Prairie Populism Returns in US Midterms as Candidates Chase Every Vote in Republican Strongholds

In the final stretch of the US midterm elections, Democratic and independent candidates could win back communities across America's rural heartland through a combination of resurgent prairie populism, local despair over the impact of Donald Trump's agenda and an old-fashioned tenet of shoe-leather politics: showing up everywhere.

When Dan Osborn rolled into one of the most rural counties in Nebraska earlier this month, he started walking into businesses on the tiny main drag of Arthur, a town of about 100, ready to meet whomever he could.

For an independent making a run for the US Senate in a red state, every vote matters — even those in solidly Republican areas that candidates often overlook. Osborn is touring all 93 counties in the state before election day; he has about a dozen left.

He is one of several high-profile candidates seeking to win over areas the left and centre ceded to Republicans over the last decade-plus. They are running on populist messages rooted in the agrarian culture of their states, harking back to politicians who stood up to corporate interests by tying together farmers and workers who felt abandoned by both parties.

In Iowa, Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek calls himself a commonsense prairie populist. Sam Forstag, a Democrat running for Congress in Montana, has emphasised economic populism in his campaign to flip a red district, saying he wants to fight for people like the kid he was growing up, whose belly was full because of food stamps.

One writer described the politics of Kansas pastor Adam Hamilton, a Democrat, as a populism of decency, comparing him to William Jennings Bryan, the late-1900s evangelical populist from neighbouring Nebraska known as the great commoner.

Turek said populism, for him, is not doing things through a party lens, but keeping as a political north star what is best for the people — what is best for Iowa, for the middle class, for workers, for rural communities and for small family farms.

The candidates often push back on attempts to label their politics, instead emphasising pragmatism and a willingness to work with politicians of any background. Hamilton's campaign, for instance, said he looked up to Bob Dole, the late longtime Republican senator from Kansas, and would work with anyone — noting that this was how Kansas got the Farm Bill that has supported farmers and low-income children for decades, by Democrats and Republicans working together.

This election cycle adds datacentres and artificial intelligence to the populist platform, drawing on anti-corporate and anti-elite sentiment and a rural desire to maintain land and lifestyles away from big tech interference.

Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party, said she had never seen her party adapt so quickly to where voters were on an issue and really lean into it, rather than poll-testing it to death — a lesson, she said, that it is fine for candidates to talk about the local issues people are talking about.

In the late 19th century, the left-of-centre populist movement in the US focused on small farmers, and its chief enemy was the railroads, according to Cory Haala, a history professor at South Dakota State University who wrote a book on midwestern progressive populism. Railroads bought up land and charged exorbitant rates to farmers who needed to ship their goods; those farmers, often working with organised labour, pushed to regulate the railroads and stand against out-of-state interests.

Some hallmarks of that movement persist today: a state-run bank and a state-run flour mill in North Dakota, and parties such as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor alliance in Minnesota. Progressive populism ebbed and flowed through the 20th century, peaking again in the 1980s in response to the farm crisis, when poor economic conditions led to massive small farm failures.

Populists and farming-focused Democrats won for decades across the prairie and midwestern states — Tom Harkin in Iowa, Byron Dorgan in North Dakota, Tom Daschle in South Dakota and Bob Kerrey in Nebraska. By 2013, however, USA Today was calling them a fading species.

Haala said the current conversations around anti-monopoly, antitrust and datacentres are providing new flashpoints for the kind of populist organising that was successful in the 1980s, the 1930s and earlier — often, he said, an out-of-state, faceless corporate endeavour.

Heidi Heitkamp, the former senator who was the last Democrat to win statewide in North Dakota, noted her win was not that long ago — she won in 2012 and lost re-election in 2018. Her successor, Republican Kevin Cramer, recently told a rural policy newsletter he was glad he was not on the ballot this year.

Heitkamp said the Democratic party decided it was easier to grow its base in the suburbs than to maintain a presence in rural America. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said as much in 2016, arguing that for every blue-collar Democrat lost in western Pennsylvania, two or three moderate Republicans would be picked up in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Now, candidates rooted in their states, speaking to neighbours' economic troubles — high gas prices, tariffs, rural hospital healthcare woes and datacentres — are trying again to win over these voters. Heitkamp said Democrats and independent populists need to respond directly to these concerns to rebuild their reputations and expand their representation, adding that rural areas depend heavily on being able to afford to drive, and that people who once believed this administration would solve those challenges have lost faith.

In Arthur, Osborn first talked to locals at the town's market, then went next door to the Bunkhouse, a restaurant lined with antlers, animal skins and Nebraska licence plates. He grabbed a burger with supporters who had heard he would be in town, then talked to other tables — first apologising for the frequency of political ads, then explaining who he was: not a Republican, not a Democrat, just someone who wants to work for workers.

Wins — or even narrow losses — in these areas would signal to national Democrats whether this return to rural voters is working. Whatever the results, the campaign of talking to every single person across the prairie states has become one of the most discussed threads of these midterms.