Reclaiming Rural Power: Chloe Maxmin & Canyon Woodward
April 20th, 2023
“If we don't do this work, the consequences for our democracy are really dire.”
Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward are the co-authors of Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why our Future Depends on It. We discuss the importance of winning rural races in America.
When Chloe ran for office in rural Maine, she knocked on over 20,000 doors and discovered that constituents feel a lack of representation in their daily lives. Democrats really stopped showing up and investing in strong organizing infrastructure in rural places, but it's possible to turn things around. There's a huge opportunity to organize in small towns and places that have been overlooked–and not at the expense of urban efforts. A key ingredient is to focus on what we have in common and connecting on those values levels.
Follow Chloe on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/chloemaxmin
Follow Canyon on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/CanyonWoodward
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Chloe Maxmin & Canyon Woodward
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Chloe & Canyon Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful, all lowercase.
Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
My first introduction to the United States was a year living in rural Idaho at age 16. And let me tell you, when I tell New Yorkers about that, they look at me as though I spent time in a colony of Mars. America is divided in many ways, but the urban / rural divide is particularly deep and has profound implications for our politics and our democracy. Today's guests, Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward, are the co-authors of Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends On It.
Robert Reich said of the book, "This is a wonderful, powerful book and one of the most hopeful I've read about a possible future for American politics."
We here at Future hindsight are 100% on board for a hopeful future for American politics. So Chloe and Canyon, welcome to Future Hindsight. Thank you for joining us.
Canyon Woodward: [00:01:39] So happy to be here.
Chloe Maxmin: [00:01:41] Thank you so much for having us.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:43] So first, a little bit more about you both. Chloe, you are a former state senator in Maine. And Canyon, you were the campaign manager, but you two have been working together for a long time on several different projects and campaigns, and now a book together.
Canyon Woodward: [00:01:58] Yeah, We are so lucky to have been best friends for over a decade now. We first met organizing around the Keystone XL pipeline back in 2011 as freshmen in college, and we certainly went through some bumpy patches early
and figuring out how to coordinate the fossil fuel divestment campaign together. But we stuck in it and just became as close as can be. And I feel like that's a huge part of how we've been able to do what we've done.
Chloe Maxmin: [00:02:32] He's the more poetic, lyrical one. I'm a little bit more stoic, but we're so lucky to be able to call each other best friends, and I think we're continually surprised that we -- like we're so different in so many ways, but it's the differences that are really complimentary and so it's just a blessing.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:54] Yeah. Well, one of the things that really came across in the book is how supportive you are of each other and your process throughout the campaigns that you have worked on and all the organizing journeys you've been on. So Canyon, let's talk a little bit about the campaign for state Senate in Maine. It was a successful campaign, and Chloe's victory was a huge upset. What do you think were the magic ingredients?
Canyon Woodward: [00:03:17] Chloe certainly is an incredible candidate. So that's the start. But something that's often lost in the way that we look at campaigns or social movements or history in this country often is the best leaders are oftentimes incredible organizers whose leadership is derived by empowering and lifting up good people around them. And I think that has been Chloe's magic all the way back to to the climate organizing and just translating what we learned through years and years of working in the climate movement to an electoral sphere and just really focusing on building a grassroots campaign that started with people and with relationships and building community and turning that into this huge, huge mobilization to go door-to-door and go down to every dirt road in this rural district and talk to folks that had never been talked to by a candidate in their lives oftentimes.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:26] Yeah, I think that was really important that some people were like, "Oh my God, you're knocking on my door. I've never met a candidate before." I thought that was really a powerful illustration of actually how important it is to reach people at their doors. So I have a question for Chloe here about your experience serving as a state senator. What in your mind is your most important or most enduring legislation? And when you were talking to constituents while you were campaigning, what was the promise that resonated with people the most?
