In FERN’s latest story, published with The New York Times, senior editor Ted Genoways unpacks the GOP’s hollow embrace of rural America over the last quarter century and makes the case that Tim Walz can help Democrats win back some farm country voters.
“For a generation or more, most of the politicians who visited towns like La Vista were Republicans who told their audiences a familiar story: that the government was in their way, that the welfare state was leeching their sweat and tears to service the lazy poor, that rugged individualism still reigned supreme,” Genoways writes. “It’s the same story that Mr. Vance and his fellow Republicans are telling today. Mr. Walz is making a bold play to claw back the narrative by telling a different story — one that harks back to the prairie populists of the 20th century.”