One Country Project's Hot Dish

Heidi Heitkamp [00:00:04]:
Welcome to the Hot Dish, comfort food for rural America. I'm Heidi Heitkamp.

Joel Heitkamp [00:00:08]:
And I'm Joel Heitkamp. Today we're going to focus on what voters are thinking in rural America. You know, a lot's happening in our country, so I think it's good to check in with what folks are thinking and saying.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:00:20]:
You think there's a lot going on there, Joel, you think? I think it's like every day is just an incredible rush of information. But, you know, the question is, how are people consuming it? What are people thinking about it? And that's why I think we have some great people for our show today. I spoke with Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark. She had a lot of insights about what's happening with the Democratic Party. Also, what she has learned dealing with focus groups that she does almost on a regular basis, Joel.

Joel Heitkamp [00:00:50]:
I'm jealous that you were the one that got to do that interview, Hyde, but I was pretty lucky, too, because I got to speak with Phil Snape of Impact Social, an online analysis company that recently partnered with us here at One Country Project to learn what voters are feeling based on their social media posts. It's going to be so cool.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:01:10]:
We have two journalists joining us today, Heidi Marttila-Losure and Christopher Vondracek. They're going to tell us about their experiences living and reporting about rural spaces.

Joel Heitkamp [00:01:21]:
You know, it's going to be a great episode with lots of insight into how rural people are feeling right now. So you know what, Hyde? Let's get to it.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:01:28]:
Yep. I'm very honored to be with Sarah Longwell today. She is the founder and publisher of the Bulwark, an independent media company that reaches millions of subscribers every day. I have followed her career for a long, long time, and she has really found a spot in the dialogue of American politics today, conducting focus groups and highlighting some of those results for her podcast, the Focus Group. So she's here to talk about the Focus Group. But before we get there, I want to talk a little bit politics because this has been an extraordinary couple days. Basically, looking at the deployment of troops and National Guard in California being nationalized against the wishes of the Governor. You see active duty military on the streets. You saw the largest protest in the history of the country over the weekend in the No Kings Protest. You saw a horrific, absolutely horrific act of political violence in our neighboring state and with our friends in Minnesota. And then you're also seeing that we may be on the verge of engaging in a war. And that's all what's happened in the last five days. And so the news moves really fast, Sarah. And so when you're looking at all of these kinds of trends, how do you stay ahead of it? As somebody who is asked repeatedly to tell us, what does the public think? What are you hearing? How do you stay ahead of this?

Sarah Longwell [00:03:01]:
I mean, I think fundamentally by having an orientation about Donald Trump, I think we understand that he is unqualified to be the president, that he is not a good person, and he is not going to act like a normal politician. And so I often think that just our ability to understand, because we are all former Republicans and, and so we understand the tension that exists between how a normal Republican would behave in this environment and how Donald Trump would behave, because we've seen him before. And I think as 'Never Trumpers,' as people who from the jump said, if you take somebody who's fundamentally a bad person and put them in charge of a country, the outcomes are going to be inevitably bad. And so I think a lot of times, because we have unfortunately, a bit of a darker outlook, we are too often vindicated in our worldview because Donald Trump behaves in ways we think he might. We thought going into 2020 that he wouldn't accept the results of the election, and he didn't. And so, like, when you understand that we don't live in normal times, when you believe that actually we are underreacting as a country to what the threat Donald Trump presents, I think that that has allowed us to know that a lot of the like right now, just take the situation with Israel and Iran. Normally this is a time you really want grownups to be in charge. And what you don't want happening is somebody sort of tweeting through it their own evolving impulses. That is an incredibly dangerous place to be. And I think that there's a lot of people in the media or in the Republican Party or maybe even in the Democratic Party who still, they, they try to make these things normal, right? They, they don't, it's people - we talk a lot about normalizing, but part of it is like, because our nervous systems can't take the chaos, like, we can't live that way. There's this constant desire to put it in a framework we understand. And so people are always doing that with Trump. And if you take that off and you say, no, guys, he might do something completely outside of anything we've ever seen before, and you should be ready for that. And you shouldn't treat this like, well, he'll probably do a normal thing because the situation's so serious. No, no, he very well may not.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:05:15]:
You know, I've been following, as I know you have, kind of the MAGA faction that is really, I think, headed up by Steve Bannon, who is really the populist in the group, the architect of 'Let's Get Rid of Forever Wars.' Those people are hot right now because they think that this president is going to engage militarily in the Mideast on behalf of Israel. How serious do you think that division is when you see people who were instrumental in legitimizing him in the last election saying, I'm sorry I misled you, that's not the guy that I endorsed.

Sarah Longwell [00:05:51]:
Look, understanding the origins of Donald Trump, and this is what I mean where, look, the Republican Party that I came up in was a hawkish party. We believed in American leadership in the world. But one of the reasons that Donald Trump resonated with a new kind of base voter in the Republican Party and outside of the Republican Party, Independents, is because he didn't vote for the Iraq war. Now, he wasn't in office then, but he was able to sort of run against Jeb Bush on his brother's reputation as, as having failed in the Iraq war. So Trump really fashions himself and his followers fashion themselves about a guy who is against Forever Wars. He's not going to get us into that. But Donald Trump is also pulled by his impulse to be a tough guy, to bring the might of the American people in some, like, impulsive way. Right? And so those things right now are intentional and they also represent a tension within the Republican Party itself, meaning whatever's left of the responsible sort of Republican Party that says American leadership is needed here. That is very much opposed by the Bannon Wing and the Laura Loomer Wing and the more Populist Wing. And so those things are going to come into conflict, both in Trump internally, because he'll say whatever when he's running, but when push comes to shove, this is what being a leader is about. And so Donald Trump's empty. His emptiness, his inability to have, like a real view of how the world should be, ends up being pulled between what his most fervent followers want him to be and then what he thinks he's got the opportunity to do as a, as a tough guy.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:07:17]:
Yeah and if you're looking for an informed decision making structure, I don't think that's what we've seen historically with this president. In fact, as recently as his attendance at the economic summit with our allies, he confused European Union with the UK So I don't know.