Chloe Maxmin: [00:05:00] Before I decided to run, I was talking to a lot of folks who have been doing this work for so long and getting their wisdom, and one of the things they prepared me for was you're going to hear a lot about education and health care, education and health care. And of course, I heard so much about those issues at the doors, but they were always embedded under a larger theme of "I don't feel represented by my government. I don't feel like my vote counts. I don't feel like anyone I've voted for has followed through on anything that they've said." And so it was like these issues that we experience in our daily lives have become more of a symptom of a of a lack of representation. I just heard that like daily dozens of times. And so when I got elected, I really wanted to represent my community from the types of bills that I sponsor to, you know, hosting coffee hours every month in my community and just trying to really make sure that I was doing the best that I could as a representative of everyone on all sides of the political spectrum. So I feel really proud of all of the legislation that I worked on during my four years in office. I think the biggest one dealt with substance use and the opioid epidemic that we're experiencing here in Maine. And that so many communities, especially rural communities, are struggling with across the country. But in Maine, it was very, very early data showed that about 90% of people weren't calling 911 when there was an overdose for fear of criminal prosecution when the police arrived. So we were experiencing a record number of overdoses in Maine. And so I worked with the incredible advocates on the ground. It was all their leadership, all their language. I was just the conduit for their work. But we ended up passing the strongest Good Samaritan law in the country, which means that we offer the strongest protections of any state if you call 911 when there's an overdose.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:55] Oh, wow. That's amazing. I thought you were going to tell me about the Maine Green New Deal.
Chloe Maxmin: [00:07:00] Yes. I also sponsored the Maine Green New Deal. And I was also really proud of that and did a lot of work with the unions on it. It was really an effort led by the unions, and I was just elected for my first time in 2018. I was a Democrat representing a Plus-16 Republican district. And so I decided to sponsor this thing called the Green New Deal that was very different from the National Green New Deal. It was very targeted, very local, really focusing on green jobs and making that economy accessible to rural folks. So it was the first state Green New Deal Bill to be
endorsed by a state AFL-CIO affiliate, which was very exciting. It was a very targeted bill. But, you know, my intent with a lot of my work is to show the progressive world that our values as progressives are really not that far apart from how folks who we think of as conservative, or not progressive, think about and operate in the world. And so we can talk about a Green New Deal in a way that is rooted in rural, working class America and have those issues resonate.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:07] Right. Those are really good legislations. Those are both real wins, right? Especially in the case of the Good Samaritan law, lifesaving lifesaving impacts. So then why did you step away from the political coalface, so to speak? Why write this book?
Chloe Maxmin: [00:08:23] You know, from the get-go Canyon and I approached these campaigns with the lens of trying to figure out a better way to campaign and do politics in rural America as Democrats, as progressives, really acknowledging the massive swing that rural voters have had to the right in the past two decades. So the left is really struggling in rural America. It's not a secret. There are so many folks on the ground who are organizing, serving, running for office, supporting candidates, you know, keeping the flames alive in rural places. But the trend is is very dire and scary. And so Canyon and I went into the experience really just trying to figure it out, just knowing that something needed to change. And as we went through the experience, we found ourselves taking notes on on Google Docs or on sticky notes and voice memos, and we would have these big pieces of poster paper on our wall and we would come home and just like jot down thoughts that we had as we were campaigning. And it all kind of coalesced into this playbook that we had; that was kind of stuff that we had stumbled upon and found that really worked and resonated, but also tried and true tactics that so many people have used campaigning. And so we decided to turn it into a book. And because our mission and our theory of change is really to galvanize a wave of progressive candidates and organizers to transform rural politics and build durable power across the country, you know, it's never been just about me or just about us. It's been about how do we create really beautiful, vibrant movements in rural spaces that can reclaim our democracy.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:01] So Canyon, I want to back up here a little bit. Chloe just talked about that big swing away from Democrats in rural areas. So while we turn to more
about your theory of change, how did we get here? How did we come to this place where Democrats are seen as almost exclusively urban? And why do people assume rural equals conservative?
