“ The Democrats quit being the party of normal. They are the party of ‘we are smarter than you. We are better than you.’ What kind of party runs on a ‘we are better than you’ platform?”Kat DiVittorio is mad. The 36-year-old registered Democrat abhors Donald Trump, but from the vantage point of small-town, Western Pennsylvania — Corry, population 6,100 — she sees what urban progressives often don’t.

“It is hard to come from Corry,” she confides, “because the assumption is ‘you aren’t educated, and you don’t get it.’” A hardscrabble Rust Belt town located 125 miles north of Pittsburgh, Corry is trying to redefine itself. DiVittorio, who holds two college degrees and serves as an assistant director of the Corry Higher Education Council, is on the frontlines of that effort.

From her perspective, Democratic policies have complicated her labor.

Corry is saddled with a 30% poverty rate, and the disparity between its median household income, $45,081, and the Pennsylvania median, $76,081, puts it nearly at the bottom of the state.

She helped write a state grant aimed at redressing this disparity. Corry, 86% white, lost out to Allentown, 30% white, because, as the grantees explained to her, “we [Corry] are not diverse enough.” Sighing, she exclaimed, “But we are poorer than [Allentown]!”

In today’s Democratic Party, social justice has become a zero-sum game, and much of rural, small-town America feels unseen. DiVittorio thinks this feeling of invisibility is the source of Trump’s appeal. Corry-area voters say of Trump, “He sees me,” she says.

Beyond Trump, DiVittorio explained, “The people of Corry don’t feel seen or heard — they get bitter. They feel as if they have to defend their right to exist.

It might not be the case, but people feel that way.”

Cory Haala agrees. The University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point professor studies liberalism in 1980s rural America, what he terms “prairie populism.” He told me, “Dems appear to be scolds and elites. In the past, Democrats were the farmers or miners down the road, just like you. But they have lost the muscle memory of rolling up their sleeves and doing the hard work of rural organizing.”

Democrats were once the party of rural America. “The idea that government can protect the small guy against the big guy was born in rural America,” says Gregg Cantrell, who authored The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism. From the New Deal through the 1980s, rural Democrats and urban liberals formed a coalition that anchored the party. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton took half the rural vote. A slump among these voters cost Al Gore and John Kerry the presidency.

So, in 2008, Barack Obama launched his campaign in rural Virginia and worked hard to woo rural swing-state voters.

It paid off. Compared with Gore and Kerry, Obama boosted his vote by 8 to 12% with rural voters in swing states.

In fact, Obama won all four of Corry’s voting wards.

After 2009, however, the Democrats came to believe that their “coalition of the ascendant” did not need rural small-town voters. Obama rarely made appearances in rural regions. In 2010, the party shut down its House and Senate rural outreach offices.

Obama won a narrow reelection in 2012. But during his tenure, Democrats became uncompetitive in rural America. Lynlee Thorne, a Democratic organizer for Rural GroundGame, told me, “Only 3% of Democratic money goes to rural America.” She explained, “We [Democrats] keep showing up to this fight with one or two hands tied behind our backs. The number one thing is being seen so people see that you give a damn about them.”

Giving a damn might have helped former U.S. Rep. Collin Allred. The 2024 Senate race between Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Allred was supposed to be a barnburner. An NFL linebacker turned lawyer and Dallas-area congressman, Allred raised $80 million and posed a threat to a vulnerable incumbent. But Cruz beat the telegenic challenger handily because Allred wholly ignored the rural vote, in a state with America’s largest rural population.

Jim Hightower, the iconic Texas populist and syndicated columnist, explained, “He [Allred] didn’t go anywhere [rural]. They had never been to Lubbock. Nowhere west of [Texas interstate] I-35.”

Hightower described the party’s broken playbook with rural voters: “Send in paid, out-of-state consultants. Then they tell the locals what they are doing is wrong. They see it as a national election, not a local election. They come in with an agenda written by the consultant class and the corporate class. It is just stupidity and arrogance.”

This was the formula during the Obama presidency, when the party lost the most governorships (13) and state legislative seats (816) since the era of Dwight Eisenhower. By contrast, in 2008, Obama campaigned in rural Pennsylvania and kept the rural margins close. And he won the Keystone State by 10 points. Sixteen years later, rural Democratic organizers are met with refrains like: “You are the first person to knock on my door since 2008,” or “You are the first Democrats I’ve met.”

In 2024, Trump took nearly 75% of all rural Pennsylvania ballots and 68 % of the Corry vote. Nationally, Trump won 93% of all rural counties and 62% of the rural vote.

Peter Johnson is not surprised.

Johnson helped repair a giant Kamala Harris after it was torn down in Corry.

“Then it was graffitied,” he says.

Sexism and racism surely play some role in Harris’s reception in Corry. But DiVittorio thinks progressive elitism also fuels the anger. She explained, “I once lived in New York City. My friends [there] are very liberal. But they assume people from Corry are dumb.”

On an array of social issues, DiVittorio sees that her urban progressive friends assume, “you are wrong if you don’t embrace these ideas.” Corryites “feel under attack and they feel that Trump is protecting them,” she says.

In Corry, opposing Trump comes with social and professional costs. What psychologists term “motivated reasoning” ensues. People favor evidence that supports their preexisting beliefs.

When Trump’s national security team sends war plans over Signal, partisans find a way to dismiss it. But urban progressives don’t help their case. Lynlee Thorne urges her fellow progressives to “stop shaming.”

DiVittorio agrees. She thinks the shaming launches a cycle in which “Corry people feel attacked and take the opposite [Trump] view.”

“I don’t have to listen to you, because you don’t listen to us” is, for DiVittorio, the unofficial motto of the rural-urban divide. For liberals looking to oppose the president effectively, it starts in rural America — by listening and showing up. Democrats can win again if they can recapture their pre-2016 margins with rural voters.

( Jeff H. Bloodworth is professor of American political history at Gannon University and a Fellow with the Truman National Security Project.)