supreme Court struck down many of †rump's tariffs. †rump's response was to immediately announce new tariffs under a different legal authority, raising the broad tariff rate to 15 percent. Farm groups begged him not to impose new tariffs. He did it anyway.

†rump announced a $12 billion farmer bailout in December 2025, paid for; he boasted, with tariff revenue collected from the very farmers he was now partially paying back. Then the details emerged. More than half of all the bailout money went to industrial farmers and giant agribusiness firms that were also major †rump campaign donors. Family farms received what scraps remained.

The head of the American Soybean Association wrote a public letter to the White House in September 2025 begging for help: we have had your back. We need you to have ours now.

USDA's 2026 forecast predicts a decline in net farm income of nearly 3 percent, enough to drive hundreds more family farms into bankruptcy. The regime buried a USDA trade report that projected a record-high farm trade deficit of $49.5 billion because it contradicted the president's messaging that tariffs were working.

That is not a trade policy. That is a wealth transfer from family farmers to agribusiness donors, wrapped in patriotic language about putting America first.

Section 7: Two Wars Nobody Voted For, Iran and Venezuela

Rural Americans are disproportionately represented in the U.S. military. They enlist at higher rates than urban Americans. They come home to communities with fewer VA services, fewer mental health resources, and fewer economic opportunities than the cities whose residents they fought alongside. And they are now being sent into two military conflicts that were started without a declaration of war, without a clear objective, and without a plan for what comes next.

The Iran War

On February 28, 2026, the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, coordinated U.S.-Israeli strikes against targets across Iran, the largest American military deployment in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, involving 40,000 troops, multiple carrier strike groups, and B-2 stealth bombers. †rump promised on the campaign trail that he would not start new overseas wars. He started one anyway.

A ceasefire took effect on April 8, 2026, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirming on May 5 that combat operations had concluded. The ceasefire remains fragile, with ongoing skirmishes in the Strait of Hormuz. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed the 60-day War Powers Resolution clock was paused during the ceasefire, a position legal scholars say is almost certainly unconstitutional.^[NEW4] In 38 days of combat, 13 U.S. service members were killed and approximately 400 were wounded, according to U.S. Central Command.^[NEW5] According to the Center for American Progress, the war cost $11.3 billion in its first six days alone, surpassing $25 billion in direct costs.^[19] Iran's health ministry reported more than 2,000 people killed and 20,000 wounded. At least 3,375 people have been killed in Iran since the strikes began, including at least 168 children.

The war detonated fuel prices across rural America. Gas prices rose 52 percent between February 27 and May 14, forcing rural households to pay at least $26 more per week at the pump.^[20] As of May 27, 2026, Americans have collectively paid $44.5 billion more to the oil industry since prices began rising, with the average additional household cost at $332.75 and summer projections reaching $870 per household.^[NEW1] Goldman Sachs expects higher energy prices to erode consumers' spending power through the rest of 2026, specifically hitting lower-income rural households hardest.^[NEW2] Fertilizer prices surged. Diesel costs have hit their highest levels since 2022. The ceasefire has not reversed these costs.

When a reporter asked †rump whether Americans' financial situations were motivating him to strike a deal with Iran, he said on the White House lawn: not even a little bit. I do not think about Americans' financial situation.

Only one in four Americans supported the U.S. strikes on Iran, including just one in four Republicans. The war had no clearly articulated objectives or endgame and was launched at the same moment the regime was cutting health care and food assistance for the rural Americans whose children were sent to fight it.

The war was started without a formal declaration of war from Congress, a requirement of the Constitution under Article I, Section 8. It was unconstitutional on its face. And its economic consequences are ongoing.

Venezuela

On January 3, 2026, the United States launched Operation Absolute Resolve, military strikes on Caracas and surrounding areas involving Delta Force and CIA operatives, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife and transporting them to New York to face narco-terrorism charges. This was not a legal extradition. It was a military invasion of a sovereign nation in the Western Hemisphere.