Canyon Woodward: [00:10:26] It's such a big question. I don't profess to have all of the answers by any means. So I can just give you, give you my personal perspective, which is so much of the roots of it are in really toxic, deliberate disinformation campaigns from the right, especially from the extreme right wing and right wing media personalities, and in particular from talk radio and to Fox News. And then on top of that, some huge strategic missteps by the Democratic establishment, making a conscious choice to disinvest in contesting the ground in rural America, as we saw that gap begin to open up. And it wasn't really that long ago, as recently as 2009, the partisan lean amongst rural folks was dead even between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. So that's not really that that long ago, 2009. But by 2016, that gap had widened to 16 points. And it's over 20 points today. And the Democrats really stopped investing in strong organizing infrastructure in rural places and showing up there and, you know, maintaining relationships of trust. When Chloe and I were getting started on Chloe's first run for office in 2018, you know, the the chair of the DNC at that time said you can't knock doors in rural America, as we were putting in hours each day doing exactly that. That was was quite a gut punch. But I think it was really reflective of the mindset of the Democratic establishment over that period of time. And that really created a huge void in these rural communities that unfortunately, far right wing extremists were able to step into pretty much uncontested and really manipulate. And so I think that's a big piece of the story.
Mila Atmos: [00:12:31] Right. Yes. I mean, I think you make that point over and over again how the Democratic establishment really is not supportive of even running candidates, frankly, in rural areas. They just cede the ground, to your point. So, Chloe, you write about the importance of translating your core values into the context of rural campaigns. Can you talk about what the values of rural voters are and maybe give us some examples of how you've translated your own values to resonate with rural voters?
Chloe Maxmin: [00:13:02] Every community is unique and every every rural community is unique. So I think it's I don't want to I don't want to generalize and take away all of those independent identities, but, you know, certainly values that I experienced growing
up in rural Maine are a sense of independence and self sufficiency. You know, when you live back in the woods on your own, it's just a different way of life. There's more isolation, but there's also this deep sense of interdependence and knowing that you do live in a tight knit community and that your neighbors are there for you and to support you. And that kindness is key. And you wave to people as you drive down the road and there's just a sense of camaraderie and support that was really so pivotal for me as I grew up and that I really missed. When I did move to a city to go to college, I, I just always wanted to come home and know that I could go to the grocery store and see friendly faces. That's, you know, that's something that's really, really special for me and my community. When I started to go knock on doors, you know, Canyon and I had had a lot of privilege while we were campaigning. And one of them is that we could work part time while we were campaigning, which allowed me in particular to be able to just knock on a lot of doors. So I knocked on about 20,000 doors between the two races, which is a lot. So I talked to, I talked to a lot of people, and when I started that process, I was like, "Oh gosh, what is this process of finding common ground? Am I going to be able to do it? And what does it look like?" But the more that I talked with people, the more that I learned how to kind of suspend my own judgment and really just have space to listen to people's experiences and stories and where they were coming from in the world and to really respect the stories that I was hearing. Of course, we didn't tolerate hate or racism or bigotry or xenophobia as we were campaigning, but the vast, vast majority of of conversations that we had with voters were really rooted in just frustration, like frustration that you're not getting what you earned in this life, frustration that the political system isn't working for you. So I really began to see that my values aligned so much with the majority of people that I was talking to. Like, you know, I never talked to a Republican who wanted health care to be more expensive. Maybe they didn't think that Medicare for all was the right way to get there, but we certainly agreed on the core value of it. So it really just kind of made me think about how so many of the words and approaches and messaging, which are kind of subtle things, they really make us focus on what we have indifferent. We don't really focus on what we have in common. We're not really connecting on those values levels. So it's hard to see. This person is just doing what they think is best for their family, and I'm trying to do the same thing. And where can we find some space to talk together about that?
Mila Atmos: [00:15:56] Yeah, that really struck me. Also in your book, as you're recounting all of these encounters, how how much room you left for people to be
human, you know, and just share about their own experiences and find, like you said, common ground. And to your point, it took a lot of practice to get really good at this and be skilled at listening first and foremost and then finding your, your way to sharing what's common and what you have, what you both want to pursue going forward.
Mila Atmos: [00:16:30] We are taking a break to thank our sponsor, Shopify. When we come back, Canyon and Chloe explain why they decided to run the campaign as politics as unusual.
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And now let's return to my conversation with Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward of Dirt Road Organizing.
