The path to restoring and securing democracy runs through red, rural America. Here’s our strategy for forging it.
I am the executive director of Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC), a 47-year-old multicultural, multi-issue network of nine grassroots organizations spanning the Mountain West and Northern Plains. We are organizing in places where everyday people are experiencing deep economic stress and a growing disillusionment with a governing system they believe no longer serves them, places where civic engagement and accountability have eroded over the last several years, and MAGA has moved in to fill the void.
While our organizing work has proven that consistent, local engagement can successfully counter distrust and build durable civic infrastructure, our groups are starved of the investment they need to scale their work to the level of democratic backsliding happening in the communities in which they operate. We’re calling on philanthropy to step up and meet the need.
A toxic political climate has already taken hold in countless communities across the country: civic engagement has declined, democratic institutions have hollowed out, and candidates are running unopposed, as demonstrated by the alarming fact that 70% of the races on the 2025 ballot went uncontested, overwhelmingly at the local, city, county, and regional levels. Candidates elected in this political climate are much more likely to govern recklessly, self-servingly, and without transparency, trusting they won’t be held accountable by their constituents. And they’re often right.
The places where this climate has taken hold are mostly rural, strongly conservative, and deprived of funding for civic infrastructure. The Right has been building political infrastructure in these places for decades, while progressives have largely treated them as election-cycle projects.
What propels our organizing work right now is this premise: there is no path to restoring democracy in the U.S. that does not run through our rural, Republican-dominated region.
The Southern Battleground
Our region is by no means a peripheral one on the national political stage. It shapes national debates on immigration, public lands, energy, and the future of rural economies. It’s where Republican national leadership is most concentrated: Sen. John Thune, the majority leader, represents South Dakota; Sen. John Barasso, majority whip and chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, represents Wyoming; and Sen. Mike Crapo, chairman of the Finance Committee, represents Idaho. Home to key House of Representatives battleground districts, our region plays a pivotal role in determining who controls Congress. The region’s fast-growing, multiracial population also now regularly decides presidential outcomes.
Our strategy for forging that path to restoring democracy is grounded in a clear theory of democratic change. When governing institutions fail to deliver transparency, economic security, or basic respect, public trust collapses. In that political vacuum, authoritarianism can gain a foothold. But when we organize communities around shared concerns and values, equip them with practical civic knowledge, and support them in holding their leaders accountable — through public participation, policy pressure, and, when necessary, electoral mechanisms — everyday people can reassert democratic norms, even in the most politically hostile environments. This strategy can interrupt authoritarian political dynamics, restore accountability, and build the local-level civic infrastructure we need for a functioning, healthy democracy.
A Strategy of Shared Values
That strategy was tested last year when a rural county commissioner in western Colorado, Scott Mijares, who had run unopposed for the Montrose County Commission seat in 2024, began exhibiting all the signs of an elected official who no longer holds himself accountable to the people he serves. In regions like ours, the role of local officials is paramount yet often overlooked. County commissioners serve as the primary executive and legislative body for the county, overseeing critical functions such as budgeting, public works, and local health services. By managing this essential infrastructure of daily life, their decisions directly determine the economic and social stability of rural communities.
Mijares’ four-point agenda included “supporting Donald Trump’s America First Agenda at the local level”. A few months into his term, Mijares and another Montrose County Commissioner, Sean Pond, who had been appointed to the seat after the elected commissioner died, joined the one other commissioner in unanimously confirming Mirza Ahmed as the County Health Director. A Bangladeshi immigrant, Ahmed had previously worked for the World Health Organization in Somalia setting up vaccination clinics during the COVID-19 epidemic.
Soon after confirming Ahmed, Mijares and Pond began hearing rumblings from a small but vocal set of their constituents who branded Ahmed a “globalist” and questioned his qualifications and immigration status (Ahmed is a legal resident of the U.S.). Mijares and Pond responded by accusing the county manager of failing to properly vet Ahmed and forcing the manager and the county attorney to both resign. Mijares and Pond then voted to demote Ahmed to “interim” County Health Director and launch a search for his replacement. But following an immediate public backlash, they voted to reinstate Ahmed. Their attempt to appease their xenophobic constituents cost the county $500,000 in severance packages and legal fees.
Mijares and Pond continued to infuriate county residents by shutting down public comments during commission meetings (including one that followed the forced resignations of the County Manager and County Attorney). They made decisions behind closed doors in apparent violation of Colorado’s open meeting laws, and attempted to pass unreasonable land-use restrictions that would have all but prohibited the development of renewable energy projects in the county.
In July 2025, county residents from across the political spectrum had had enough and formed the Recall Scott Mijares Committee, which filed a notice of intent with the county clerk to remove Mijares from office. Organizers with Colorado Rural Voters (CORV), one of the organizations within WORC’s Grassroots Democracy Program, supported the committee by organizing and training some 150 volunteers, who fanned out across the county — at churches, coffee shops, farmers’ markets, grange halls, and front doors — to gather the required number of signatures to place the recall on the 2025 ballot. They gathered 5,400 signatures, well over the required number.