The stated justification was drug trafficking. The actual motivation, stated plainly by †rump and his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, was oil. "We had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back," †rump said publicly.

The Venezuela operation was also launched without a congressional declaration of war. No vote. No debate. No constitutional authority beyond a president who decided he wanted a country's oil and sent in Delta Force to take it.

What Both Wars Mean for Rural America

The soldiers dying in Iran and the special operations troops deployed to Venezuela are disproportionately from rural communities. The $25 billion spent on the Iran war so far, now projected to reach $1 trillion total, could have funded rural hospital stabilization, rural broadband infrastructure, and rural housing programs for generations. It is being spent instead on Patriot missiles shooting down $50,000 drones, and on fuel price shocks that are hitting rural families hardest of all.

The Democratic Party has called these wars unconstitutional and reckless. Words are not enough. Rural veterans and rural military families deserve a direct, sustained, unrelenting argument connecting what happened in Iran and Venezuela to what is happening at their kitchen table, that their children were sent to fight resource wars while the Big Fugly Bill cut their parents' Medicaid and their grocery bills climbed because of fuel prices from a war started without a vote. That argument exists. It is not being made. That is the abdication this article is naming.

Section 8: The AI Data Center Invasion and the New Extraction Economy Has Come for Rural America

There is a pattern to how rural America gets used. An industry arrives. It takes what it needs, the land, the water, the mineral rights, the labor. It promises jobs and economic growth. It delivers some of both, for a while. And then it leaves behind contaminated soil, depleted aquifers, higher utility bills, and a community that is worse off than before it arrived.

The AI data center boom is the newest version of that pattern. And it is happening right now, in rural communities across the country, with a speed and scale that has outpaced any regulatory framework designed to protect the people living there.

The Energy Demand That Is Raising Your Electric Bill

According to a January 2026 Consumer Reports analysis, U.S. data center energy demand will nearly double between 2025 and 2028, jumping from 80 to 150 gigawatts, the equivalent of adding a country with the energy needs of Spain to the American power grid in three years.^[21] Since 2020, residential electricity prices in the U.S. have risen by more than 36 percent, and are expected to continue rising through at least 2027, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In South Carolina alone, data centers will account for 65 to 70 percent of all new energy usage in the state.

The cost of building the infrastructure to provide it is being passed directly to ratepayers, meaning you. Rural farming communities and communities of color are disproportionately hit. In rural America, where people are already paying 22 percent of their gross household income on rent, where 14 percent have no health insurance, where median household income is already $28,000 below the national average, electricity rate increases are not a minor inconvenience. They are a catastrophe that compounds every other crisis already bearing down on rural communities.

The Water That Is Being Consumed and Evaporated

A single large data center can consume as much water as a town of 50,000 people. The water is not treated and returned to the local water system. It evaporates in the cooling process. It is gone.

Data centers in Texas alone will use 49 billion gallons of water in 2025 and as much as 399 billion gallons in 2030, equivalent to drawing down Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, by more than 16 feet in a single year.^[22] This is happening in a state already facing acute water scarcity, in rural agricultural communities where water rights are the difference between a viable farm and an abandoned one.

By 2028, U.S. data centers could collectively use as much water as 18.5 million households. Rural communities that have managed their water tables carefully for generations are watching multinational technology corporations arrive and consume in months what took decades to accumulate. In both Georgia and Arizona in 2026, data center developers were caught consuming water they were prohibited from taking, in communities already experiencing water stress, and it was residents who discovered it when they noticed low water pressure.

The Jobs That Do Not Materialize

The promise is always the same: jobs, tax revenue, economic growth. The reality is documented by Good Jobs First, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on corporate accountability: "People are starting to be really, really aware that these projects tend to be very extractive and bring very little to local communities."^[21] A hyperscale data center the size of a small city may employ as few as 20 to 50 permanent local workers. The construction jobs are temporary and often bring in outside contractors. The tax incentives that lured the facility in the first place frequently exempt the company from paying the local property taxes that rural schools and public services depend on.