So Canyon, I was really struck also that you described the motto of this campaign as politics, as unusual. What do you mean by that?
Canyon Woodward: [00:18:38] Hmm. Well, I'll bump that over to Chloe in just a second because I think she came up with that. But really, it meant kind of bucking this establishment politics where everything is super top-down. You know, they hand you
basically the budget and the consultants, like, tell you how to spend your money and who to work with. And oftentimes it feels like we're just running the exact same types of candidates with the same types of campaigns that sound the same. Cycle after cycle. And it's almost like... We've compared it in the past to like going to IKEA and getting the candidate in a box. That's, that's how it often feels. And there's such a lack of authenticity and connection to the community and like real investment in again, that grassroots organizing, that's largely what we meant by politics as unusual. And then also a big piece of it was we completely rejected negative campaigning. So, you know, Chloe was able to flip a 16-point Republican advantage district in 2018 and then unseat the highest ranking Republican in the state, the Senate minority leader, in 2020, without saying a bad word about either of them. And that's really unusual in today's politics. And it's something that we heard over and over again. People took note of that and they they appreciated that.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:07] Right. Well, Chloe, I do want to hear about your take on politics as unusual. And I think one of the things we can start with is the clincher cards. You wrote that you got blisters from writing clincher cards, and maybe you can first explain what clincher cards are, because I had not heard of it before. Maybe others haven't either.
Chloe Maxmin: [00:20:30] Yeah, I think Canyon described the politics as unusual piece perfectly, but such a huge part of our campaigns was trying to bring just more, more humanity into it. There's all these weird parts of campaigning where we kind of expect people not to be human. Like we expect people to agree 100% with their candidates. And, you know, I don't agree 100% with anybody on planet Earth; that, you know, we agree people to make make decisions about a vote, which is, to me, such a sacred big thing based on two minutes of interaction with a candidate or maybe a volunteer. And so it just didn't make any sense to us. And I feel like the consequences of a more inhumane politics have really reared its head in the last decade, so one of the very small ways that we brought more humanity into it. And a lot of people do this as well, but clincher cards are basically just postcards. And every time I talked with a voter, I would go home that evening and I would write them a little thank you note for taking the time to talk with me, which I really sincerely meant, because I feel like it's a big deal to talk with a random politician on your doorstep. You know, just say like, you know, follow up with anything that they talked about or provide any information that they had asked
for. You know, the card has my cell phone number on it and all of that stuff. And so, you know, some days you're talking to like 50 people. So you go home and you write 50 postcards, and then towards the end of the campaign, you really want to make sure that you're writing as many postcards as possible to everyone that you talked to. So, you know, sometimes people would get 3 or 4 postcards from me because I would interact with them, you know, have a conversation with them 3 or 4 times. And I think people got a little annoyed with me by the end of it. But I think they like really appreciated the persistence of of like saying thank you. I mean, even to this day, I write so many thank you notes. It's just like a part of my part of my life.
Mila Atmos: [00:22:22] That's interesting. You mentioned that some people are annoyed, but I have a question about whether people actually called you since you provided your phone number.
Chloe Maxmin: [00:22:31] A lot of people did call me or text. You know, definitely a small percentage based on the amount of people that I gave my cell phone number to. But I feel like it's also just the act of being like, this is my personal cell phone number. Like, please call me any time. Or, you know, I think another sweet thing about small communities is that someone would call me and then they would like be, "Oh, I really wasn't expecting you to answer the phone. I thought it was going to be your office." I was like, "I don't have my own office. Like I'm just a state rep." And so then they can go tell their neighbor like, "Oh, I called Chloe and she actually answered the phone." You know, that kind of thing spreads really quickly in communities like mine.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:13] Yeah, that makes sense. So Canyon speaking about the clincher cards, they were really a part of a broader strategy you had, kind of keeping things deliberately rough around the edges. You know, not using the fancy consultants and not sending out the shiny focus group mailers. Why was that important for this campaign?