Sarah Longwell [00:07:35]:
He's not a smart man.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:07:36]:
No, I mean, honest to God, Sarah, the thing that is fingernails on a chalkboard for me is when people say he's smart. I said, he's clever, he's cunning, he's sly, but he is not smart because he's not curious about the world. He doesn't understand kind of all the history that goes into a lot of these decisions. I want to just kind of pivot before we talk about the work that you do in Focus Groups, I want to talk about something that's really been bothering me, which is, you know, in the past, when, when politicians say stupid stuff or they make bad decisions on their public statements, there was always this moment where they'll walk it back, they'll say they're sorry. Maybe it would be a little disingenuous, but they'll acknowledge that this was a problem. We have seen three events now where that hasn't happened. Joni Ernst basically saying people are gonna die and then doubling down with a march through the cemetery and talking about the Tooth Fairy. And you've got the Senator from California, Alex Padilla, basically be taken to the floor as he is basically telling them who he is. No apology. In fact, the best defense is a good offense. And now you have this situation with Senator Lee, who tweeted really insensitive things about what happened in the state of Minnesota, doubling down and not saying they're sorry. So where does that trend come from? Is that because of Donald Trump or, or is that just everybody realizes, no, Donald Trump never says he's sorry, so they're not gonna say they're sorry?

Sarah Longwell [00:09:06]:
Yeah, well, it's both those things, right? So Donald Trump's his doubling down strategy, right? Republicans have basically allowed Trump to show them a path that overwhelms their decency but that works kind of in our social media era. And they've convinced themselves that this is okay because the mobs, right, the online mobs that came for them, that was censorship, that was, you know, curbing free speech, speech. And so the way to handle this is just to push through it, to never say you're sorry, to never let them see you retreat from your position. And Donald Trump really pioneered that in politics. But people sort of forget that Donald Trump did that, in part because he does have, like, he's not smart, but he has a reptilian sense for how to dominate space, almost like a wrestling sense, like a kayfabe. And I think that, that people have lost in that what it means to be a decent person because Donald Trump doesn't have any decency. And so I know that Joni Ernst probably is a human. And what I've seen, what I saw her as, you know, eight years ago or something, she doesn't think this is a good idea. I mean, Mike Lee, the things that Mike Lee tweeted where he's blaming Tim Walz for these murders, but he does it in sort of a joking way the day after the murders happened. It is...it's the kind of grossness that says, like, your - I don't know if I'm allowed to swear on this podcast, but, like, your need for shitposting is overwhelming your human sense of decency. And a lot of that is because Donald Trump has both convinced you that they have so dehumanized their other side. Like the idea of Nancy Pelosi and her husband's another great example where people were then dressing up as Paul Pelosi for Halloween as somebody who got hit with a hammer. Like, this is a political movement that is steeped in indecency. They've told themselves a story in which they are the victims. And so they, they have this grievance-based politics, but then that allows them to feel like they can be just disgusting, despicable human beings to people who are not. See, this is the thing. Mike Lee thinks that those people are his enemies. Not his colleagues, but his enemies. And I think that is a grave loss for our politics when people start seeing each other as an enemy. It's like Barack Obama. I mean, everybody sort of understood, like, politics in America, it's an intramural sport. You know, like, if you're a Senator, like, this is the thing, this just shocks me. Padilla, Senator Padilla, when he was - obviously that was, it went way too far in terms of what they did to him. And I think most Senators agree with that.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:11:41]:
Yeah.

Sarah Longwell [00:11:41]:
Where are his colleagues who know him as a human and say, 'hey, look, maybe he shouldn't have been at the, maybe he shouldn't have interrupted,' like, whatever throat clearing they need to do. 'But you can't treat Senators like this. I watched the video. Guy identified himself. You cannot do this.' Like, where's the collegial respect? That erosion is the gut-coarsening of our politics is really harming us as humans.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:12:03]:
And in the category of you can't make this up, when Corey Lewandowski is the same person in the room telling people, 'you can't do this to a United States Senator,' you know that whatever that center is, that normalcy has moved so far.

Sarah Longwell [00:12:18]:
Well, that's before they get their story straight. Right? So Corey Lewandowski knows it's bad. It's like when January 6th happened, everybody knew it was bad. But then like people get their story straight and they're like, no, no, no, we're not going to act like this is wrong. We're going to act like it's Padilla who should be censured.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:12:31]:
That's what I'm saying is that there isn't an apology anymore. There isn't a sense of, oh, and this is a good jumping off spot because for us to talk about the work that you're doing on Focus Groups. I hear so many people saying Senators and the people in public life are reflecting their constituencies. They're reflecting the anger and the desire of their constituencies to go out there, just punch, punch, punch, and don't ever retreat, don't ever sit down, don't ever compromise. Is that what you're seeing in your focus group, Sarah?

Sarah Longwell [00:13:05]:
So there's a phenomenon that I have that I call the 'Republican Triangle of Doom,' and it is the toxic and symbiotic relationship between Republican elected officials, the voters and the right wing info-tainment media. And if you think about it as sort of three points, right, and leave Donald Trump out of it for a second. But like you can see how it is mutually reinforcing and radicalizing because there is some, and let's just, I'll use as an example something like the election being stolen. So Trump says the election stolen. And now most of the country after the election, they don't think it was stolen. Most Republicans don't think it was stolen. Trump's sort of saying it and everyone's like, okay, but there's some segment of Trump voters who are like, yeah, it was stolen. And so Newsmax says, okay, well, we're going to put people on that says, yes, this was stolen. And then Kevin McCarthy says, oh, well now if the, you know, right wing info-tainment media and some of these voters are saying it was stolen, I better go on Newsmax and say, yes, something fishy is going on here. And then pretty soon some other, you know, Fox News say, well, if Kevin McCarthy is saying that it's stolen, maybe there's something to it. And then another segment of voters say, I don't know, if Fox News and Kevin McCarthy are saying that it was stolen, maybe something was going on. And pretty soon the entire right wing ecosystem has told itself a story and convinced itself because more and more people buy into it over time. And it becomes fact then in this ecosystem. And so in some ways it's not, some people are chicken and egging this in a way of like, is it the voters or is it the politicians? And I'm saying these things are all working together in this very toxic and symbiotic way that creates this almost contained bubble of falsehoods where when I'm in the focus groups, you can tell who lives in these bubbles and who doesn't really quickly. And it tends to be the more devoted you are to Trump, the deeper you are in that bubble.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:15:03]:
One thing that I would ask you is when you're doing focus groups, is there any sense of, you may believe that, but here are some facts that would maybe help you recalibrate or rethink kind of where you're at politically or where you're at in understanding this issue?