Meta's $10 billion, 2,250-acre Hyperion facility in northeast Louisiana has drawn intense opposition from residents who report increased traffic and safety risks near schools and homes. A facility the size of a small city that consumes the water of a town of 50,000 and employs dozens while driving up electricity bills for thousands is not economic development. It is the same extraction economy that built Joplin's lead mines and left.

The Communities Fighting Back

Rural communities are not passive in the face of this. Between March and June 2025, community opposition led to $98 billion in data center projects being blocked or delayed. At least 25 projects were canceled in 2025 in response to local objections. After months of intense opposition from Indianapolis residents, Google pulled its rezoning application for a planned data center. Bipartisan legislation, the Unleashing Low-Cost Rural AI Act, would require federal agencies to formally study the impact of AI data center expansions on rural communities. It has not passed. It needs to.

Rural America is once again being asked to pay the price for someone else's profit. And once again, nobody with power is standing up to say: not this time.

Section 9: The Direct Conversation and What We Are Asking of Both Sides

The documented record is now before you. Democratic abandonment. Republican exploitation. And a sitting regime that is simultaneously gutting the rural USDA programs that build hospitals and broadband, firing the federal workers who administer them, raiding the farms that feed the country, starting unconstitutional wars for oil, driving up gas prices through a war that is now projected to cost $1 trillion, and telling the people experiencing all of this that immigrants and coastal elites are the problem.

Here is what both parties need to hear directly.

To the Democratic Party

The autopsy you released in May 2026 is a start. It is not enough.

Showing up, listening, and then doing it again is not a strategy. It is a slogan. Here is what an actual strategy looks like.

The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative has been lobbying the DNC to allocate $400 million, which is 10 percent of the Democratic ad buy for the 2024 general election, toward rural districts and candidates. Co-signatories include Rep. Ro Khanna, sociologist Arlie Hochschild, and dozens of county committees alarmed by Democratic decline in rural areas. The DNC has not yet committed to this. It needs to.

Hire local organizers who are from the communities they are organizing in. Stop sending consultants who have never driven a dirt road in their lives. Stop writing off any district where the Republican win margin exceeded 20 points in the last election. Those are exactly the districts where the vacuum exists. That is where you build.

Stop the condescension. Rural voters know when they are being talked down to. A party that spent a decade lecturing working-class communities about their cultural backwardness while doing nothing about their hospital closures does not deserve their votes, and has not earned them.

Run candidates who live in these communities, know these communities, and can speak to the specific, material conditions of these communities, not parachuted-in figures who treat rural districts as sacrificial losses.

Make the economic argument, directly and repeatedly. The minimum wage. Medicaid expansion. Rural hospital funding. Broadband infrastructure. Drug pricing. These are not abstract policies. They are the difference between a community with a hospital and a community without one. Say so. And say clearly what the Big Fugly Bill did: it gave people making over $1 million a year $114 billion in tax cuts for 2027 alone while giving the poorest households a tax increase.^[15] Say clearly what the Iran war is doing: it is forcing rural households to pay at least $26 more per week at the pump while the president says he does not think about Americans' financial situation.^[20] Rural voters deserve to hear that in plain language at every town hall between now and November.

To rural Americans

We are not here to tell you how to vote. We are here to give you information that the media ecosystem you are operating in may not be providing.

The hospital that closed in your county: check who was governor when it closed, and whether your state expanded Medicaid. The drug crisis that has devastated your community: look at who lobbied against oversight of OxyContin. The manufacturing jobs that left: look at which party controlled Congress and the White House when the trade deals were signed. And look at how your Republican senators and representatives voted in 2025: with †rump 95 to 96 percent of the time, on every vote, including the ones that cut your Medicaid, slashed your food assistance, raised your healthcare premiums, gutted your rural school funding, and sent your children to fight a war for oil while telling you immigrants were the problem. The minimum wage that was voted for by your neighbors and then repealed by your state legislature: look at which party controls that legislature. The gas prices you are paying right now: they rose 52 percent in less than three months because of a war started without congressional authorization for oil.