Canyon Woodward: [00:23:34] I mean, that again, goes back to wanting things to feel different, to be true to ourselves. And a big part of that was Chloe and I are organizers through and through to the core. And so. Investing in the organizing side, the volunteers, and building up this grassroots movement that could reach all across the district and go door to door and listen to people and have these conversations was
really our priority from the get-go, especially in that first district that had the 16-point Republican advantage. We were clear-eyed about that. The odds of actually pulling it off and winning were not in our favor, but our hope was that we could leave the community better off and more more volunteers empowered no matter the outcomes of the election. So that meant really investing in volunteers. And that's not really how campaigns are typically run. I reference getting handed down a budget by Democratic leadership. They wanted us to spend about two thirds of our budget on their consultants to run a direct mail campaign to put, you know, put those awful mail pieces in people's mailboxes that we all get and toss immediately into the trash. And so we rejected that and instead just designed everything ourselves. It looked different. For better or worse. We got pretty good feedback on it from folks feeling like it looked more authentic. And most importantly, we were able to free up a lot of our budget to invest in the staff capacity to do that community organizing.
Chloe Maxmin: [00:25:14] I just wanted to add one quick thought on all the mail stuff before we moved on, which is just to say Canyon designed it all, all by himself, alone at home while I was out canvassing. And it was just like, so impressive. He learned like, he learned how to do it all, you know, all on the go. But it was also like that sense of authenticity and that it really did look unique. That helped us get traction in a space that we didn't think we would.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:40] Yeah. Well, one of the things that really stood out to me is that you were able to have a whole story arc about Chloe and what she wants to accomplish so that if you received several mailers, it was not the same thing. And it built on that. And one of the feedbacks was that somebody read every single thing you sent, which, you know, like, I definitely don't do that. If I get a mailer from a politician, like you said, most of the time it goes directly into the trash... Like, oh, there's so-and-so. Okay, trash. But I don't even read it. And I thought this was really compelling. And, you know, a lot of people should listen to that, make your own mailer and really say what you want to say and tell your story that is authentic. So I want to turn here to what you guys did during COVID. Chloe, you pivoted from campaigning and used your organizing skills to help older people when COVID-19 hit. Can you talk about how that came about and what you learned from that experience?
Chloe Maxmin: [00:26:35] Yes. During COVID, you know, we had decided to run for state Senate in large part because we had this vision of just creating a huge movement of canvassing and community outreach. But I had already started knocking on doors. And then when COVID hit, obviously everything ground to a halt. I think most of us probably have awful memories of those early days. And so for us, we completely stopped campaigning. But we realized we had about 200 volunteers that had already signed up to make our campaign what it was. Nothing happens without our volunteers. And we also had access to the voter database. And so we were like, hold on a second. These are some tools that seem pretty rare and useful right now. And so we worked with a small community group and one of the towns that it was a community group that actually came out of our campaign in 2018. We called them up and we were like, "Would you do just a test phone bank with us and call older folks in the town and just see how they're doing?" And so we did that in an afternoon and we found, you know, this one poor older woman who was stuck at home without any food and was too scared to go to the grocery store and her kids didn't want to drive her to the grocery store because they didn't want to give her COVID. And she was just stranded at home all alone and didn't have the food pantry number right on hand because that wasn't a resource that she had used before. So we were like, Oh, there seems to be a need here. And we expanded it. And so we ended up calling every senior over the age of 65 in our district, regardless of political persuasion. I think it was around 50,000 phone calls to folks in our district, and we ended up coordinating with our volunteers, this huge mutual aid network that, you know, we'd help people with prescriptions, with rides to the doctor because there is no public transportation around here. Even on a non-covid day, anything that people needed in isolation, we helped get it to them. And it was I mean, it's amazing because that network has kind of continued. The needs aren't as great now, but that network continues to this day and I'll often still get phone calls of like, Oh, do you have a driver who could bring someone to the doctor? It was an amazing experience and just really reinforced for us and we hope for our community too, that campaigning isn't always extractive and it's not always just about a candidate. It really is supposed to be a community service and like Canyon said, leave a home better than it was before.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:58] Yeah, I think you stressed that several times that really this is about a movement, as opposed to just an election that you build up and break down, but something that endures. So Canyon, deep relational organizing has come up quite a
bit on this show before and how it's a long process to build these relationships and that this kind of organizing can be transformative, as Chloe just described. Not extractive. It's about community service. And this is what you were doing already at that time before this became very popular. Do you have thoughts about how that can be sustained or scaled, especially on a rural level?
