Rural versus urban. Red versus blue. Progressives versus centrists. Trump versus the world. Extreme political polarization makes it feel impossible to address any of our many pressing problems. But rural organizers have a road map that bypasses partisan quicksand and is racking up an impressive number of people’s victories.

Rural organizers have it hard. They’re woefully under-resourced and often ignored, if not scorned, by urban liberals who see rural America as a MAGA-deranged wasteland that deserves its comeuppance. The secret to their success is their ability to reach past party labels and ideological divides and bring members of the community together around shared interests in things like housing, health services, transportation and childcare.

It all begins with listening. That’s how Lake City, Colorado, resident Cheryl Tate, 71, got started. In 2024, Tate noticed that her town didn’t have the kinds of programs for seniors that other mountain towns did. So she formed a committee and got to work. First, the committee asked seniors what services they wanted. Then, the group convinced the city and county to help pay to turn the back room of Lake City’s armory into a senior center staffed by volunteers. It was a great reminder that local people are good at finding local solutions.

Similarly, Luke Allen, a lead organizer with the group Michigan Faith in Action, recounts how an affordable housing campaign in Benzonia, Michigan, began with a potluck cohosted by a conservative evangelical church and a liberal UCC church:

We broke bread together and had a discussion of the issues affecting our own local community. I facilitated and kept it very focused. We’re not here to talk about the President or congress. What’s wrong right here, right now. What issues are affecting you, specifically. Guess what the conservative people said? Lack of affordable housing. Guess what the liberal people said? Lack of affordable housing.

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That potluck gave rise to a series of listening sessions and, eventually, a housing campaign that is still going strong five years later. In 2023, pastors and congregants from eight churches convinced the Republican-controlled Benzie County Commission to spend a million dollars building 16 affordable single-family homes on land donated by the Housing Trust of Benzie. This summer, the group is launching a new campaign to get local businesses, churches, and individuals to donate or sell plots of land to the Housing Trust at a steep below-market discount.

Not every effort can lead to brand-new housing. Some groups still provide modest but much-appreciated services. The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative’s Community Works program supports county Democratic Party committees to meet all kinds of unmet needs. (Disclosure: I’m on the parent organization’s board). Food banks, smoke detector installations, park cleanups–you name it, and one of 14 Community Works chapters is out there doing it. Community surveys done in late 2025 show that these efforts have had the effect of building trust and goodwill across lines of difference, a precursor for any kind of enduring political change.

Taking a different tack, Put People First! PA publicizes and drives rural residents to free pop-up health clinics offered by the Remote Area Medical charity in Pennsylvania. During the drive or at the clinic, Put People First! organizers talk to patients about their healthcare concerns and link their personal struggles with the systemic failures plaguing our national healthcare system. From there, patients may be invited to join one of Put People First!’s healthcare rights committees.

Like housing and healthcare, most rural issues cut across party lines. A local campaign in a conservative community can be just as successful as one in a liberal neck of the woods.

Trump won 59 percent of the vote in Sauk County, Wisconsin, in 2024, but that didn’t stop local organizers with Citizens for Sauk County Health Care Center from raising hell when the county hatched a plan to sell off its sole public nursing home. According to Judy Brey of Reedsburg, Sauk County taxpayers invested $15 million to build the center in 2008, only to see the county offer to sell it for $5.1 million to Aria Healthcare, a private company with a less-than-reassuring track record.

Upon learning of the plan in early 2024, Citizens for Sauk County Health Care Center sprang into action. Members circulated petitions, wrote letters to the editor, made so many angry phone calls that county supervisors stopped answering their phones, and raised their fists at the supervisors while chanting “shame on you.” Brey said it wasn’t always comfortable for “people like myself who are kind of meek and nervous about standing up in front of 31 supervisors.” But stand up they did.

In October, 2024, they filed a lawsuit (which is still pending) alleging that the sale was being negotiated in secret to hand a sweetheart deal to the prospective buyer. Aria Healthcare eventually backed out and, as of last summer, plans to sell were iced. Still worried about the nursing home’s future, Citizens for Sauk County Health Care Center recruited a slate of pro–nursing home candidates who, on April 7, successfully won a majority on the county Board of Supervisors.

Two hours down the interstate, isolated seniors in Walworth County, Wisconsin (another Trump stronghold), convinced the county to provide Sunday van service at a time when other public services were being cut. A few residents started showing up at Board of Supervisors meetings and, before long, dozens of residents were turning out.

After winning the transportation campaign, the informal group formed itself into the Groundswell Collective to tackle other local problems. The group is now campaigning for an innovative “nursery to nursing home” intergenerational care center in Elkhorn.

Kevin Gunyon, a partially blind oven-factory worker from Elkhorn who is active in the transportation campaign, said, “What we did right is that we didn’t make it a right or wrong thing or an us versus them thing. We made it a ‘how-are-we-going-to-make-this-work thing.’ That’s what we did right in Walworth County.”

Gunyon’s words are prophetic, or ought to be. Rural communities have no shortage of local problems and no shortage of practical solutions. When people meet not as partisan warriors but as neighbors with shared interests, common ground is not hard to find. It’s not actually hard to find at the national level either, but conflict entrepreneurs see to it that we obsess over the handful of issues that divide us.

We are living through an era in which an out-of-touch, self-interested political class tells us whom to hate. But it’s hard to hate people when you’re working shoulder to shoulder with them on things that matter.

Sustained, focused local campaigns can’t solve everything, but they can tangibly improve people’s lives and, perhaps more importantly, disrupt the us-versus-them narrative that has poisoned civic life. No matter how many wrecking balls Trump sends crashing into Main Street America, these rural Midwesterners have demonstrated that we are neither as divided nor as defenseless as we’ve been led to believe.