And consider what you are hearing about all of this, and from whom. The local news station you trust may be owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which requires its anchors to air pro-†rump propaganda segments produced in Washington. The media ownership rules that once prevented this level of consolidation have been deliberately dismantled by †rump's FÇÇ. Journalists who tried to report the truth have been arrested, assaulted by federal agents, and had their homes raided by the ƒBI. The United States now ranks 57th in the world on press freedom. You are not getting the full story, and that is not an accident. It is a strategy.

We are not asking you to become Democrats. We are asking you to demand accountability. And if you are a person of faith, that accountability extends to how your faith was used. The party that told you it would defend your Christianity signed a law that cut food assistance from your neighbor's children and closed your neighbor's hospital. The Sermon on the Mount says blessed are the poor. The Big Fugly Bill says the poor can pay more so the rich can pay less. Those are not the same gospel. You are allowed to name the difference. More than 16,000 of your fellow Christians already have. We are asking you to demand accountability from the people who actually hold power over your lives. In most of rural America, that is a Republican governor, a Republican state legislature, and Republican senators and representatives. If those officials have not delivered for you, you have every right and every reason to demand more from them. Or to find someone who will.

The Democratic Party has failed you. That is documented above, and it is true. But the party that has been in power in your state and your county and your congressional district, the party that has controlled the specific institutions that have made the specific decisions that closed your hospital and gutted your wages and repealed your minimum wage, that party also needs to answer for what it has done with the power you gave it.

You deserve better from everyone.

Section 10: What Would Help and Specific Policy Demands

These are not partisan. They are practical. They are what rural communities need, documented by rural health researchers, rural economists, and the people who live there.

Medicaid expansion in every state.

States that expanded Medicaid have dramatically lower rural hospital closure rates. The states that refused to expand it, primarily Republican-governed states in the South and Midwest, are the states losing the most rural hospitals. This is not a coincidence. It is cause and effect.

Reverse the Medicaid cuts in the Big Fugly Bill.

417 rural hospitals are now vulnerable to closure. The Medicaid cuts will push many of them over the edge. Rural Americans who voted for the Big Fugly Bill voted to close their own hospitals. That needs to be said clearly, and the damage needs to be undone.

Universal rural broadband.

22.3 percent of rural Americans have no reliable broadband access. Without it, there is no telehealth, no remote work, no small business internet presence, no access to the modern economy. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 allocated funding for rural broadband. The regime has moved to claw back or redirect much of that funding. Demand it be restored and accelerated.

Rural hospital stabilization funding.

Congress must create a dedicated federal fund for rural hospital stabilization that is not dependent on Medicaid reimbursement rates alone. Rural hospitals serve populations that are older, sicker, and less insured than urban populations. They need structural support, not just market-based reimbursement.

Local news investment.

The collapse of local journalism in rural America is not just a media problem. It is a democracy problem. Without local news, communities cannot hold local officials accountable. Congress should expand and make permanent the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which provides tax credits for local news subscriptions and journalist salaries.

Restore media ownership limits and prosecute press freedom violations.

Congress must reinstate the FÇÇ media ownership rules dismantled by the †rump regime to prevent further consolidation of local broadcasting into right-wing propaganda networks. The Department of Jus†ice must be held accountable for the unconstitutional arrest of journalists and the ƒBI raid on a reporter's home. A free press is not optional in a democracy. It is the mechanism by which every other accountability in this article becomes possible.

Data center accountability legislation.

Pass the Unleashing Low-Cost Rural AI Act requiring federal study of data center impacts on rural communities. Require community benefit agreements as a condition of all data center construction in rural areas. Cap the cost-shifting of data center electricity infrastructure onto rural ratepayers.