Canyon Woodward: [00:29:37] Yeah, it's so, so important. And what Chloe just talked about in that mutual aid effort I think is such a great demonstration of of the power of giving folks these organizing skills and then they have the tools to meet the moment, whatever the moment is, whether it's a global pandemic or a political campaign or an issue campaign in the community, but takes serious investment, investment in money, and especially being able to hire experienced staff and organizers to invest in people and their growth. Chloe and I just started a nonprofit called Dirt Road Organizing that very much builds off of our experiences here. And our mission with that is to work all over the country with rural communities to provide trainings and on the ground support for folks to organize in their communities. And we're going to be just a small piece of the national ecosystem there. But our hope really is that we can divert more resources into progressive rural organizing and really create a movement across the country that can go down every dirt road and hear people out and invest in really powerful grassroots movements.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:56] Yeah, that sounds very powerful and very promising. So, Chloe tell us a little bit more about what you've got planned with Dirt Road. What are campaigns that you maybe are working on right now or where you're about to focus your energies? Because next year is a big year again, another big election year.
Chloe Maxmin: [00:31:12] I know it always seems like there's never a break in electoral organizing and I know it's so, so much, but we're really excited about Dirt Road Organizing. It just feels like such an opportunity to support so many incredible people who are doing this work really over the long haul. Because doing this work in rural spaces where there is little to no democratic infrastructure, you know, you can't just invest in someone or in one town for one cycle. It's really, it's really a long term investment. So that's what we're trying to build up. We just started our second year, so we're building up our programming. We're going to roll out training programs for staff and candidates who are interested in working in rural communities and be able to
provide the long term support for folks as they are working on campaigns and running for office. We're doing a lot of also other other direct work with Democratic county committees and other folks who are holding down the fort in rural places and and just trying to to bring as much resources as possible to folks as they invest in their communities. We're also doing some work with this great group called the State Innovation Exchange to really make sure that folks have support once they're elected as well. So we're really excited about it and just trying to build up the support that we wish that we had when we were running.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:29] Yeah, I mean that is a lot of support and it sounds like you're really doing the hard work to try and build this over time and have a sustainable movement in these rural areas. I guess my question here is, what are you hearing from the candidates that you're training right now that you you haven't, you didn't expect? What's surprising?
Chloe Maxmin: [00:32:49] You know, one of the things that is surprising to me, but I guess maybe shouldn't be so surprising is that we talk with so many folks who live in rural communities and are doing organizing or working on campaigns or running for office. And the themes in every corner of the country are so similar, just around the disinvestment from the Democratic Party or the lack of support from the party, or that there's only, you know, a dozen people in the local county Democratic committee. And the hopelessness that people feel and that, you know, so many people don't even want to run in many districts because there's no support, the chances of winning are so low. And so it's just a tough road to slog. But at the same time, we know intellectually that if we don't do this work, that the consequences for our democracy are are really dire. So, you know, I think that common theme across rural places, despite the unique differences in all of these towns, has been really, you know, scary, but also, wow, there's a huge opportunity here to support organizing in places that have really been overlooked.
Mila Atmos: [00:33:54] Yeah, there's definitely a lot of opportunity. This is a civic engagement podcast and we're here to help our listeners build their civic action toolkits. So what are two things that someone listening to this show can do to do their part in terms of reaching rural voters and building progressive power in rural areas? And maybe if you can give me one each per person. Who wants to jump in first?
Canyon Woodward: [00:34:19] Sure. There's so much that you can do and that needs to be done. If you have the resources to donate to an organization or a campaign in in rural areas. Rural folks are so under-resourced in doing this organizing work. So you can certainly go to dirtroadorganizing.org and make a donation there. But there are so many great candidates as well. And also we offer, like we said, trainings for staff and candidates as well as local organizations. So grab some friends and we'll come and do an organizing training. Or if you're interested in running or serving as staff, sign up for one of our trainings.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:58] Great. How about you, Chloe?
