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.