End the unconstitutional war powers model.

Both the Iran and Venezuela operations were launched without congressional declarations of war, as required by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. The ceasefire in Iran does not erase the constitutional violation of how the war was started, nor does it erase the $44.5 billion in additional fuel costs it imposed on American households. Congress must reassert its war powers authority, prohibit the executive from launching military operations without authorization, and enforce the War Powers Resolution rather than allow the regime to circumvent it. Ban 287(g) performance bonuses and restore training requirements.

Congress must prohibit the federal government from paying local law enforcement officers bonuses based on immigration arrest numbers, reinstate the training and oversight requirements gutted by the †rump regime, and ban the Task Force model that was discontinued in 2012 after documented civil rights abuses and unconstitutionally revived in 2025.

Repeal the Cicero Institute anti-homelessness legislation that criminalizes sleeping on public land and blocks the Housing First model that has actually been proven to reduce homelessness. More than a dozen Republican-controlled states have passed versions of this legislation. It has not reduced homelessness in a single one of them.

Section 11: What You Can Do Right Now

Whether you live in rural America or in a city, these actions are specific, concrete, and achievable today.

If you live in rural America

Demand your senators and representatives answer these specific questions in writing:

• Why did you vote for the Medicaid cuts in the Big Fugly Bill that are closing rural hospitals?

• What specific legislation have you introduced to address the rural hospital crisis in your district?

• What is your plan to restore broadband access to the communities in your district that still lack it?

• Why did you vote to give people making over $1 million a year $114 billion in tax cuts for 2027 alone while raising taxes on households earning under $15,000?

• Why have you not introduced legislation to protect rural counties from being financially coerced into 287(g) agreements that turn local sheriffs into federal immigration enforcement agents paid by arrest numbers?

• Why have you said nothing about the unconstitutional deployment of U.S. military troops to American cities in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act?

Find your senators at senate.gov and your House representative at house.gov. The U.S. Capitol switchboard connects you to any member of Congress: 202-224-3121.

Contact your state legislators and demand Medicaid expansion if your state has not done it. Find your state legislators at openstates.org by entering your address. If your state is one of the ten that still has not expanded Medicaid, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, your state government is making a deliberate choice to let your rural hospitals close.

If you live in a city

• Rural Urban Bridge Initiative is currently lobbying the DNC to invest $400 million in rural districts and candidates. Sign their open letter and share their work.

  
  

• The Daily Yonder is the best independent publication covering rural America. Subscribe. Share their reporting.

  
  

• Barn Raising Media is independent investigative journalism focused specifically on rural political and economic issues. Subscribe and support.

  
  

• National Rural Health Association is the primary advocacy organization fighting rural hospital closures.

  
  

• Rural Coalition is a national alliance of rural organizations working on food, farming, land access, and economic justice in rural communities of color.

Hold the Democratic Party accountable

Contact the DNC directly and demand they commit to the $400 million rural investment: democrats.org/state-parties | Phone: 202-863-8000

Contact your state Democratic Party and demand a rural organizing director who is actually from a rural community, a 50-county strategy in your state regardless of partisan registration, and a commitment to running candidates in every state legislative district. Find your state party at democrats.org.

Read and share independent rural media

The Daily Yonder | Barn Raising Media | 100 Days in Appalachia | The Missouri Independent | Investigate Midwest | High Country News

Contact the Senate Finance Committee and demand hearings on the Medicaid cuts: finance.senate.gov | Phone: 202-224-4515

A Final Word

The Democratic Party owes rural America an apology and a plan, not just a 192-page autopsy released under political pressure. The Republican Party owes rural America accountability for 30 years of governance that has overseen the closure of their hospitals, the destruction of their local news, the decimation of their wages, and the explosion of addiction and despair in their communities, and for a second term that has delivered a war for oil that raised their gas prices by 52 percent, a wealth transfer law that cut their food assistance while handing billionaires $50,000 a year in tax cuts, and a farm economy gutted by tariffs that enriched agribusiness donors while family farmers begged for help.

