A Good Night for Prairie Populists

A handful of anti-establishment, anti-monopoly Democrats from the heartland broke through on Tuesday night, winning a slate of hard-fought elections and putting up competitive showings in Republican strongholds. Taking their moniker from the agrarian labor movement that swept the Great Plains in the early 20th century and built Democratic dynasties that lasted into the early 21st, on Tuesday those “prairie populists” won Senate races in Iowa and Kansas, a House contest in the mountains of Montana, and the agriculture commissioner’s seat in Texas. Where they lost, they knocked GOP incumbents down a notch and then some, in many cases swinging their races by double digits from years prior.

The moment has been ripe for the kind of politics the new prairie populists have professed. The country’s rural and agricultural communities have been battered by high diesel prices and erratic tariffs, record debt and chastened profits, polluted water and ramrodded data centers, a stalled farm bill and a trickle of federal relief that has mostly evaporated back up to Big Ag. The hardship has been clear enough on the ground. “When I’ve been out there and I’ve been in rural communities and talking to family farms, it legitimately looks like a vacuum cleaner has gone through these rural communities,” Josh Turek, the Democratic senator-elect from Iowa and a protégé of Iowa’s original prairie populist senator Tom Harkin, told The Gazette, a daily covering the eastern part of the state.

Turek and other prairie populists, including his Iowa compatriots and the state’s governor-elect Rob Sand and attorney general-elect Nate Willems, Texas’s incoming agriculture commissioner Clayton Tucker, and Montana congressmember-elect and former firefighter Sam Forstag, have proposed a robust package of reforms to get the heartland back on its feet. That includes mobilizing federal antitrust powers to break up Big Ag monopolies and their consolidated supply chains, attacking so-called “checkoff” programs that force small producers to fund Big Ag’s marketing and lobbying efforts, codifying a “right to repair” requiring equipment manufacturers to furnish farmers with the information they need to fix their machinery, and enforcing “country of origin” labeling to differentiate American-raised meat in the marketplace.

They’ve also updated prairie populism for the age of AI. The 35-year-old, cowboy-hat-wearing, former cattle farmer Tucker, who will become Texas’s first Democratic agriculture commissioner since before he was born, has pledged to use his office’s pricing oversight remit to “stop corporations from using AI surveillance pricing to squeeze even more money out of shoppers” and to crack down on water-guzzling data center projects. Forstag has gone in that direction, too, advocating for the publication of a “price transparency” database to make it harder for meatpackers to manipulate prices at the national level. That’s urgently needed now that the direct-to-market cash trade for cattle and other animals has thinned out, giving an information advantage to meatpacker middlemen. The USDA announced it would institute a regional cattle pricing report covering Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas last month, though some traders have already waylaid the rollout as a work-around to real cost transparency and another giveaway to the packers, helping them further price in their across-the-board formulas and avoid negotiating with farmers.

Some of these ideas had been making their way into the national Democratic mainstream for some time. Back in 2019, in the lead-up to the Heartland Forum in Iowa, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released a policy memo outlining an agriculture program along those lines. “You’ve got these giant corporations that are making bigger and bigger profits for themselves, for their executives, for their investors, and they’re putting the squeeze on family farms, on small farms,” Warren told the forum. “Twenty years ago, 600 different outfits were selling seed; today it’s basically six.” (That spring, it was actually down to four after a series of mergers among the giants.) By 2024, a right to repair appeared in the Democrats’ national party platform, after an attempt by then-Montana Sen. Jon Tester to make it law a few years earlier failed.

The inclusion did little to make political gains with farming communities, who throughout the Biden years felt snubbed by the administration’s choice of Tom Vilsack to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Vilsack, a former dairy lobbyist, failed to stop consolidation when he held the same position under President Obama. The results out of Nebraska in 2024 gave some indication of the administration’s credibility problem on rural issues: Running as an independent, Dan Osborn, the onetime mechanic who led a 77-day-long strike at a Kellogg’s food processing plant in Omaha, outpaced Kamala Harris by more than seven points in his unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate.

Osborn ran again as an independent this cycle and came up short, though he managed to drag incumbent GOP senator Pete Ricketts down to just above 50 percent of the vote. Ricketts won his last Senate contest with 62 percent of voters backing him. Other would-be prairie populist independents were soundly defeated in Senate races in South Dakota and Idaho, suggesting that the attempt to shake the Democratic label in deep-red and hostile territory was ineffective in insulating independents from criticism, and may have backfired by allowing their opponents to attack them for not being straight with voters.

Those kinds of swings were the norm all throughout states that Democratic operatives and pundits had for years written off as “Trump country.” In Kansas, where President Trump won by 16 points in 2024, Democrat Adam Hamilton, a megachurch pastor, captured his Senate race by five points, leaning into a politics of moral suasion; and cattle farmer Don Coover, campaigning in a low-key manner against tariffs and the Iran war, came within six points of a Republican incumbent in a heavily rural congressional district, pushing Neosho County in the southeastern corner of the state 29 points toward the Democrats, which outperformed Hamilton, the statewide winner, by seven points.

In Arkansas, Hallie Shoffner, a former soybean and corn farmer and prairie populist Democratic Senate candidate, lost her race 54-to-42 against Republican incumbent and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Tom Cotton. But she outperformed every Democrat who has run for statewide office in Arkansas since former state Rep. Nate Steel got 43 percent of the vote in his bid for attorney general in 2014. Shoffner carried Washington County in the northwest by 17 points; Donald Trump two years ago won it by seven points. In Mississippi County, where Trump won by 32 points, Shoffner came within seven points, or about 500 votes, of Cotton, who, flush with money from defense contractors and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and backed by GOP super PACs, outspent her 6-to-1.

Joe Maxwell, the former Democratic lieutenant governor of Missouri who now runs Farm Action Fund, an advocacy group, thinks these candidates tapped into more than just fury with the status quo.

“These challengers brought to the Democrat Party that real authentic voice because they felt the pain of their communities,” Maxwell told the Prospect. “They came from the people, if you will, and brought that feeling, that pain, that understanding to the race, and I think that’s one reason they won, the authenticity for which they spoke.”