Many of the new Democratic candidates making a splash this cycle are the progressives who ran to the left of the party establishment in the primaries and defeated their more centrist counterparts. But there’s another intriguing trend that’s been obscured in all the hype: the outsider candidates who built their careers mostly away from the political arena and are now taking on the career insiders. Naturally, it’s not new to see nonpoliticians parlaying their real-world bona fides into a new career in Washington, D.C., but what does feel new this year is how many farmers are doing it. Specifically, the farmers that have been battered during the Trump years.
Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran have raised the prices of goods and gas and closed global markets, making what was already a U.S. farming crisis even worse. In some races, farmers are stepping up to try to connect their stories to the myriad disasters the Trump administration has brought to all voters in their districts. They’re making this effort while drawing on the farmer populism of the Democratic Party’s bygone era, and blaming Trump for the ways his bad policies have hurt their rural communities: Think lost jobs and closing hospitals.
The biggest challenge they face? They have to run a high-wire campaign that proves their claims while not alienating their farmer colleagues who, as a whole, have supported Trump since the beginning.
One of the most interesting races featuring a farmer turned politico is in my home state of Arkansas, where Hallie Shoffner is running for Senate against two-term Republican Tom Cotton. Shoffner grew up in the Delta, in a small town named after her family, and returned to Arkansas after graduating from Vanderbilt University. She also earned a master’s degree at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock. She took over her family’s farm about 10 years ago, after her father was diagnosed with dementia, but she had to close operations last year. “I wouldn’t be running for the United States Senate if last year I hadn’t had to close my family’s farm,” she told me. “It did not matter what we did or what crops we planted financially. It wasn’t enough, and that is true for hundreds of farmers across Arkansas. We’ve lost 25 percent of the family farms in Arkansas in the last 18 months.”
Shoffner realized that if she didn’t close, she’d risk gambling away her family’s land by relying on loans, and her father needed stability and care. “I was so angry. I was so angry because farming’s the best job in the world, but when you’re not making any money, it eats you alive because it’s not just a job. It’s a lifestyle. It’s almost an obsession. You really got to love digging in the dirt to do it because you never really make any money,” she said.
The farming crisis in Arkansas has been particularly acute; the state led the nation in farm bankruptcies in 2025. But Shoffner and others think the experience they earned navigating the challenges of the industry is comparable to the affordability crises facing everyone, especially in the rural areas where they live.
Blake Gendebien, a dairy farmer running for Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s open seat in New York’s 21st district, said the problems facing farmers are directly impacting everything from grocery store prices to the loss of opportunity for young people in rural communities. “We’ve got immediate things to focus on that can help our small businesses keep employing people, and focus on success and development and opportunity for people to stay here and live and work and thrive in the North Country,” he said. That especially means ending the war in Iran and repairing relationships with Canada, which borders his district across the St. Lawrence River. The lack of cross-border travel is hitting businesses in his area hard, he said.
Don Coover is a veterinarian and cattle rancher in Kansas running to defeat Representative Derek Schmidt, a Republican ending his first term serving the state’s 2nd district, which covers much of the state’s eastern border. He says everyone should be concerned about how the impacts of Trump’s changes at the policy level are affecting them. “If you’re concerned about the cost and the health of the nutritional environment in the United States … you better be concerned about the [agricultural] industry because that’s the foundation of it,” he said. “None of these things exist in isolation or in a vacuum. Everybody’s dependent on everybody else, and so we need to make decisions like that.”
The loss of global markets arising from Trump’s trade wars have hit his district hard, he said. “A lot of decisions have been made capriciously without a real understanding of the long-term effects and the unintended consequences,” he said. “We’ve got to get away from that. We’ve got to have people that are interested in putting in the work to understand what the hell they are making decisions about and making better decisions.”
Shoffner, Coover, and Gendebien are running in red areas of the country where Democrats are often painted as caricatures. They have tough races. Coover is rated as having a very slim chance of victory; Gendebien’s race is tightening but tilting Republican. Cotton is favored to win reelection in Arkansas. I asked Shoffner if Arkansans think she’s a socialist, given the rise of Democratic Socialists of America–aligned candidates around the country, and she said their platform doesn’t work for her but that voters across the spectrum are tired of being put into boxes. “DSA is the political box, MAGA is the political box, and neither one tells you everything about the millions of Americans who vote Democrat or Republican, or in Arkansas, those who split their tickets,” she said.
Cotton has been in D.C. since his first election to the House in 2012. It’s a difference she tries to emphasize. “I do know what life is like here right now,” she said. “And let me tell you, nobody likes Tom Cotton.… He’s too far away from the problem. He doesn’t bother to come home and find out.”
Gendebien and Coover are trying similar messages, which is partly an anti-D.C. message, as well. Gendebien said he’d be willing to listen to good ideas, but he did sign the pro-capitalist, anti-socialist “Promise to America” unveiled at the centrist WelcomeFest earlier this year. “When we’re working to reduce costs at the grocery store, that is not a Republican or a Democrat issue,” Gendebien said. “And if you want to save rural health care, that is not a Republican or Democrat issue. So I am the alternative that is working for everybody, both Republicans and Democrats.”
His opponent, Republican nominee Anthony Constantino, is the owner of a custom sticker company who is known for making controversial and offensive comments. But Gendebien’s focused on running against Stefanik’s legacy, as well. That includes passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has jeopardized rural health care across the country and in his district.
“We have over 150,000 families in the district that require help from Medicaid in one form or another,” he said. “We also need to bring back the Affordable Care Act premium subsidies because without them, the health care is too expensive and people are just dropping off.… That’s what I am laser focused on, and our current congresswoman has not been in person to any of our hospitals to say I’m going to fight for rural health care for you.”
One thing these unique candidacies are making clear is that there are issues much more pressing than the internecine squabbles between the DSA and the Democratic establishment. And if these candidates win in November, it likely won’t be because of any party’s national platform. It will be the combination of local issues and a massive blue wave that puts even the least likely candidates over the top. Still, we may be on the cusp of the first return of real farmer politicians since President Jimmy Carter—candidates who are well versed in how politics and policy have directly led to the demise of their professions. What could come next? The potential severance of the Republican Party’s ties to farm country, and the revival of an older connection to a worker-aligned Democratic Party.
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