Rural Americans owe themselves the right to demand more from both.

The people living in these communities are not the problem. They are not backwards, ignorant, or irredeemable. They are people who built this country, who have been extracted from and abandoned, who are being fed a diet of government-aligned propaganda through what used to be their local news, whose access to independent journalism has been deliberately curtailed by a regime that has arrested reporters, raided newsrooms, and dismantled the regulatory framework that once ensured media diversity, and who deserve as a basic matter of human dignity the same access to healthcare, economic opportunity, political representation, and truthful information that any American in any city takes for granted. Many of them are also people of deep and genuine faith, whose values were used as the entry point for a political project that has delivered them poverty, closed hospitals, and food insecurity. That is the most intimate betrayal in this entire story. Not just their economy. Not just their hospitals. Their faith itself was turned into a weapon aimed at them.

As the Daily Yonder has documented, the story of rural political alignment is not as simple as rural people are Republicans. It is a story of a failed Democratic strategy meeting a successful Republican disinformation campaign meeting genuine, legitimate economic devastation that neither party has adequately addressed.

The question is not whether rural America deserves better. It does. The question is which party is willing to actually show up, make the material case, and then deliver, and hold the other accountable when it does not.

We are watching.

All sources linked within this article are from U.S. government records, peer-reviewed research, independent journalism, and official public data. We encourage readers to click every link and verify each claim.

Sources

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[2] USDA Economic Research Service, Rural Poverty and Well-Being. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-poverty-well-being

[3] USDA Economic Research Service, Rural vs. Urban Median Household Income. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=84389

[4] Rural America at a Glance: 2025 Edition, USDA ERS via AGDAILY, January 2026. https://www.agdaily.com/news/rural-america-glance-report-captures-economic-social-snapshot-of-rural-life/

[5] 2026 Rural Health State of the State, Chartis, February 2026. https://www.chartis.com/insights/2026-rural-health-state-state

[6] Healthcare Deserts in 2025: 80% of the Country Lacks Healthcare Access, GoodRx Research, September 2025. https://www.goodrx.com/healthcare-access/research/updated-healthcare-deserts

[7] 48.4 Million Americans Lack Convenient Access to a Pharmacy, GoodRx Research, March 2025. https://www.goodrx.com/healthcare-access/research/many-americans-lack-convenient-access-to-pharmacies

[8] How Democrats Lost Rural Voters and How to Win Them Back, Washington Monthly, January 28 2026. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/01/28/how-democrats-lost-rural-voters-and-how-to-win-them-back/

[9] Trump's Deportations Are Causing Farm Labor Issues, Investigate Midwest, October 29 2025. https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/10/29/trumps-deportations-are-causing-farm-labor-issues-he-hasnt-presented-a-viable-long-term-solution/

[10] Trump's DHS Is Pushing the Boundaries of Probable Cause and Due Process to Fuel a Farm Labor Crisis, Investigate Midwest, February 11 2026. https://investigatemidwest.org/2026/02/11/trump-dhs-is-pushing-the-boundaries-of-probable-cause-and-due-process-to-fuel-a-farm-labor-crisis/

[11] Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions, Just Security, updated May 2026. https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/

[12] Analysis: Trump 2026 Budget Slashes Rural Housing and Other Programs, The Daily Yonder, May 6 2025. https://dailyyonder.com/analysis-trump-2026-budget-slashes-rural-housing-and-other-programs/2025/05/06/

[13] President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill Raises the Fiscal Gap, Center for American Progress, February 2026. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/president-trumps-big-beautiful-bill-raises-the-fiscal-gap-to-2-4-percent/

[14] Trump's Tax Law Will Mostly Benefit the Rich, NBC News / CBO, August 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/trump-tax-law-mostly-benefit-rich-leaving-poorer-americans-less-cbo-rcna224449

