Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Lynlee Thorne: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Thorne: Very often that is true. It’s a real gut punch. And I think something for people to keep in mind is that it’s not just the radio stations—because a lot of rural people even now cannot get radio reception in their rural area from their home. So often when there is a crisis or a power outage or something similar, people are having to go to their neighbors who might be able to get radio reception and hear that news through the grapevine.
Thorne: It means to be seen. In preparation for this interview, I turned my own radio on. And the fact that they’re covering stories from Broadway and Fulks Run and these little bitty towns that are never covered by a local TV station—you’re talking about the local football team, the local VFW event, whatever it is, that just isn’t covered by any other outlet by any other means. Maybe a weekly or monthly newspaper, but that’s about it. And then looking at what happened in Alaska or the recent flooding we’ve had in Western North Carolina, radio stations are critical in emergency situations as well.
Thorne: We’re north of where the flooding was in far southwest Virginia. We have had pretty extreme flooding here in Rockingham County in the past. And yeah, emergency situations are not the only reason why a rural radio is important, but that’s obviously when you would notice that it could have a life-threatening impact.
Thorne: Stunned that someone like Senator Murkowski is surprised by this, but also it makes sense. This is actually what we’re seeing from a lot of voters in rural Virginia this year. Part of what our organization has been doing for the last several months is calling folks who are registered to vote but haven’t been participating very consistently in elections. And we’ve been reaching out to make them aware of the coming cuts to our health care—not just Medicaid, but how this will impact the ACA marketplaces as well as the cost increases from Trump’s tariffs. And people are stunned that this is happening. Sometimes our volunteers are emotionally struggling because they feel like they are breaking horrific news to people in real time. And people are pissed and scared and feel a little blindsided. So while those of us who have been paying attention are well aware of these cuts, this is devastating news to a lot of people in rural spaces.
Thorne: Yes, I guess I’ll be generous and say sure. My member of Congress, Representative Ben Clein, was at a recent event and I guess the local Democrats had a chalkboard out making sure that people knew that he recently voted to cut Medicaid and Medicare. Apparently he didn’t like that information being out in the world and simply wanted them to remove the sign. I think a lot of what we’re seeing here—the attacks on the Smithsonian, the attacks on our history—they don’t want us to know the truth. Radio is just one of the tethers that helps rural people communicate and stay connected to each other. Every single tether to the truth they can find they want to sever. I think it’s hard for Democrats to recognize that for a long time, rural people have heard about Democrats through the lens of Republicans because they’ve been the only ones to bother to show up and communicate with us. So at the same time that it is true, that we should be talking about the real harm Republicans are unleashing on their own communities, Democrats need to also recognize that we haven’t been bothering to show up to participate, to engage in meaningful ways.
Sargent: Well, yeah, the story of what’s happened with Democrats in rural America is horrible, and I want to get into that in a second. But at first, I want to draw you out on this point. It seems to me that the failure of Democrats to engage comes back to bite them at times like this. This bill screws rural America in every which way you can possibly imagine. And yet, it becomes easier for Republican representatives to get away with this precisely because Democrats aren’t in these areas really taking it to them and telling their constituents what these lawmakers are doing to them. Is that right?
Sargent: Well, just to reiterate, you’re in the Shenandoah Valley in Western Virginia, and Virginia has big elections this fall for governor and state legislature. That’s what you were talking about just a minute ago. What are you seeing out there with these voters more specifically? What are rural Americans in these places who are making decisions right now about how to vote this fall saying? Are they open to Democratic appeals? What’s working for Democrats in appealing to them, and what’s not working for them?
I do think people are open to having the conversation about health care in particular. That has come up for us again and again and again. But mobilizing those folks to vote is going to be really hard. People are feeling a tremendous amount of despair. They’re working two or three jobs. They’re struggling to find a home. You’re seeing 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds still having to live with mom and dad because accessing their own place just isn’t a reality even if they are working pretty hard. It’s hard to get people to show up and participate in election when they’re feeling that type of economic pain and pressure on a daily basis and you’re coming to their door saying, Hey, the other side is making it worse. We really need to have a much clearer picture of what it is we can do to address this at the state level.
Thorne: I would say our focus has largely been on folks who we have reason to believe might be favorable toward Democrats to begin with. In Virginia, we have open primaries, so we do not register by party. So we have to rely heavily on past voting behavior and some other data to inform us about their partisanship. So we’re really looking at less likely voters. This is significant because we lost the governorship in 2021 by, I think, a margin of around 58,000 votes, something like that. Just in my congressional district, for previous years, we’ve had well over 300,000 voters who just haven’t shown up. We can clear the statewide margin pretty easily in rural spaces even if we’re just looking at folks that we think are likely to vote for Democrats if they are to vote at all.
Sargent: Understood. I take two things from what you’re saying. One is that an untold story among Democratic organizers in some of these rural areas is that they’re really waking up to the possibility of going out and getting those voters who would vote Democratic but just don’t vote. [These voters] are really being left on the table because they’re in these rural places and represent such a minority in them, the party just assumes that they’re not really there for the getting—but they are. That’s one story. Then the other piece of this, I think, is that in an off year, which this is, and the 2026 midterms will also be, not having Trump at the top of the ticket is a real boon in these places because you can maybe make a real appeal to swing voters and try to turn them against the local Republican without Trump muddying the picture with all his cultural politics and stuff. Is that right?
Sargent: Yeah, I can certainly see that. Just to close this out, one thing that’s really mystifying about Trump for a lot of Democrats is that on the one hand, his cultural appeals to rural America and his support there have both outdone other Republicans. He’s been tremendously successful in these places. But at the same time, he’s really, really screwing them over, almost in a way that’s worse than the Republicans over the last 50 years. There’s the Trump tariffs, which hit farm country hard. There are these enormous health care cuts we discussed, which are creating these huge problems for rural hospitals across the country. Again, that’s a real lifeline in those places. Many of them have very little access to health care. The other stuff we discussed. How do you think about those two stories where he’s doing better in these places than even Republicans traditionally have while shafting them even more royally than anyone else? How do we understand that?
There’s a lot of brilliant people in rural communities who feel like their hometowns are worth fighting for and, I think, can be fantastic partners and allies to folks in cities and suburbs—because a lot of our issues are honestly very similar. The solutions might look a little different, but a lot of the core problems that people are experiencing are very much the same. They don’t want us to be on each other’s side, but really we can be. But there’s no shortcut. We have to communicate. We have to engage. We have to show empathy. And we haven’t done that for far too long. And now we’re in a place where we have got to catch up somehow and find ways to reconnect with each other.
Thorne: Thanks, Greg.
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