Holly Ragan has lived in rural Missouri her whole life. She grew up in Callaway County and now lives in Fulton, a college town of 13,000 in central Missouri. There, she raises stock, fishes, and hunts. And she supports laws that protect women’s health, the environment, and independent family-owned farms, platforms typical of Democrats. But because she lives in a small Missouri town, Ragan has cast her vote for Republicans over the last decade. She says there haven’t been as many Democratic candidates, and she’s noticed that if a local official wants to stay in office, he or she runs as a Republican candidate.
Ragan heard complaints that many residents in rural areas feel forgotten because some Democratic candidates think it’s pointless to visit there. So to focus on outreach and support for rural Democratic candidates for office, Ragan founded her organization River Rat Democrat, in 2018.
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To Ragan, living in a rural community and voting Republican nearly go hand-in-hand—“it’s a cultural identity,” she says. (According to a poll reported by St. Louis Public Radio, President Donald Trump received 70 percent or more of the vote in Missouri’s rural counties in the last presidential election.) And research might back up Ragan’s claim. Washington University recently published a study that found that between 2003 and 2018, the urban-rural political divide became more noticeable and decisive in recent elections.
The study shows the divide is rooted in geography and how close people live to major metropolitan areas, or cities with a population of at least 100,000. Population density also plays a significant role in shaping people’s political beliefs and partisan affiliation.
Ragan remembers growing up in Callaway County, where she lived for 18 years, and where most of the people she knew worked at the nuclear power plant and other union jobs. People there were socially conservative, sure, but residents identified as Democrats because of their union memberships. Ragan, who was raised in a union home, was taught to vote Democrat. Her mother worked for the union as a welder at ABB in Jefferson City, and her father helped build the Callaway Nuclear Plant as a pipefitter and later worked for the city of Fulton as a backhoe operator. In her early twenties, Ragan also worked for the union as a welder at John Deere in Ankeny, Iowa, before she made a career change and became a veterinary tech.
She has had a hard time reconciling the idea of union families voting Republican, considering the party’s pro “right to work” stance. (In 2018, Missouri voters rejected a state “right to work” law, which would have banned compulsory union fees.)
“I will never for the life of me understand why people who work so hard for every dime they have are so willing to vote for a party that says right on their platform they want to kill the very reason these people make a good living,” said Ragan.
“Being a Democrat doesn’t mean you’re a limousine liberal with no idea about rural values or the rural lifestyle,” she continues.
So Ragan started her organization with a group of folks who have all run as Democrats in Missouri for both state house and state senate (except for Ragan, who has never run for office). The group has connected with communities in areas where Democratic candidates or elected officials haven’t campaigned in decades.
River Rat Democrat encourages statewide and national-level Democratic candidates to campaign in rural areas, but they also focus on finding candidates to run for the offices in rural Missouri. The organization supports Democrats who feel like islands in a sea of red and connect them with other like-minded folks in their communities.
River Rat Democrat supported Elad Gross, a former Democratic candidate for Missouri Attorney General. According to Ragan, Gross spoke with community members at the annual Maries County Democrats Truman dinner fundraiser in Vichy, Missouri. Even though the town is very small, she says Gross gave the same enthusiasm as he would in a metro area.
Cori Bush, a nurse, pastor, and activist who is all but guaranteed a seat in Congress after winning the Democratic primary, is another candidate that has the support of River Rat Democrat.
Ragan has known Bush for five years, and Bush has spoken in Springfield and Rolla. Visits from Democrats in those areas, Ragan says, made people feel like they matter.
However, even though River Rat Democrat has made a lot of strides in outreach and support for rural Democratic candidates, Ragan says, “there are still Democratic officials in the cities who need to be convinced that the rural areas matter, too.”