[15] Trump's Big Ugly Law Steals from the Poor to Give to the Ultra-Rich, House Budget Committee Democrats, August 2025. https://democrats-budget.house.gov/resources/fact-sheet/trumps-big-ugly-law-steals-poor-give-ultra-rich

[16] 7 Ways the Big Beautiful Bill Cuts Taxes for the Rich, Center for American Progress, December 2025. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/7-ways-the-big-beautiful-bill-cuts-taxes-for-the-rich/

[17] Trump's Tax Cuts Give the Richest 5% Big Breaks While Everyone Else Pays More, Yahoo Finance / ITEP, April 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/trumps-tax-cuts-richest-5-103000993.html

[18] The Challenge of Rural Poverty, FREOPP, October 2025. https://freopp.org/whitepapers/the-challenge-of-rural-poverty/

[19] By the End of the Week, the Trump Administration's War in Iran Will Likely Have Cost $25 Billion, Center for American Progress, April 2026. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/by-the-end-of-the-week-the-trump-administrations-war-in-iran-will-likely-have-cost-25-billion/

[20] The Trump Administration's War in Iran Is Raising Costs for Rural Communities, Farmers, and Food Production, Center for American Progress, May 2026. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administrations-war-in-iran-is-raising-costs-for-rural-communities-farmers-and-food-production/

[21] AI Data Centers: Big Tech's Impact on Electric Bills, Water, and More, Consumer Reports, March 2026. https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers-impact-on-electric-bills-water-and-more-a1040338678/

[22] America's Data Centers Are Thirsty: Rural Towns Are Paying the Price, Fortune, May 13 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/05/13/data-center-georgia-arizona-water-wars/

[23] 4 Takeaways from the DNC's Long-Awaited 2024 Election Autopsy Report, PBS NewsHour, May 21 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/4-takeaways-from-the-dncs-long-awaited-2024-election-autopsy-report

[24] Sowing a Rural Insurgency, The American Prospect, March 21 2025. https://prospect.org/2025/03/21/2025-03-21-sowing-rural-insurgency-democrats/

[25] Data Center Water Use Is Not Sustainable in the Dry American West, Washington Post / Ripple, April 8 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/04/08/data-center-water-use-not-sustainable-increasingly-dry-american-west/

[26] With 417 Rural Hospitals at Risk of Closing, Rural Health Transformation Funds May Be Too Little Too Late, Fierce Healthcare, February 11 2026. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/providers/417-rural-hospitals-risk-closing-rural-health-transformation-funds-may-be-too-late

[R1] US Agriculture Department Reports Food Price Increases from Iran War, Tariffs and Drought, World Socialist Web Site, April 29 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/29/vmga-a29.html

[R2] The Trump Administration's Tariffs and Iran War Will Cause Americans to Face Higher Prices This Summer, Center for American Progress, May 2026. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administrations-tariffs-and-iran-war-will-cause-americans-to-face-higher-prices-this-summer/

[R3] US Food Prices Face Inflation Threat from Iran War and Tariffs, Claims Journal / Bloomberg, May 28 2026. https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2026/05/28/337819.htm

[R4] It's Official: Americans Will Pay Much More for All Types of Health Coverage in 2026, The Century Foundation, February 2026. https://tcf.org/content/commentary/its-official-americans-will-pay-much-more-for-all-types-of-health-coverage-in-2026-including-medicare/

[R5] Health Insurance Will Cost More for Millions of Americans, Especially Rural Residents, Stateline, August 2025. https://stateline.org/2025/08/22/health-insurance-will-cost-more-for-millions-of-americans-especially-rural-residents/

[R6] The Housing Affordability Crisis Is Accelerating Fastest in Rural America, Redfin, November 2025. https://www.redfin.com/news/suburban-urban-rural-q3-2025/

[R7] Almost Unmanageable: Raising a Child in the U.S. Now Costs More than $300,000, Fortune, April 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/04/12/cost-of-raising-child-in-us-2026/

