Whether it be going on tour, holding rallies or hosting roundtables, Democrats are spreading out across the country — sometimes thousands of miles from their states or districts — to talk about how Republicans’ recently passed reconciliation bill will affect rural communities.
Sen. Tim Kaine said he’s hosting roundtables in rural Virginia about health care. Sen. Peter Welch said he’s meeting with rural hospitals. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said she and her staff have been talking with rural Nevadans about the bill, and, like several other lawmakers NOTUS spoke with, she’s gearing up to use August recess to reach more people in her state. And Sen. Jon Ossoff hosted a rally against the bill in coastal Georgia over the weekend.
Sen. Raphael Warnock, also of Georgia, said showing face in rural areas is important because in some areas they rarely interact with politicians.
“I spent a lot of time in rural Georgia, and there were places that weren’t accustomed to seeing Democrats. Quite frankly, there were rural parts of our state that weren’t accustomed to seeing anybody who was running for the United States Senate. They were surprised that I was there. I was surprised that they were surprised,” Warnock said. “It’s important for us to talk to everybody, particularly these rural communities, where people have long felt overlooked by both parties.”
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Democrats say that emphasizing these rural communities — even in red districts that didn’t vote for them — is key to winning back power to chip away at the reconciliation package. Especially since many of those areas stand to be disproportionately affected by those cuts.
Hundreds of rural hospitals already risk closing due to low reimbursement rates for patients on Medicare and Medicaid, and the $1 trillion cut over time to federal health care programs within the bill is expected to exacerbate the problem.
That’s something House Democrats highlighted when they kicked off a tour against the bill in Louisiana last week. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other lawmakers, including Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, slammed the reconciliation bill and the cuts within it.
Wasserman Schultz, who represents a district in Florida, told NOTUS that several hundred people showed up, and that the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee is doing events all over the country.
“Louisiana in particular, disproportionately high number of Medicaid beneficiaries there, people who are going to be in really serious danger when they don’t have the ability to go to a doctor. They’re going to be diagnosed with later-stage illness,” she said. “They know that people will die as a result of a lack of health care, so we wanted to go and hear their stories and let them know that we’re going to continue to fight this.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders has spent months on his own tour across the country, which he and some of his colleagues see as groundwork for some of the travel the rest of the party now has to do.
“In my view, the reconciliation bill will be the issue of the 2026 campaign season, and people are going to have to, in this country, decide whether they think it’s appropriate to make massive cuts to health care, nutrition and education in order to give tax breaks to billionaires,” Sanders told NOTUS.
“I hope that people get out all over the country and make them see what’s in this bill and how their members voted,” Sanders added.
The Vermont senator — with the wide influence he’s grown over two presidential campaigns — has hosted rallies in states including Oklahoma, Idaho, Montana, Texas and Louisiana in the past few months, denouncing the reconciliation bill well before it hit President Donald Trump’s desk.
Welch, also of Vermont, told NOTUS that while the tour is “terrific,” and the crowd sizes at the rallies show they’re resonating, “We can broaden it out.”
“This ‘big, beautiful bill’ inflicts bipartisan pain. And the things that are going to happen — hospital shutdowns, seniors losing medicaid coverage for their home health care — that’s going to hurt you whether you voted for Trump or voted for Harris,” Welch said. “I think getting out into rural areas where the pain is going to be severe and explaining the bill is very good, and I think Bernie’s given us a good start in that.”
Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado told NOTUS that he wasn’t sure how much traction Sanders would get in red states when he first heard about the tour, but he said a “real appetite for change” exists in red and blue states.
“My hat’s off to [Sanders], just because I think the frustrations people have in not just rural areas, but in red states, even in the cities in red states, is real. The most important thing we can make sure to provide is realistic hope,” Hickenlooper added.
The tour has been on hiatus for the past few weeks. When NOTUS asked last week what’s next for the tour now that the bill has passed, Sanders laughed and said he couldn’t share anything yet, but did say, “We’re working on it right now.”
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, who represents part of Albuquerque along with several rural counties in New Mexico, told NOTUS she held town halls this spring while the bill was being marked up. She said attendees cried over what the bill could mean for them.
“It’s important that we get out of the kind of traditional media and take the information into our communities, so that people hear what is actually in these bills and not just the spin that the Republicans are trying to sell them,” Stansbury said.
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