Sarah Longwell [00:15:20]:
Yeah. So here's what happens is that it's not that people are all nuts, but for a lot of them, they're so, they're either pretty deep in the ecosystem or they're difficult to even get to with alternative information, right? Like the real information isn't even penetrating. It's not getting to them. But then when it does, part of what happens is in that 70% of people, 70% of Republicans who said the election was stolen is that there are gradations of how they think about it. There are people who are like, the voting machines were rigged and they switched people's votes. And that's what happened. And even after Fox News had to pay an enormous defin- defamation suit, like, they still believe that. They believe it to this day, then there are other people who say, well, I don't think it was that. I think it was more, and there's, there's been, there's a whole media ecosystem for that. Mollie Hemingway wrote a book called "Rigged," where it was a much subtler type of what they would call rigging, where it was the changes that happened during the Pandemic to some of the voting, the way that people are allowed to vote earlier, the way that they were allowed to vote by mail when they previously hadn't been able to because of the Pandemic. That's how it happened. It was because of the rules changes, which doesn't mean it was what - didn't mean those votes weren't real. It just means that the election was rigged in some way by the people who were in charge. And so there's gradations to these stories that although layer up to a large part believing that there was something unfair about it.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:16:42]:
Well, I mean, it's just interesting because you have that insight to voters every day as you look at the work that you do and the work that we do at One Country. And I've said all along, I started this One Country Project because I could see this trend, and I could see this trend moving outside of rural America and moving into suburban America or even urban America. The same messages that will develop a sense of grievance, a sense of this guy is on our side and the other guy or the other woman isn't on our side. That same sense and that same cultural attack, you could see migrate. And, you know, the Democratic Party has been woefully inadequate at cauterizing that wound and basically pushing back on that message. And I'm curious about how you see, number one in your work, the difference between urban and rural and how people perceive these issues? But basically also, what do you think are the messages or the methods that could persuade people that they need to, you know, not change their mind necessarily, but at least open their mind to a different way of thinking?

Sarah Longwell [00:17:53]:
I've been doing the focus groups now for about seven years, really consistently. And since 2020, when the Pandemic hit and we started doing a lot more of them online, we were just able to do, you know, three or four a week. And so I'm constantly able to sort of get feedback from voters. And there's a ton of things in there that I have learned, much of which is about information flow and what people hear and what they don't and what gets through and what doesn't. And you can see the results of this in an election like we just had in '20. The people who voted for Kamala Harris, like, the vast majority of them read mainstream media. Like they were, they were following the news. They read regular news. People who vote for Donald Trump live in an entirely different media ecosystem. Or - or it's not, and this is, this is to your point about rural divides. One of them is, you might be somebody who doesn't follow politics very closely, and this is something that's Donald Trump and the Republicans now, they, they count on a what, what somebody might call "Lower Information Voter," which just means somebody doesn't pay a ton of attention to politics. I think this is a perfectly rational thing to do, not pay a ton of attention to politics. However, you swim in a cultural soup of Trumpism when you're in these rural areas, meaning the people that you know that you're friends with on Facebook or that you're friends with on social media who share posts and share things about politics then tend to come from a political persuasion that is MAGA, that is Trumpy. And so the stuff that you are seeing from your trusted sources, which is not a media source, not the Wall Street Journal, it's not even, might, might not even be Fox News. A lot of times people are like, oh, it's Fox News. I'm like, half these people who vote for Trump, it's not Fox News, it's not news. It's not even, it's just they swim now in a cultural soup of Trumpism that, that sort of permeates on social media and in other ways in which we're now so hyper, hyper segmented. Oftentimes, like the redder places are getting redder.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:19:50]:
Sarah, you're just depressing me. I just, I want you to give me some, some hope that this is reachable.

Sarah Longwell [00:19:56]:
So here's the thing that I'll say that gives me hope, although it makes, it makes a lot of people mad when I say it, which is the vast majority of people who vote for Donald Trump. I think there's a lot of people who are like, well, these must be awful people because Donald Trump is an awful person and how could somebody vote for him and not be a terrible person? And I gotta tell you, I don't see that at all. Like, I just see a lot of people who, where they get their information now has changed. People are living through an enormous amount of disruption. You know, I just said the thing about Low Info. What I'm saying is people, these are people who don't follow news clearly, but, like, they're awash in information, information is coming out of their pores. They can't, they can't avoid information. And people are confused about what to believe and what to trust. And so I just still see a lot of people every day who are working at pet shelters and taking care of their sick parents and who love their country. And they're not bad people. They just believe, based on what they're hearing, that Donald Trump was being unfairly prosecuted by his political enemies. And they think that's wrong. And so, like, it's funny because sometimes you're like, Democrats talk a lot about, well, we're losing democracy, but Republicans think that they're defending democracy.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:21:06]:
Oftentimes, I have to tell you, on Election Night, I was on television at ABC and CNBC and I saw the early exit polls and they listed defending democracy was high on the list. And I automatically assumed, oh, those are Democrat votes. No, no, no, no, they were not. And so I think, you know, this argument about, well, we are the Defenders of Democracy. If you're a Democrat, that's not how people see it. They see democracy being threatened on both sides.

Sarah Longwell [00:21:35]:
Yeah, democracy's been polarized just like everything else has. Because, you know, Democrats think Republicans are a threat to democracy because they, you know, lied about the election being stolen and attacked the Capitol on January 6th. But Republicans think Democrats are a threat to democracy because they think a) either they stole the election in 2020 or in 2024 didn't hold a real election.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:21:57]:
Or ironically, that they politically persecuted the president, therefore -

Sarah Longwell [00:22:01]:
Or that they politically prosecuted Donald Trump. Yeah. And so this is where, this is where I go back to the Republicans right now who are feeding this garbage to, like, this is where I would turn it around for people who are like, well, these elected officials are doing what their voters demand. And I'm like, but these elected officials know what they're doing is wrong. They 100% and leading - if they cared about this country, they would explain to their constituents why what Donald Trump did on January 6th was wrong. Like, instead, they have, they have decided to abdicate. And they tried at first, or some of, many of them did at first. And because they lost their jobs or saw that it wasn't as politically popular, they just gave up on leading. And now they just go in for - I mean, Mike Lee is a great example of somebody who used to be, he, he was a Never Trumper like me. He really didn't want Trump to be the nominee in 2016. And now you fast forward to 2025, and he is like the lead shitposting conspiracy theorist guy out there. And so, like, Trump has changed. He both tapped into something that existed and then accelerated it and has changed the party in all kinds of ways that are deleterious not just to the Republican Party, but to the country. And a lot of it is just an absence of fidelity to the truth, to decency and all the things we've been discussing here.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:23:11]:
So I want to ask you this, because the Democrats had four years of Biden and, you know, had had workable majorities, the ability to make decisions. Why couldn't they turn this around?

