Vice President Kamala Harris won’t come close to winning in Jefferson County, a rural area tucked in the middle of Pennsylvania that has only voted for a Democratic presidential candidate once in its history.
Yet the hundreds of Democrats who descended on the county fairgrounds recently couldn’t feel more at home.
They gathered for Demstock, the annual part-therapy, part-campout, part-strategy session over two days at the end of August. County and regional leaders made connections and traded suggestions for getting out the vote in places where they say it’s not only isolating to be a Democrat but dangerous.
There are relatively few rural Democrats in Pennsylvania, but they could have a huge influence this year. With Harris coalescing support in the cities and suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the Trump campaign is determined to maximize base support among the 1.8 million rural registered voters. He won nearly 70% of rural voters in 2020.
Rural Pennsylvania Democrats are determined to close the margins, seeing themselves as the last line of defense against a Donald Trump victory sealed by a rural blowout.
“I know how hard it is to be a Dem in a red county,” Sen. John Fetterman said to a crowd of hundreds at the fairgrounds. “The work that you do, you are the unsung heroes here right now. I thank you, because you don’t hear that enough.”
Fetterman has been a leading supporter of Demstock for years, speaking at the annual event since he was lieutenant governor. And as he noted to the group, he skipped out on the Democratic National Convention, held earlier that week, but would never skip out on Demstock.
“They are not in the business of turning a red county blue,” Fetterman told reporters before his speech. “It’s about jamming things up, playing on the margins instead of allowing Trump to carry rural Pennsylvania.”
What started as a humble gathering in a backyard in 2018 has, in just a few years, blossomed into the premiere event for rural Democrats in the commonwealth, one that Democrats in several other states, including Georgia and Texas, have reached out to organizers to replicate back home. The PAC now raises thousands of dollars each year through Demstock tickets. Everything not spent on operating costs goes toward supporting local candidates in rural areas, particularly those who don’t get support from the state party.
This year’s Demstock kicked off on a Friday afternoon, as RVs, trailers and tents popped up throughout the Jefferson County fairgrounds. The party kept going that night until 2 a.m. One attendee set up DNC highlights on an outdoor projector, but the real buzz was around the bonfire. The Democrats drank Bud Light and moonshine and made “mountain pies” over the fire (two pieces of white bread and your filling of choice in between). Several of the Butler County Democrats took turns shooting horizontal fireworks over the field as classic rock hits like “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted in the background.
James Heckman, treasurer of Demstock and chair of the PA Dems northwest regional caucus, explained the next day that the “magic” of Demstock isn’t in the standing-room-only dinner led by Fetterman and statewide candidates. That’s a norm at any Democratic event.
“The real magic is up at that bonfire, everybody getting to know each other, talking, networking, exchanging numbers,” he said.
“When you look at Pennsylvania and what determines our 19 electoral votes, it’s going to be the middle of the state; it’s the margins that will determine it,” Heckman said. “And it’s the connections made around this fire that help get that done.”
Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair Sharif Street called Demstock “a support group, an energizing group, a feel-the-love group and a lot of fun.”
It’s also a way to keep tabs on the rural Obama-Trump-Biden voters who will determine Harris’ outcome in Pennsylvania.
The Trump campaign is relying on high turnout among base voters in rural Pennsylvania, particularly in the western part of the state, to counteract enthusiasm for Harris among young and minority voters in the suburbs. The campaign is also focused on appealing to white, working-class voters who supported Trump in 2016 but flipped for Joe Biden.
“We got a lot of them back in 2020, and it’s going to be critically important that we make sure we hold onto those folks,” Street told NOTUS.
“The national party and the media, you’re talking so much to people in the suburbs. It takes a 67-county strategy. I know in some other places, targeting a couple counties is enough, but not here,” he said.
Some of the local Democratic leaders here also broke with their state party over the best ways to reach rural voters.
