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Emilea Johnson is an America in One Room: The Youth Vote participant. She wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.
I grew up on a multi-generational farm near Goodridge, Minnesota — a small town of just 112 people. My father is a fourth generation self-employed farmer, and my mother works at our local church as a parish secretary. Now an 18-year-old in my first semester of college at Iowa State University, I finally cast my vote for the first time.
While the election results may be shocking to some, they reveal what many young rural Americans like me have known for some time: rural Americans, and many of the issues that make our lives so challenging today, are consistently overlooked and misunderstood.
The candidates, and frankly much of the electorate, assume that rural America is a guaranteed win for the Republican Party every election cycle. As a result, the media repeatedly labels us as a homogenous community with similar lifestyles, beliefs and voting habits.
While it’s true that rural states turned out for President-elect Donald Trump this year, the electoral map doesn’t convey the full story, and both parties still have a lot of work to do to bring meaningful change to rural America. Especially as Gen Z takes over more of the electorate, the rural vote will only become increasingly diverse as young people align less closely with specific parties, and instead develop varied policy opinions that often correspond with more than one ideology.
Rural Americans want to feel heard and have our values deeply considered in the policymaking process. The continued failure of many candidates to consider our perspectives has led to a glaring disconnect between rural America and national platforms addressing healthcare, inflation, and other key issues.
I’ve seen firsthand the challenges that rural communities face when candidates overlook our needs. Given my parents’ employment statuses, we, like many other rural families, struggle immensely with health care affordability. We’re tasked with navigating complex options, or lack thereof, on our own. Neither Trump nor Vice President Kamala Harris put forward a health care platform that addressed our specific needs. Perhaps even more concerning, neither campaign appeared invested in understanding these challenges.
Rural America also spends more than the rest of the country on nearly all expenses. Farmers are the backbone of our nation’s food supply and ensure that we maintain a healthy and sustainable environment for future generations, which is why I hoped rural perspectives would play a larger role in shaping each candidates’ economic plan. As I weighed both platforms ahead of Election Day, I never heard either candidate address how they would support the rural economy. As Trump shapes our next four years, I’m left wondering: where do rural Americans fit within his second term?
Driven by my motivation to address stereotypes about my community and advocate for our needs, I traveled to Washington, D.C., for a weekend in July to attend America in One Room: The Youth Vote. During a few days of passionate political deliberation with more than 400 fellow first-time voters, I was excited to serve as a voice for the rural perspective to my peers who may have never set foot in or even driven through a rural community.
I felt most heard after explaining one reason why the energy revolution cannot happen overnight. While I share my peers’ urgency to slow climate change, electric farming equipment cannot currently compete with the capacity standards of traditional machinery, a pitfall that I knew was not obvious to my peers from urban areas. As I contextualized the sheer scale of the U.S. agricultural industry, I saw the group consider alternative solutions and dissolve the assumption that rural communities are simply unwilling to address the problem.
Rural voices have too long been overlooked, and if politicians followed a similar model of respectful, compassionate discussion with our community, they would make a small, but powerful, step in improving our satisfaction with democracy and cultivating respect for opposing points of view.
While Trump might find it difficult to relate to an 18-year-old girl who was raised in a small town community, earning votes — and most importantly, our trust — can be achieved by different means. Actively listening, validating our beliefs, acknowledging our stories, and making clear how he plans to support us in his first 100 days might have a surprisingly large effect in cementing rural confidence.
While we don’t expect candidates to relate directly to our everyday experiences, we want to feel like they are making an effort to educate themselves on the realities of rural America.
