Meet the rural Americans bucking the trend and voting Democrat

Rural America was once a happy hunting ground for Democrats, but in recent decades the Republican Party has taken firm control

Ohio farmer Bill Wiley says he votes Democrat because he is concerned over the Republican stance on immigration. Stephen Starr / The National

In today’s America, Bill Wiley is a rare find: a farmer who votes Democrat.

Mr Wiley lives in a rural county in western Ohio where more than 81 per cent of voters backed Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

But Mr Wiley says he has a good reason for voting Democrat: he relies on the help of guest workers – people who come on temporary visas for jobs in fields such as agriculture – to run his 147-hectare farm in Shelby County, where the back-breaking work includes harvesting 6ha of ornamental pumpkins and gourds.

“I would not be able to harvest some of my crops without physical, manual labour,” he says.

The number of visas granted to temporary agricultural workers grew during the administration of president Donald Trump, keeping pace with previous expansions, but some farmers are still concerned.

Mr Trump has frequently used anti-immigrant launguage and some believe that if he were to win the election in November, he would restrict immigration across the board.

That would affect not only thousands of farmers dependent on immigrant labour, but all Americans, as cutting down on this source of labour is likely to increase the cost of food.

“Our whole economy could not be as successful as it is without immigrant labour,” Mr Wiley says.

Rural America was once a happy hunting ground for Democrats. In the 1996 presidential election, Bill Clinton won about 1,100 rural counties.

But in recent decades, the Republican Party has taken firm control. On his way to winning the White House four years ago, Joe Biden won only 194 rural counties.

Although rural America is overwhelmingly populated by Trump supporters, change may be under way before the November election as Democrats chase voters in the countryside.

Dirt Road PAC, a new fundraising effort for Democratic Party candidates running in rural America, has pledged to spend millions of dollars reviving the party's profile, which for most of the past century relied heavily on blue-collar workers such as farmers and coal miners for votes.

Other Democratic-leaning groups such as Democrats 101 and Third Way are also putting huge efforts into reclaiming rural American voters .

“We have a 38 per cent win rate, which I think really shows there’s an appetite for change, that people want choices on their ballot,” says Daniel Jubelirer of Contest Every Race.

The initiative has helped more than 7,000 candidates run as Democrats in hyper-local races in about 350 counties.

Founded in 2018 after a gap was identified in the Democratic ecosystem where the party was not recruiting enough candidates to run for office, especially outside major urban areas, Contest Every Race claims its efforts have resulted in a 3 per cent increase in votes for Democrats in some parts of rural America.

Mr Jubelirer says that national Democrats in 2016 did not show up in rural America or speak about rural issues in a compelling way – but that’s changing.

“We have the second-highest rural population in North Carolina [a swing state],” he says.

“When you’re talking about millions of rural voters, a 1 per cent, 2 per cent increase in rural voters can be the margin in some of these really close states.”

This is happening at a time when support for Mr Trump in rural America appears not to be as stable as before: in the 2022 midterms, Democratic Party candidates won more rural votes than expected.

That was largely due to candidates aligning with more centrist views that include controlling immigration flows and government spending.

While Mr Biden remains deeply unpopular among rural voters, moderate Democrats running in local and state-level electoral races are faring better.

In Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, John Fetterman, the US senator, outpolled Mr Biden in all but five counties in the 2022 midterm elections.

In Michigan, where Mr Biden won the 2020 election by only 154,000 votes, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, also a Democrat, won her re-election in 2022 by almost half a million votes.

It is still unclear how his replacement on the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris, will fare, although her pick of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as running mate indicates she will be trying to woo rural voters back to the party.

The challenges facing Democrats in rural America are significant. As Mr Jubelirer says, Republicans have built a formidable political machine, controlling all but three state legislatures in more than a dozen states across middle America.

But that does not mean Democrats are not trying.

On a cool Thursday evening in June, about 40 people gathered at the public library in Sidney, the county seat of Shelby County, to help turn give the Democratic Party a boost in this ruby-red corner of America.

Participants talk of how in the 1980s and 1990s, about half of local political representatives were members of the Democratic Party. Today they have been nearly wiped out.

Speakers talk about wanting to “get Democrats out from hiding".

Those attending say they cannot align with the Republican Party because it has become a cult of personality, focused on Mr Trump, and that it does not support children after they are born, including their education.

As to their reasons for being Democrats, they cite how the party supports health care and fosters an acceptance of all people. Others mention the importance of protecting women’s personal autonomy.

Among them is Mr Wiley, for whom meeting regulations and paying a litany of fees to secure immigrant labour for the harvesting season is front of mind.

Those requirements included getting his drinking water and housing conditions checked annually to meet programme standards.

Mr Wiley spends hundreds of dollars on visa processing, transfers, flights to and from his workers’ home countries and other requirements.

On top of that, he is required to pay the labourers $18.18 an hour – more than $10 an hour above the federal minimum wage.

All that is after he has made sure – through advertising and other methods – that no American has come forward for the job first.

For him, while current immigration policies do not work, they are likely to worsen under Mr Trump.

“Businesses are struggling to find workers or are having to get illegal [immigrants]," Mr Wiley says.

"We’re shooting ourselves in the foot if we stop [allowing immigrants to enter the country], let alone deport people.

"What we need to do is find out a way to streamline the process so that we can get the workers we need.

“The bottom line is that this country is built on immigrant labour.”