Sarah Longwell [00:23:23]:
I think it didn't work cause I think Biden's theory of the case was just 100% wrong. And this is when I say I feel like people are often underreacting. I think Joe Biden thought, hey, I'm gonna just restore normality. We're gonna come in and we're gonna go do politics. We're gonna bring it back to normal. And they didn't realize how much people had changed. And I'll just give you one example. In our communications environment now, Donald Trump changed the way voters are used to hearing from their president. Like Donald Trump sets the news every day. He was tweeting, he was in people's faces. And there were plenty of people who didn't like that, but there were lots of people who also just got used to it. And when Joe Biden came in and was like, I'm not going to hold very many press conferences, I'm not going to be out there talking, voters were like, is he dead? Where is he? I don't hear from him. He thought, hey, I'll pass big bipartisan legislation and people will like that. We're going to do infrastructure. People did not like that. They thought they knew the price tags of the bills. But this idea that people were gonna reward him for sort of politics as usual and being normal just wasn't the case. And so you do have to, one of the ways in which our politics has really changed over the last decade is you have to communicate to people all the time. You cannot just give a State of the Union. That's not the thing anymore. People, the Left right now is deciding they've got to build their own sort of Left Wing media ecosystem. And I'm not against the Left building more of that, but it's also about being able to go into the existing media ecosystems. It's not that many of the, the Joe Rogans or the influencers, they're not Republicans, they're kind of Red Pilled, they don't like a lot of the stuff happening on the Left. But they're not Republicans in any stretch of the word or even MAGA. But the MAGA guys go on and talk to them, they can sit down and be normal. And Democrats are gonna have to realize they're now in a culture war as much of a political war. There used to be axiomatic that, that culture was downstream from politics. But they're really fused together right now. And so this idea that Joe Biden, Joe Biden did need to be a bridge, he needed to be a bridge to a next generation that they were building while he was in office. And the fact that they didn't do that and they decided to go again with somebody who was in their 80s and was going to be closer to 90. I mean, voters were telling me all day long they didn't want it. They didn't, Democrats didn't want it, Independents didn't want it. And the fact that it was, it was a massive. So, like, I think there were, there were obviously two tactical errors there. The first was they didn't understand what was happening to the country when they got back in and what people really craved. And then the idea that Biden needed to run again was insane. I mean, just - and, like, the fact that they're out there now saying, oh, Biden's like, why I would have won, like, absolutely not. Not even close. And I think that, thank goodness Kamala Harris actually got in there and, and took a run at it and stopped just the bottom from absolutely falling out of Democratic politics. And the reason people are mad at Democrats right now isn't because they hate everything Democrats do. It's because they are so angry that Democrats won't do anything to push back. They feel like they're weak and they can't stand up to this party. And that's what they want. They want someone to stand up.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:26:17]:
The question now is, if you were advising, let's say, Gretchen Whitmer or Pritzker here in Illinois, what would you tell them right now? What's the three bits of advice that you think they need to hear?

Sarah Longwell [00:26:31]:
Okay, top thing is an "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once" communication strategy. So it's a movie I didn't like, but it's a good communications philosophy, philosophy. So you have to be comfortable. And I'll tell you, like, somebody like Josh Shapiro is doing a good job of this right now. He's going on all these sports talk radio shows in his state, and he's getting out there. You've got to be out there. You are - And, and then that's my first piece. But you got to get out there, and it's on you. It's on you. Second piece of advice: ignore consultants, consultants. And, and so it's funny because, you know, I do focus groups. And so people are like, weren't you kind of a consultant? And I'm like, actually, my main thing when I listen to focus groups is I want to go grab politicians by the lapels and say, I know you spent a long time learning how to be a politician, but I'm going to need you to unlearn all that right now and just figure out how to be a human. And when somebody asks me, hey, what should I say when someone asks me about trans women playing sports? And my response to that would be like, what do you think? Like, what do you think? Tell me what you think right now. Because I bet your answer is something like, I don't think they should be able to do it. But I really want people to stop bullying trans kids. I don't want to pick on trans kids. I don't want to throw trans people under the bus, but I don't think they should be playing sports. And I'll be like, because I don't think that's fair to women. And I'll be like, go say that. That makes perfect sense. Like, the idea that everybody needs a consultant that has perfectly focused grouped something before you have a policy position is like, the Democrats have got to shake that off. Their, their addiction to testing. They're losing their heart. They're losing the part where it's like, this is what I believe. This is what I'm passionate about. This is what I'm going to go talk to. People like that. Everybody, like, has this buzzword "authenticity" right now, which is like, true, but also it makes people be like, boy, how do I be more authentic? And I'm like, don't ask yourself that. You've just gotta learn how to talk to people like a person, for the love of God. And then my third piece of advice is do popular stuff. And you know what's popular? Saying that you want the border secure. Like, there's just a couple of policy things that Democrats are gonna have to take the L on.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:28:25]:
Well, I don't know that it's even a loss. I was endorsed by Border Patrol because I spent a lot of time down on the border. I understood the complications and basically understood that those guys were doing a tough job and they needed some additional help. Did I say we should build a wall? Hell, no. That was really a dumb idea. And, you know, I think that we have a habit in Democratic politics to endorse people who've never been in a tough fight, who've never had to walk into the VFW or go to a focus group where people disagree with them and try and figure out how you're going to persuade them without losing who you are and what you believe. And when we nominate people who only want message testing, will only want to, I mean, I agree with you. Throw all of that out and start figuring out how you're going to govern this country and persuade people. I've done this thing when people say, well, why is it so bad? I said, because politicians are so lazy.

Sarah Longwell [00:29:21]:
Yeah. And risk averse.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:29:22]:
Yeah.

Sarah Longwell [00:29:23]:
Like, I just take some big swings, guys, and, like, maybe you'll get some things wrong, but, like, everyone's going to have to start trying a lot harder.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:29:30]:
If there is a lesson of Donald Trump, isn't that the lesson?

Sarah Longwell [00:29:33]:
Yeah.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:29:33]:
I don't like what he says. I don't like what he does. I don't like everything. But damn it, he's doing it.

Sarah Longwell [00:29:38]:
He ignored 100% of the Autopsy Report that Republicans had put together about how they could win places. He threw it out and he said, this is what I think. I've thought it for a long time. He made, he, you know, compromised on a couple things that people - But, like, basically, he ignored all the consultants, went with his gut, and like it was, I disagree with most of it, and I don't think that Democrats need their own demagogue or need their own Donald Trump, I do think they need to take the lesson of say what you believe, make a pitch that you believe in, and - Because then, you know what? If you believe it, you'll be consistent whenever you talk about it anywhere. And you don't have to be so afraid to go on everything because you're so afraid you'll say something wrong. Not if you really believe it. And it's just a thing you say all the time. It's easy then.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:30:16]:
Well, Sarah, it's, you and I could go on and on and on, and you've offered some, I think, really great suggestions. I don't, I think that people keep waiting for the Democratic savior to show up. And, you know, right now, the hero of the Democratic Party is in every community like Fargo, North Dakota, where 3,000 people showed up and said, we don't like the direction of the country. Because I think that's sending a message.