“The state party was telling candidates statewide, ‘Don’t invest in signs, don’t do billboards,’” said Kevin Boozel, a Butler County commissioner, DNC delegate and former member of the state committee. “But out here, it’s one of the ways we communicate the most. And so when they were telling our candidates that, I’m like, that’s wrong.”
Boozel has been coming to Demstock for years and, as he proudly admits, was the first to bring an RV. (“I told them, I’m too old and too fat to be laying on the grass. I need a camper.”)
As one of the leading voices for rural Democrats at the state level, Boozel credited Trump’s win in 2016 to “complacency” from the state party.
“We have to stop relying on densely populated areas to get our votes out. We’ve got to wake up, kids, because the reality is, Allegheny is slipping more purple. You have Erie that put a Republican in as executive. Philly has carried it, still carrying it, but I don’t know for how much longer that they’re going to carry enough,” he said.
“The way I just put it to someone at the DNC was, I’d like to lose by less. I may not win them, but I want to lose less.”
It’s not just an isolating time to be a rural Democrat, but a potentially dangerous one, Demstock attendees repeatedly said in interviews. They brought up the vehicles that have been damaged, the house windows they’ve had smashed, the mocking or ostracizing at county fairs — all, they say, because they made their support for Democrats public.
That’s what drives Malcolm Kenyatta to come each year. On paper, the 34-year-old state representative born and raised in North Philadelphia, who is Black and gay, might not seem to be a natural advocate for rural stretches of the commonwealth. In his speech to the crowd, he leaned into it.
“Sometimes I tell my friends, ‘I’m going to Jefferson County,’ and folks in Philly say, ‘Are you gonna be OK?’” the crowd laughed.
“And then I get back home and tell them I just came from Jefferson County, and they say, ‘And you made it out?!’” he said.
But in Kenyatta’s current campaign for state auditor general and his role as a Harris campaign adviser, he’s putting rural Democrats front and center.
He told NOTUS about friends in Reedsville who had a barn with “Biden-Harris” painted on the side that was burned to the ground. Kenyatta helped raise money to rebuild the barn but said his friends “are still terrified to this day” of publicly showing support for Democrats.
“If you are willing to talk to your neighbors in an area where you put yourself at risk, I’m willing to show up and organize with you, fight with you,” Kenyatta said.
Phil Heasley is chair of Demstock and has been on the front lines as the gathering went from a backyard get-together to a PAC that raises thousands of dollars for local candidates. He first showed up in 2019 when he slept in his Subaru and brought a single bag, and he immediately recognized that this was a unique space for those “who don’t quite feel comfortable in other spaces of the party.”
“There’s so many different candidates that suck so much money and attention in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. We need to be there to help ourselves in rural PA, that’s what it comes down to,” he said.
“Rural Democrats live in a shadow, and that’s why I want to make this as fun as possible,” he said.
For Annie Bowyer, another member of Demstock leadership and a self-described “redneck at heart,” Demstock is also about reclaiming her political and cultural identities.
“This is my jam. I love sitting in the woods, around a campfire, listening to music, drinking cider. We’ve surrendered a lot of those spaces to Republicans,” Bowyer said.
“It’s very, very isolating being a Democrat in a very red area. You can almost feel like you’re alone, you can almost feel like you’re afraid. But events like this show you that you are not alone,” she said.
Bowyer had a message for the national and state parties: Ignore rural voters at your own peril.
It’s a message that extends far beyond Pennsylvania, to the rural stretches of states like North Carolina and Georgia where, similarly, Democrats cannot win on cities alone.
“It’s organic right now, but I think that it’s going to take off. And it would be a model for rural everywhere,” Boozel said.
We got interrupted; a young boy camping out with his parents was ready for one of Boozel’s famous corncobs, already boiling in a massive pot next to the fire. He clearly had business to attend to.
“It could really take off,” Boozel said. “I mean, people love to camp.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Reese Gorman contributed reporting.