[R8] America's Twin Scarcities: The 4-Million-Unit Shortage in Both Housing and Childcare Is Breaking Families, Fortune, May 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/05/03/american-housing-crisis-childcare-crisis-double-whammy/

[R9] How the Education Department Cuts Could Hurt Low-Income and Rural Schools, NPR, March 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/21/nx-s1-5330917/trump-schools-education-department-cuts-low-income

[R10] New Federal Policies Spur Higher Health Insurance Premiums in 2026, Commonwealth Fund, September 2025. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2025/new-federal-policies-spur-higher-health-insurance-premiums-consumers-2026-insurer-filings

[P1] 23 Attacks on Freedom of the Press, Mediaite, April 25 2026. https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/journos-hit-trump-with-23-attacks-on-freedom-of-the-press-in-blistering-whcd-letter/

[P2] In 2025, Press Freedom Came Under Direct Attack, Columbia Journalism Review, December 22 2025. https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/press-freedom-attacks-2025-arrests-detention-journalists-trump-ice-assault.php

[P3] Journalists Face Escalating Threats in 2026 as Trump Intensifies Hostility Toward the Free Press, Milwaukee Independent / PEN America, January 4 2026. https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/newswire/journalists-face-escalating-threats-2026-trump-intensifies-hostility-toward-free-press/

[P4] The Numbers That Defined the Trump Administration's Attacks Against the Press in 2025, Poynter, January 5 2026. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2025/united-states-press-freedom-donald-trump/

[P5] Press Freedom Groups Denounce Arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, The Guardian, January 30 2026. https://www.aol.com/news/press-freedom-groups-denounce-arrests-193317934.html

[P6] Trump FCC Eyes Plan to Reward Local Broadcasters Like Sinclair for Airing Right-Wing Propaganda, Techdirt, May 6 2025. https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/06/trump-fcc-eyes-illegal-plan-to-censor-real-journalism-reward-local-broadcasters-like-sinclair-for-airing-right-wing-propaganda/

[P7] Trump Is Very Excited About Right-Wing Broadcasters Merging, Techdirt, February 12 2026. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/12/donald-trump-is-very-excited-about-all-of-our-shitty-right-wing-broadcasters-merging-into-one-bigger-even-shittier-company/

[P8] On World Press Freedom Day, Journalists Face Increased Pressure Under Trump, Amnesty International USA, May 2026. https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/on-world-press-freedom-day-journalists-face-increased-pressure-threats-under-trump-administration/

[P9] 13 US Troops Killed, More Than 380 Wounded in Operation Epic Fury, Military Times, April 8 2026. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/04/08/pentagon-data-13-us-troops-killed-346-wounded-in-operation-epic-fury/

[P10] CQ Roll Call 2025 Vote Studies: Congressional Republicans Vote with Trump at Historic Rates. https://rollcall.com/2026/01/09/vote-studies-2025-party-unity-presidential-support/

[NEW1] Iran War Fuel Costs Tracker, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, updated May 27 2026. https://itep.org/iran-war-fuel-cost/

[NEW2] Iran War Average U.S. Household Paying More on Gas and Energy, CNBC, May 29 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/29/energy-costs-inflation-iran-war-trump.html

[NEW3] Is the Iran War Driving Up Prices Beyond the Gas Pumps?, Deseret News, May 29 2026. https://www.deseret.com/business/2026/05/29/us-inflation-gas-prices-iran-war-cost-of-living-basic-necessities-federal-reserve-interest-rates-consumer-concerns/

[NEW4] Rubio Says Epic Fury Is Over as Strait of Hormuz Tests Fragile Ceasefire, Time, May 5 2026. https://time.com/article/2026/05/05/rubio-iran-epic-fury-over-strait-hormuz/

[NEW5] The Lives Behind the 13 US Troop Deaths Tied to the Iran War, CNN, May 25 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/25/us/us-military-deaths-iran-war