Sarah Longwell [00:30:41]:
Well, I do think we are the ones we're waiting for. I think that you're right. Like, there is no knight in shining armors coming. And there's, I think that the chances that the 2028 Democratic Nominee is somebody who's not officially in politics right at this moment is pretty, pretty good. Because I think that, and the good thing about this kind of opposition is it does give birth oftentimes to new voices. And I think, I think the Democratic Party could stand for a big, rowdy primary with lots of new voices.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:31:13]:
Absolutely.

Sarah Longwell [00:31:13]:
Because it's gotta find its way. It's gotta find out who it is.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:31:17]:
Yeah. And people have to be tested, Sarah. I mean, you know! And in the meantime, you'll continue talking to voters, and I hope at some point you'll come back.

Sarah Longwell [00:31:25]:
Of course. This is so fun.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:31:27]:
Okay, thanks so much, Sarah Longwell.

Sarah Longwell [00:31:29]:
Thanks for having me.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:31:35]:
Next, Joel will be getting into some data analytics with Phil from Impact Social.

Joel Heitkamp [00:31:40]:
Thanks, Heidi. I'm Here with Phil Snape from the Impact Social team. Impact Social uses data software to track over - ready for it - 60 million online sites! One Country Project has recently partnered with Impact Social and Phil is with us here to give some specifics. Phil, welcome to the Hot Dish. Thanks for joining us.

Phil Snape [00:32:02]:
Delighted to be here.

Joel Heitkamp [00:32:03]:
I think it's best if you just explain the methodology, explain how this works.

Phil Snape [00:32:09]:
So we're a social media analysis company, and what we do is we use social media conversations to understand what's happening. It could be in politics, could be in brand, could be in anything. The way the methodology works is kind of crucial to understanding our accuracy. What we do, first of all, is we go and create massive focus groups, right? So these aren't focus groups that people would know, like 20 people in a room. We're talking about thousands, hundreds of thousands of potentially millions of people. For this specific project, we have five different focus groups which are basically taken America into five different zones, as you were, sort of Frontier, Midwest, Northwest, Pacific and the South. Then what we do, if you write some code, and this particular instance, we're writing code about the cost of living, people understanding the thing about inflation, eggs, housing, et cetera, et cetera. And another biggest analysis we're doing is in terms of the job security. How do people feel about their jobs? So we write a lot of code where we're trying to understand. We then press go, all the information comes in and we're talking about, in this case, millions of social media posts. We then take all the bots, so we take all the marketing and things like that out of it. We then randomize the entire data set and pull out a statistically representative sample. And we physically read the sample. Okay? And this is really important to what we do and the reason we have to physically read the sample, and I'm talking about thousands of social media posts here. And just to let everyone know, these are all publicly available, right? So there's nothing - if I can read it, anyone can read it. The reason why we read these particular posts is because algorithms can't pick up sarcasm. They can't pick up cynicism, they can't pick up context. So, for example, if my parents said something is sick, it means it's bad. If my daughter said something was sick, it would mean it's good. Okay? So context is really important and tone is very important. How are people feeling? How are people thinking about things? So what we do is we'll read all these particular posts. We'll read it. In this particular instance, we're reading it from the Trump administration's perspective, are they feeling positive or are they feeling negative about these particular subjects? And then we'll effectively, we'll take the positive conversation from the negative conversation, and we get what we call the net sentiment. And the net sentiment is then tracked over time. And from the net sentiment, what we can see is why people are thinking more positively about cost of living or job security and why people might be feeling more negative. And we see what the overall trend is, therefore, over time. And because we're taking it across the entire country in five different segments, and because of the fact that we're looking at such a massive data set, we're very confident that, effectively, this is a lot of the voice of America. This is what Americans are thinking and feeling and why, about their cost of living and also their job security.

Joel Heitkamp [00:34:42]:
You know, when it comes to job security, there's been a change, there's been a rebound in May after those numbers were dropping significantly in previous months. Why have you found out why people's attitude has changed?

Phil Snape [00:34:57]:
Initially at the start of the year, this wasn't the case. The first quarter, which we looked at, what happened was people started off being optimistic. There was a new president, he was talking a good game, and people were sort of thinking, well, you know, this is going to be fine. Let's give this guy a go. But what happened was, is that I think in January, February and then March, increasingly because of the tariffs, people were concerned about the impact of the tariffs, in particular, what that meant for their job going forward, especially then, which went into April. Also, very importantly as well, DOGE. What happened with DOGE was people aren't necessarily specifically against DOGE. They're not against there being cuts in the federal workforce, and they think that obviously America's spending too much. But it's the haphazard way of the cutting, the feeling that there's no plan, the feeling as if they're just basically making it up. And so what happened was, on the one hand, you're very concerned about the fact that the terrorists might come in and they might lose their jobs. And also they're very concerned, and I can't emphasize this enough, there's a lack of feeling that there's a competence within the administration that people feel secure about that. It just gives a feel of huge amounts of anxiety. And then, as the tariffs are not being spoken of as much, and DOGE hasn't been spoken of as much, what's happened is the amount of conversation in May online in relation to these has dropped in terms of the job security by 39%. This is the tone coming away from, this is the anxiety coming away as the tariffs are being spoken of less. However, there's a legacy. And the legacy is, although people feel a little bit more secure about their job than they did, say, maybe a month or so ago, people are still talking about how they, they're not going to ask for that job raise, they're perhaps not going to look for that job that they thought they're going to get, that the employers are saying that they're still concerned about taking other people on. So the real legacy here of people basically saying, let's just wait and see, let's wait and see what happens here. Because at the moment, I'm not sure what's going to happen from day to day. And the Trump administration would be looking at our data and thinking, well, we've got people's confidence back, et cetera. They should be aware that that confidence isn't too deep because of the fact there's an anxiety and there's concern in there.

Joel Heitkamp [00:37:02]:
Do people seem to understand the tariffs, or is it just the word that scares them? You know, a lot of people using the phrase TACO, a lot of people talking about things in a presidential way in regards to how he always backs down. And is that the reason that they've quit worrying about tariffs?

Phil Snape [00:37:20]:
They do understand tariffs, for sure. They don't understand the real impact of the tariffs because it wasn't explained to them. That 120% tariff does not mean that your stuff goes up by 120%, right? But they are very, very aware this means something which is bad for them. And it means that it could be bad for their jobs, it could be bad for their local area. When Trump then comes back away from the tariffs and all of a sudden the tariffs aren't being spoken about anywhere near as much, there's a sense of relief. But that's not to say the bad feeling that was caused, it still exists, because it very much do. And you can see it in the data, the way people are speaking about things to each other online. They're basically saying to each other, you know, that job is going to go for, I'm just going to leave it. We need to wait til this whole thing settles down, and then I'll make my move. And the same with an employer, too.