Chloe Maxmin: [00:35:00] I think what Canyon said is so spot on. I think, you know, just go in and connecting with the folks who might be thinking about running for office or who are running for office or connecting with the folks who run your your county Democratic Committee and just starting to transfer some of that energy into these spaces, even though it's hard work.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:20] Yeah, I always ask this question at the end about what makes you hopeful. But before I ask that question, is there anything here that you want to share that I haven't asked you about, that you really wish the listener would know about what it means to win rural office, or to run, or to pay more attention.
Canyon Woodward: [00:35:38] Thanks for asking that. I think the thing that comes immediately to mind for me is when Chloe and I first started on this journey, just how inaccessible it felt. And I remember when Chloe first told me that she was thinking of running for office, my initial reaction was like, "Oh, like not any time soon." Like, you need to be older. You need to have more experience. And so I just want to really strongly urge folks to to think about running for office or working on a campaign or finding ways to organize in your community, even if you don't feel like you're absolutely the right person or have all of the right experience banked, you learn what you need to learn along the way, and meet the folks who will help you transform your community. So just jump in headfirst, run for office, work on the campaign. You don't have to have all the experience in the world to do it.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:35] Love it. Words of encouragement. So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Chloe Maxmin: [00:36:44] One of the things that makes me hopeful is just so many incredible people who are running for office, who are working on campaigns and who are engaging with the political process and really new and creative ways that give me hope that we can salvage our democracy and our fights for social justice. I also feel like just building off of what Canyon was saying, that, you know, sometimes when we're talking about rural organizing, we don't mean at the expense of urban organizing or any form of organizing at all, but it's really about investing in all communities in our country so that we are creating a democracy that is truly representative. I think when we talk about rural, we often have this image. The classic image might be of just like a white farmer by his tractor or something like that. But, you know, rural America is so diverse and so vibrant and a huge part of talking about rural organizing is ensuring that all of those identities and perspectives are represented. When we are making policy that affects everyone in our community or our state or our country. So seeing this new wave of energy, especially from young folks who are kind of taking over this political process, makes me really, really hopeful.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:54] Great. How about you, Canyon?
Canyon Woodward: [00:37:57] Yeah, I love the question and my mind immediately goes back to one of my close mentors in college, Marshall Ganz, who's an incredible organizer, and he would always quote an old philosopher, that hope is the belief in the plausibility of the possible, as opposed to the necessity of the probable. And I feel like that really encapsulates this striving together in, you know, the shadow of uncertainty. We have no idea what the world or the country is going to look like ten years from now. But we know that we can come together and set our minds towards trying to build something better. And I get a lot of hope out of seeing the change starting in the way that we perceive "rural." You know, I think we had really written off rural America in a lot of ways and now we can clearly see that it's possible to turn things around and organize successfully in small towns. And so I have a lot of hope of of building that movement and really turning things around and fighting the polarization in this country.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:11] Hear, hear. Well, thank you very much, both of you for being on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Canyon Woodward: [00:39:18] Thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Chloe Maxmin: [00:39:22] We're so grateful. Thank you so, so much.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:25] Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward are co-founders of Dirt Road Organizing and co-authors of Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics, and Why Our Future Depends On It.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we are joined by Jeff Sharlet, a longtime observer and investigator of the Christian Right, to talk about his startling and deeply researched new book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.
Jeff Sharlet: [00:39:57] And when I started talking to folks, at first, I would sort of raise like, well, I've heard people talk about civil war. The only answer was yes. And the only variation was there were those who thought it was happening and those who thought it would come soon. But either way, there were those who looked forward to it. You know, you could see their pulse quicken and those who thought it sorrowful but necessary. I don't think it is inevitable. I am not one of those.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:26] That's next time on Future Hindsight. Have you checked us out on Instagram yet? We've got a bunch more tips to help you build your Civic Action toolkit. Follow us on Instagram @FutureHindsightPod to get special updates, episode clips, and everything in between. This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:40:57] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.