Organization’s Objective
"Rural Montana voters carried Jon Tester's victory."
That was the headline from Courtney Lowery of NewWest.Net just days after the 2006 election.
It is time to build a powerful enough movement that newspapers across the west report on the critical influence of progressive rural voters on November 5, 2008, and beyond.
WORC's theory of change recognizes that progressives cannot fully succeed until we move beyond occasionally influencing policy decisions to being organized and powerful enough to regularly decide who the policy makers are. In order to do this, we must organize a strong and long-lasting progressive rural voting bloc.
Key progressive public policy initiatives from curbing global warming pollution, to transitioning to a clean, renewable energy economy, to food and trade policies that support healthy, local food and family farmers and ranchers, and to universal health care ? will depend on whether or not candidates and strategic initiatives can capture the hearts and minds of swing rural voters.
Long abandoned by the Democratic Party, rural voters are becoming critical swing voters. But rural families deserve more than just to be political pawns for the next election. Rural folks deserve broader prosperity for their families and their communities. They deserve to have their land protected from strip mines, strip malls, and stripper wells that are now constantly encroaching on their land. They deserve to protect not only their way of life, but also the ability to pass their heritage on to the next generation.
With little help coming from the top of the ticket, rural voters must organize themselves, develop new community leaders and recruit top-quality candidates. We must establish an infrastructure that activates fellow progressive rural voters at each and every election. And we must be sophisticated in our organizing strategies, so that the ground most frequently ceded to right-wing ideologues is finally and permanently reclaimed.
Energy Independence and Environment