Joel Heitkamp [00:38:06]:
Do you have a way of monitoring the small business owners? Because in my job as a talk show host, one of the things that a lot of the small business owners are saying is that as they fear the tariffs and what this might mean to them more than anything, they fear the opportunity to expand.

Phil Snape [00:38:26]:
We don't look at small businesses specifically, but there's enough people in the data who are small business owners who are talking about, exactly as you say, Joel, exactly that point. I'm just going to sit this one out. So what concerns me is that what this is going to do to the American economy. Obviously you won't come to an abrupt end, but nevertheless, people would be less reluctant to change jobs, to employ people, or to go and buy something, you know, like a house or a car or something, those kind of bigger spends.

Joel Heitkamp [00:38:55]:
So your groups that you've put together by region, you can determine whether or not they've made up their mind to spend money? And let me give you an example. I'm sitting here looking at a pickup with 90,000 miles on it, right? So I was looking at potentially a different pickup and I found myself getting into more of a hurry to buy a pickup. If I was going to buy one anyway, I better hurry the hell up and buy one, If steel prices go up.

Phil Snape [00:39:21]:
Yeah.

Joel Heitkamp [00:39:22]:
Can you tell that in your survey?

Phil Snape [00:39:24]:
Very much so, yeah.

Phil Snape [00:39:25]:
Yeah.

Phil Snape [00:39:26]:
You could see that decision making process. So the decision making process being I'm going to buy this now because I know it's going to go up in a month's time. When you're talking about a truck, when you're talking about a car, when you talk about bigger spends like that, these are always big decisions for any household. But when they are matched with such uncertainty, they're much less likely to happen. And that's what we're seeing in the data. That's what we're seeing in the conversations of saying, you know, I was, you know, I was going to move house, I'm just going to leave it for a while.

Joel Heitkamp [00:39:53]:
I live in a farm community. The area I'm at, a lot of farmers. And one of the concerns they have is trading, shipping. The fact that, will China even want their product anymore is, does your survey get that defined in regards to what happens per region? In this particular case, in the Ag region?

Phil Snape [00:40:14]:
Yeah, so soybeans, for example, right?

Joel Heitkamp [00:40:17]:
That's exactly what I'm getting at, Philip.

Phil Snape [00:40:19]:
Yeah, this is what we have in the data. People saying, if there's a tariffs there, how on earth can I sell my soybeans to China? And I'm a soybean farmer and so what can I do about this? This is the end of my business. But then, of course, what happens is it's not just the end of that person's business, it's the community, it's the shop, it's the everything in that particular area then starts, starts to be concerned. Because the other thing to remember as well is that people didn't go into this particular administration feeling like they had a lot of money, right? They didn't go in there thinking, oh, it's fantastic already, and Trump's going to make it even better. They're going in there, hanging on, a lot of people are sitting there and they're counting their cents on the dollars every single week, and they're living paycheck to paycheck. Or the businesses also, you know, they're looking at their tractor, they're looking at their combine harvester, et cetera, and thinking, that's going to have to go another year, right? They were already in that spot. And then all of a sudden, you can imagine them sitting there and Trump turns around and says, this is what we're going to do in China, et cetera. And you're thinking, this is my entire livelihood, right? So this is what, this is what we're getting from, particularly from farmers. Farmers saying, you know, we're about to get turned over.

Joel Heitkamp [00:41:22]:
Do they trust him more? Do they...is their perception that Donald Trump is actually winning when it comes to these tariffs?

Phil Snape [00:41:30]:
It depends where you go. So there's still plenty of people out there who are effectively saying, you need to give Trump time, right? These tariffs are going to work. These tariffs are going to bring jobs back to America. But I suspect that even a lot of these people, and we can see it in the data, if you look at the amount of positive discussion which is in there, the bands of positive discussion drops. And that tells you one of two things. Either less people feel positive about it and are prepared to express this to one another online, or it means they just don't want to talk, which effectively means the same thing. So you kind of feel that even amongst Trump's base, some of them are thinking, you know what? I don't want to wait and see whether this works or not. This just seems a little bit out of control to me. So he still has lots of support, he still have lots of people who have his back. There's no question about that. But the fact that the amount of positive discussion has dwindled, both in terms of the tone and content, and also the numbers tells me there are less people supporting him now than they were back in January. So what the data's telling us is they're Trump and people, they're MAGA people, and they love all Things Trump. And yet there's another reality which effectively says, well, you know, he did say he was going to lower the gas prices, and that's not happened. I'm still waiting for that. He did say the prices were going to come down on day one. In actual fact, I thought they were about to double. So, as a consequence, some of his most loyal supporters have been disappointed. They're still there, but nevertheless, they've been promised things. It's all going to be fine once we get rid of Biden, and it's going to be great when we get Trump. And here we are in June and prices haven't come down, right? So there's a feeling of disappointment, which is there.

Joel Heitkamp [00:43:03]:
I could do this all day, I'm not going to lie to you. Like, for me, as a talk show host, the example I use, Philip, is this one got the phone lines going.

Phil Snape [00:43:10]:
Yeah.

Joel Heitkamp [00:43:10]:
You know, that one didn't get the phone lines going. And data like you talked about here is, you know, if you know what they're talking about on social media, you're already to there. I mean, you really are.

Phil Snape [00:43:22]:
Yeah. Thank you. I think the thing that we're doing, which nobody else is doing, is we're physically reading the data. You have to physically read it. The algorithms can't tell you - and we've looked at AI many times, and it's nowhere near. It doesn't understand sarcasm, it doesn't understand cynicism. It doesn't understand tone and context. It just doesn't know, it just sees things. If somebody says Trump is great, well, then they think it's a positive, Trump's great. But the person's being sarcastic, right? And so therefore, that's what we get down to. That's where we can get into the emotion. And when we talk about sentiment, it's not just a topic of positive and negative. How are people feeling about this? Because that's what's important, right? That's what's important in your community. It's what's important in mine. How are people feeling about it? Not just what they're saying, the way that they're saying it. And I think that's the thing I think people really like about what we do.

Joel Heitkamp [00:44:05]:
Philip, good to have you on Hot Dish.

Phil Snape [00:44:07]:
It's a pleasure.

Joel Heitkamp [00:44:08]:
I look forward to many more of these conversations.

Phil Snape [00:44:10]:
Good to speak to you. Thank you for having me.