“Scott Mijares’ unpredictable actions have created instability, resulting in a toxic, fearful work environment for one of our community’s largest employers,” the petition read. “Our county’s credibility has suffered across the state because of [his] secrecy, fiscal recklessness and erratic leadership. He has wasted money, county services, and silenced citizens.”
In the 2025 election, by a margin of 52% to 48%, county residents voted to recall Mijares and replace him with a politically unaffiliated candidate. The victory was made possible by the bipartisan leadership of the Recall Committee and its decision to stand together in the face of Mijares and Pond’s intimidation and threats. It was also made possible by CORV’s canvassing and phone banking efforts, which specifically targeted Republican and conservative voters, asking them to stand up for their values and demand a transparent, fiscally responsible county government accountable to its constituents.
“The contempt Commissioner Mijares and Commissioner Pond have shown the citizens of this county is just totally unacceptable,” Ray Langston, a former chair of the Montrose Republican Party who was part of the recall committee, told the Grand Junction Sentinel after the recall vote. “Regardless of whether you agree with the citizens of this county or not, as elected officials, you work for everybody in this county, not just the people you agree with.”
In a county that Trump won with 64% of the votes, Mijares’ recall was a remarkable rebuke of someone who had obviously modeled his behavior on the national leader of his party. What fueled the campaign was not ideology, but core democratic values that cut across party lines — government transparency, responsible management of taxpayer budgets, and public participation.
Republicans Are Revolting
It’s important to recognize that several Republican constituencies in the Mountain West and Northern Plains states remain culturally distinct from the MAGA coalition, creating real potential for progressives to join with small-business conservatives, libertarians, Native voters, and rural moderates who value local control and commonsense policy over ideological extremism. Indeed, many Republican leaders in our region have never fully embraced the MAGA agenda and have even shown a willingness to defy the movement rather than participate in the culture wars it wages and the poor governance and reckless policy it engenders.
That happened in Montana last year, when a group of nine Republican senators broke from their party and joined the Democrats in a single caucus, effectively neutering the Senate president and sidelining the state Republican Party. The caucus passed bills that expanded Medicaid, increased teacher salaries, and made investments in affordable housing and healthcare. They also blocked bills that would have weakened labor unions and made state judicial elections partisan.
“I always looked at politics when I was younger and you see people work across the aisle,” Gayle Lammers, one of the Republican senators, told The New York Times. “I know we’re in this new age where division is so hardcore, but why can’t we get back to where any reasonable legislation is reasonable legislation? If it’s good for Montana, if it’s good for your district, why not consider it?”
Dubbed the “Nasty Nine” by their Republican colleagues, the defectors have since been censured by the state Republican Party. In April, the party revoked their voting rights at the party’s state convention and passed a resolution “rescinding recognition [of the Nine] as Republicans.” Apparently, none of it has shaken the Nine’s resolve. Four of them recently appeared on CBS Mornings to proudly defend their alliance with Democrats, and three sued the Montana Republican Party to regain their voting rights at the convention (they lost, however).
Funding the Organizing that Works
This caucus and its success were not accidental. It was the result of years of relational, one-on-one organizing, voter education, and leadership development that expanded who participates in public life and how decisions are made. Further, this success, and perhaps the caucus itself, may not have been possible without the surge of funding Montana’s grassroots organizations received in the lead-up to the 2024 Senate race. That funding enabled Western Native Voice, one of WORC’s member groups at the time, to conduct a get-out-the-vote tour across Montana, with stops at each of the state’s eight reservations and the city of Great Falls. At each stop, WNV field organizers canvassed Native communities, encouraged voter registration, and answered questions about the upcoming election. They also invited residents to a community event later in the day featuring Native food, music, and comedy.
Through these face-to-face interactions, the WNV team connected with hundreds of voters and collected over 3,400 new registrations across all stops. As a result, 12 Native Americans were elected to the state legislature. This group went on to form the largest American Indian Caucus in Montana’s legislative history, their representation matching the proportion of Native Americans in Montana’s population. Because of the relational organizing WNV conducted in conjunction with another group in the WORC network, Montana Rural Voters (MRV), Democrats flipped 12 seats and broke a Republican supermajority in the state legislature. That change in the legislature’s makeup set the stage for the good governance and good policy that came from the bipartisan Senate caucus.
Despite the backsliding of democracy in the Mountain West and Northern Plains and the success of groups like WNV and MRV to counteract it, long-term funding for rural civic infrastructure in our region has sharply declined since the 2024 election. Many organizations operating in this politically crucial region of the country are now forced into survival mode — precisely when sustained engagement is most needed.
That’s why it’s so crucial that philanthropy step up and invest at the grassroots level in this most politically challenging of regions, and do so with a patient, unwavering focus on building grassroots civic capacity. That funding allows grassroots organizations to do more than respond to crises or conduct electoral work in the election cycles. It enables us to cultivate benches of local leaders, strengthen public participation, and reestablish democratic norms in places where authoritarian politics have gained the strongest foothold.
Without this investment, the erosion of democratic accountability in rural America will accelerate. With it, these same communities can become anchors of democratic renewal — locally and nationally.