Joel Heitkamp [00:44:15]:
Now let's hear from Heidi Marttila-Losure and Christopher Vondracek.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:44:24]:
Hello, Hot Dish listeners. I'm Heidi Martilla-Losure. I'm recording this from my family's farm near Frederick, South Dakota, where I grew up. I was away for 12 years and moved back, which is kind of a lot of the story of a lot of people who live in rural places. They leave and then, you know, something pulls them back home. And I have a background as a reporter, writer and designer in journalism, and I'm still using those skills, but kind of in a different way. I'm Director of Communications for a suicide prevention nonprofit. So I'm very excited today to be on the Hot Dish. And I'm especially excited to be speaking with Christopher Vondracek, an esteemed former agriculture reporter from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Thanks so much for joining me today, Christopher.

Christopher Vondracek [00:45:09]:
Yeah, thanks, Heidi. It's wild still to hear myself referred to as a former agriculture reporter because I think it's like, like in my soul now.

Christopher Vondracek [00:45:16]:
But yeah.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:45:17]:
Christopher is the Washington correspondent for the Minnesota Star Tribune, but prior to that recent assignment, he covered agriculture for the Star Tribune and has covered legal affairs, education, religion and politics at different times in his career. In 2020, he published a book of poetry entitled Rattlesnake Summer, which is a collection of 66 poems for 66 South Dakota counties, which is very cool. I'll have to look up what the poem is for Brown County.

Christopher Vondracek [00:45:42]:
It's about baseball, naturally, the minor league team that used to be there, the Pheasants. Yeah.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:45:47]:
Well, we're just going to have a little conversation about rural. Excited to dive in. June is Men's Mental Health Month, and I know that that is a topic that has come up in rural places among the farm community especially. So, you know, in your reporting and your experience, what have you heard about men's mental health especially? What would you say is the state of men's mental health right now?

Christopher Vondracek [00:46:10]:
Sure, I think it's improving in terms of people are carrying away kind of the taboo that used to be around, sort of surround the conversation around mental health for men and particularly I think rural men. In my farm beat, when I was out in Minnesota, I vividly remember a number of conversations with farmers that would be about one topic. Say, for example, I went up in the fall of 2023 to interview a turkey farmer in central Minnesota and he and his brother in law had to depopulate their farm because of bird flu, right? We were talking about sort of bird flu but then quite quickly the conversation turned into sort of discussing what, what that personal impact was on him and his and his brother in law in terms of what that tough process, you know, did to them in some respects. And so I know that whether it's financial or whether it's sometimes the lack of access to mental health services in rural places. I oftentimes had an ear for being able to pick up when I'd be out on the road and talking to farmers. And there was just a longing, a hurt, a kind of quietness. And I actually think a lot of agricultural groups are doing a really good job of trying to change the narrative and make that a topic that is discussable and not to be sort of shied away from. I know that Farm Bureau in Minnesota particularly had reached out to me to do some stories when I first started on the agriculture beat. And I think that organizations know this is definitely a critical need for the community.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:47:49]:
You know, just thinking about my day job, you know, I come across a number of statistics on mental health and suicide. And one of the statistics that stands out is that the highest percentage of suicide deaths are among men, certainly way more than women, but then also ages 20 to 29. And that's a really tricky age group to try to target, you know, so it's just tricky to think about, like, what kind of programming, you know, how do you actually try to get to those people? I think that, that the conversation's moving in that direction is, you know, how do we work with workplaces or other ways to reach people who might need mental health services?

Christopher Vondracek [00:48:28]:
When I talk to these farm groups, they oftentimes emphasize also a sense of community and the ability to create strong towns and sort of bonds within these communities as a way to sort of also build a sense of togetherness for folks. And I think that may also have a kind of a mental health impact. I think it's really, truly easy to get lost instead, post-COVID to get lost in your phone or to kind of isolate yourself in certain ways. We've seen that happen in a lot of unsettling ways, but I think that that can have a mental health impact. And the ways in which you can talk about building strong main streets, you can build, I think it's been sort of much discussed the idea of like, a third place in town. Like in my hometown of Wells, Minnesota, they now have a coffee shop. And I kid you not like my brother and I, my mom helped organize, like, a little Christmas musical, like Sing Along last Christmas for the town at this coffee shop. And, like, way more people showed up than we ever imagined were going to show up. And it was really great. And it felt like kind of, you know, something you would see out of a small town of Yore, in a way. But I think people were kind of hungry for that, you know.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:49:38]:
Yeah, I definitely think so. We can kind of maybe swing into that, that our next topic, which is news deserts. And I think that that is one of the reasons why people are feeling a little bit more isolated, is that they don't have this news source that is telling them when your Sing Along is, you know, bringing people together around, you know, a common source of news, a common understanding of what's going on in their community. So if we talk about, you know, just what are some of the challenges you've seen as far as, you know, not having that common news source in rural places?

Christopher Vondracek [00:50:11]:
You know, I mean, I started as a journalist working in a small town. Like, I wrote in the ninth grade for the Kiester Courier-Sentinel, which is like a softball throw from the Iowa border. I was writing, like, football stories, you know, and it really felt like everybody would read them, but I appreciated that, like, everybody was reading the paper, right? Right. And to your point about news deserts, you know, we've seen so many papers fold, understandably, because they've done it for 50 years, and there's no one to hand it on to. Right? I think what happens is when you lose that common thread, there can be a, a cynicism or a distrust that develops. And I had had the wonderful experience of interviewing the radio programmer from an independent radio station in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, about a week ago, and she actually told me that, for example, during the recent fires in northeastern Minnesota, that their traffic digitally, like, skyrocketed, because in that kind of kinetic event, people needed to have the news. And the ones that are standing, like, they're not coming to the paper from Minneapolis for that. They're going to the local radio station to hear from people who live and work with them what's going on.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:51:14]:
Yeah, definitely. To give one example of a positive development right around here, the Aberdeen American News, which was the paper for many, many years, has kind of shrunk to a former husk of itself. People really like to, you know, mock it right now. But in its place, one of my colleagues and a friend, Troy McQuillan, started another newspaper and that has started up with, he has hired some of the former journalists from the Aberdeen American News, working at the Aberdeen Insider now, including local sports, which I think that, that I don't understand why any newspaper would give that up, because that's one of the things that would absolutely bring people to a newspaper.

Christopher Vondracek [00:51:56]:
Yes, right? So I had a book talk in the Dakota Prairie Museum in Aberdeen and Trey came out to me. I did not know him at the time. He was just someone who had come to the talk and he told me some of their numbers about in terms of traffic and I was like, gobsmacked. Yeah, you know, I kind of didn't believe them at first. And then I started talking to more folks and being like, oh, no, this is like what's replaced the, the previous sort of legacy media there. And it's wonderful. And you know, a comment on sports. Like, I think we've discovered in Minnesota that like, actually there's a huge appetite for local sports. And it kind of breaks my heart because, and now what we're discovering 20 years later is that actually, I mean, you don't have to be a lover of football to appreciate what a Friday night football game can do for a small town.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:52:42]:
Exactly.

Christopher Vondracek [00:52:43]:
Yeah.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:52:43]:
I definitely think that sports is a key. There are other organizations that have stepped in to do that sports piece. But I do think that the organizations that have been able to marry the local sports and the local news are finding a sustainable business model. And I just think that sports is a key thing in these rural places. I mean, I've really found it to be the bridge to my neighbors, you know, whatever. Because we're not talking politics then, right? We're just. We're cheering on the local team. We're, you know, we're finding our community pride. You know, we're all wearing the same colors. There are people that I have been surprised to find out that I'm completely at odds, odds with politically. But, you know, we are some of the loudest cheers or it can bring a community together in a -

Christopher Vondracek [00:53:28]:
You know, I think sports is unique and that has a certain draw. But I think whether we're talking about athletics or academics, I mean, I was a knowledgeable, you know, like that kind of thing. I think there's a way in which those sort of activities are really unique and they can build like generational connections. Like there were people when I was playing basketball who would be like septuagenarian substitutes who would all of a sudden would be in the stands and then they would, and they would tell their friends about you and you'd be at the drugstore getting, you know, like a Cherry Coke and then see, you know, like, like there was just something really wonderful about those experiences, those center rituals in small towns.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:54:02]:
Absolutely. It does sometimes bring about the rivalry between towns. But even that is kind of fun, you know, so gives people something to talk about. So we can move on to our last topic here, which is some of the highlights of living in rural America, which we've hit on a few of them already. But what are some of the just really good things that people who don't live rurally might be kind of surprised to know are positive aspects of living in rural places?

Christopher Vondracek [00:54:29]:
I think there's a pluralism that actually really exists in rural America that it often doesn't get credit for. When I was on the Ag beat, I would go into these packing towns in western Minnesota, be it Windom or Worthington, and you would talk to the school officials who'd say there are, you know, dozens of languages spoken in our school and there are bustling main streets, oftentimes immigrant-run businesses because of the, the work that is here. But you know, it felt like that didn't match sometimes the simplistic two dimensional like stereotype about what small towns are, you know, kind of like Mayberry sort of impulse. And I also think that I said, I mentioned Wells earlier in south central Minnesota. You know, my parents and their dear neighbor do not agree on politics. They fly flags literally sometimes for the opposing candidates. And yet, you know, they're out here with me this summer watching our, watching their grandchildren in Washington D.C. and it's that very neighbor who's like keeping watch on the house, you know, versus I think it's sometimes easier to find your sort of bubble. And bubbles can be nice too. But you can find that bubble more easily in a larger community than you can in a small town where you're on the library board and you're singing in the church choir and you're running in against folks in the grocery store and you, yeah, you know, politics are so front and center, but I think that small towns have a way of like in some respects pushing them behind you. Like you said at the sports game, right? You didn't even know that you were in disagreement with these folks.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:56:08]:
Exactly.

Christopher Vondracek [00:56:08]:
Yeah.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:56:09]:
I sometimes like to use the framing of bridging versus bonding social capital. The idea is that you can form bonds with other people and they can either be bonding, which is among people who are like you, or bridging.

Christopher Vondracek [00:56:23]:
Yes.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:56:23]:
Who is, you know, bridging social capital, which is between people who are different than you. And so much in our society is really pushing us to do a lot more bonding social capital. But in rural places, you're really much more forced to do that bridging social capital, right? Because you are, you, you can't pick who's, who your neighbor happens to be, right?

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:56:45]:
And.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:56:45]:
But you want to necessarily, you know, keep up relationships with that neighbor, because you're going to be living in this place, theoretically, for, you know, many, many years.

Christopher Vondracek [00:56:54]:
Right. Sometimes I hear the adage about, like, shoveling snow, which is maybe a particularly, like, upper Midwest analogy, but - Or, like, if you go in the ditch, right? And I've gone in the ditch, I've had complete strangers help me out.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:57:06]:
I think for a lot of rural places, it's, it's a different kind of framing, right? Because it's, we're thinking about what the community is and how to be a member of a, of a community where you are a key player in it. They need you in that small town to bring whatever gifts you have to do the work that that community needs.

Christopher Vondracek [00:57:26]:
Yeah, no, I agree. I often go back to Kathleen Norris and her book Dakota and the way she talked about community as kind of my, like, lens on that.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:57:34]:
You know, I think we have run through our list of topics and we are close to the end of our time. So, Christopher, this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Christopher Vondracek [00:57:43]:
Thanks, Heidi.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:57:44]:
So nice to hear from you.

Christopher Vondracek [00:57:45]:
Same. This will be really enjoyable to chat. Next time I'm out in Brown County, I will let you know, it's been a minute.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:57:53]:
And I'm gonna go find that poem, see what's up with the Pheasants in baseball.

Christopher Vondracek [00:57:57]:
I'll give you a heads up. It's not just about the baseball team. It's also about, there's a crime about a century ago, kind of a notorious crime that happened in Brown County. And so it's, I weave in some of that, too.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:58:08]:
Okay. Now I'm even more interested.

Christopher Vondracek [00:58:09]:
Just beware.

Christopher Vondracek [00:58:10]:
It's got a trigger warning.

Heidi Marttila-Losure [00:58:11]:
All right, wonderful. Thanks so much, Christopher.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:58:16]:
I think hearing about all these different issues in rural America is really important right now, and I think that hearing all the hope that these guests are bringing is equally important.

Joel Heitkamp [00:58:27]:
I truly agree with you, Heidi. And, you know, we hope you learned something about what it takes to live rural in this episode. And if there's something you think we need, need to talk about, you know, you gotta let us know.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:58:39]:
Yeah. We like to think that this is a podcast where we can bring all kinds of discussions to rural America. So please email us your thoughts. Our email address is podcast@onecountryproject.org.

Joel Heitkamp [00:58:55]:
And you know, we're also on Bluesky and Substack, so give us a follow and reach out there too.

Heidi Heitkamp [00:59:01]:
Thanks for joining us today on the Hot Dish, which is brought to you by One Country Project, making sure the voices of the rest of us are heard in Washington. Learn more at onecountryproject.org.

Joel Heitkamp [00:59:13]:
You know what? We're going to be back in two weeks with more Hot Dish, comfort food for rural America.