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The Hot Dish delves into the most pressing issues facing rural America. Hosts Heidi and Joel Heitkamp speak with policymakers, advocates and everyday Americans living across rural America about what's happening across the heartland and what should be done to make life better for rural America.ct's The Hot Dish, former U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp serves up insight into issues affecting rural Americans.
Welcome to the hot dish comfort food for rural America. I'm Heidi Heitkamp,
and with me is my brother, Joel Heitkamp. Let's just admit
why there's that bounce in your voice, why you just seem so happy
that, you know what? Somebody could dent your car and you wouldn't care. Just tell
them and get it over with. Are we going to talk about, you know, how
I have the world's most beautiful granddaddy? Are we going to talk about that?
I think that's well within your rights there. Grandma
Heidi is a brand new grandmother. First grandchild ever,
and it's a little boy that already has baseball in his mind. You can see
it. Most important thing is he has red hair, so
congratulations. I mean, what's so interesting is Joel is
the youngest. Yes, I know that's hard to believe if you've seen pictures
of all of us, but he is the youngest of the clan, but has
some of the first grandbabies. In fact, was Tenley the
first great. Julie. Joel. Julie. Yeah, Julie. Julie.
But my sisters, me and Thomasine, have been
borrowing grandchildren for about the last 14 years,
15 years. And Thomasine in particular, has
created such a bond with Joel's granddaughters. It's just
been a joy for us. But we are, both
of us, so excited to welcome another
group of grandchildren. Her grandbaby, Petra, and my grandson,
Ashby, are going to be carrying the
toddler and kid load as Joel's grandchildren
move into teenage years. And that'll be fun.
We're going to start this episode by hearing from a lovely couple in
Alabama who tragically lost a son to drug addiction,
but established a foundation in his name to help men recovering
from addiction restart their lives. They'll tell us about
their work and the challenges that proliferation of fentanyl
is creating for first responders and drug treatment.
Will was our third child, grew up in a
suburban home in beautiful Alabama, did
really well through school until he hit middle school and hit those
golden years of puberty and pressures and all the
things that come along with that. He bought a pill
in middle school and was suspended from that.
From that point on, he really started to struggle. So he
was in and out of doing well, staying away from drugs,
and then would go right back to the point where we had him
in and out of rehabs from Alabama all the way to
California. Fortunately, he would do well in rehab, but
then would always relapse once he got back home.
So we lost will in 2012, and he
was 25, and we knew that we wanted to do
something to honor his name and to try
to remove the stigma. Know this can happen in any
suburb. It's not just in big cities or
rural. It can happen anywhere. So we started the Will Bright
foundation, and we wanted to focus on the area where will struggled
the most, which was that next step after recovery.
So our foundation is named the Wilbright foundation.
And our facility that we have in rural west
Alabama is restoration Springs. And there is where we
house men coming out of recovery but needing help with that
next step in life. Get a job, get their driver's license
back, housing, transportation, all the things that really hold
them back from taking that next step in life.
So just people talking about it is good.
It's much better than it used to be. When we first started
dealing with this. People are beginning to realize it's not a
choice, it's a disease. And then when we first got into it,
we didn't tell anybody. I mean, we didn't ask for help. We didn't know who
to go to for help. We just suffered ourselves together.
And then when it became known that will was an addict,
everybody said, oh, can you help us? My son's got a
problem, or my brother or my husband. And so now
it's like, wow, we know where to go to. We know who to call.
There are people in places and organizations now
so much more than there was ten years ago. We've
been relatively successful. We don't necessarily have a treatment
program. We take each individual that comes, and we try to design a program
for what their problems have been. And we've been really successful
in taking guys that we've had homeless
people, we've had people come from prison, we've had people come from the
rehab facilities, and they seem to respond very
well to what we're offering, because we're not just a
babysitting service. I mean, there are a lot of halfway houses, those kind of things
out there that are not much more than that, but we try to take them
and get them a job. And the jobs that we get them in Fayette are
good jobs. I mean, they all of a sudden have insurance, and they have retirement
plans and things they never thought they'd have before in life. The biggest thing
is they're ready to go to work. They'd been in recovery, or they'd been in
jail, and they're ready to start being able to send that child
support money back home, get legal issues
cleared up and out of their way so they can move forward.
So there's nothing quite like a resident that's with you for a few months,
and they get the driver's license back, or they get
that great job, and they can send money back to their mother
or to their families. And one thing we did see was
that bringing people to Fayette, which is very rural Alabama,
they get out of our facility and bring their families to Fayette
because they have a good job. So when we see those kind of
success stories, it just makes you realize that it's been worth
it. Probably the thing that's changed the most
is the accessibility and the ways that
you can get illegal drugs. The
federal government did crack down on opioid and prescriptions and that
sort of thing. And as that helped, we're seeing
a rise in older drugs like methamphetamine,
cocaine, and we see it a lot in our schools
through the source of vaping. So that's
become a hot topic. Vapes that are laced with fentanyl,
it's everywhere, and it's being laced
in everything that a lot of our young people are
experimenting with. The vaping is huge right
now amongst our students. And a lot of times they may not know what
they're getting when they are buying vape or something to put
in their vape, and it could be laced with fentanyl. At Restoration
Springs, we have Narcan in our dormitory
and our cabins as well. So we make sure that we have a good stock
of that. Fortunately, we have not had to use it yet, but we're
realizing that with the fentanyl use, which is much harder
to overturn, to reverse, you're having
to do five or six shots of
Narcan to revive someone, as opposed to when it was
heroin. Typically, one dose of Narcan would
revive them. So we are seeing positive things from that.
On a first responder side. In our city,
all of our officers and first responders are equipped with
Narcan and plenty of it. So if they run into a
situation where they've got to revive someone, they're not going to rely on
just having one or two doses. They've got a bag full in case
this person has been using fentanyl. But I am proud of the state
of Alabama for allowing FDA products
and antagonists to be used when it comes to
opioid and fentanyl overdoses. I think a big part
that bill and I have realized through the will bright foundation is
the advocacy piece. So exactly what we're doing right here, sharing
our story, we're noticing more awareness,
more people willing to get out and share their stories. Like Bill
and I have and not worry about what people think of youth,
because you want to be able to make a difference and help someone else not
have to live through what we have lived through. We're blessed
to be able to be in Washington, DC a few
times a year, to share it on the hill to our lawmakers
and to share the story of so many that have
lost their lives to addiction and let them hear it firsthand from
parents. That's very powerful. It's moving, and
I think that it's helped move the needle some on getting some legislation
passed on how we treat opioids and fentanyl.
So those type pieces of advocacy I
think are very important and are a vital part of what the Willbright foundation
does.
We're coming into an election year and everybody's nervous,
but we now know who the candidates are going to be. Not that it was
a big mystery before. And so I will continue to
believe that rural America will play an outsized role. And I
know your conversation on the role of rural radio
and what needs to happen in terms of using that method for
communication. And I don't think people really understand kind
of that value because it is the
connectivity and the tissue that holds rural
communities together. Our newspapers are dying.
People are now replacing that with Facebook. But people still turn
on the radio for weather. They still turn on the radio for news.
And it's definitely an opportunity to
have a conversation about issues other
know kind of the weather with a broader audience in
rural America. But I think you and your guests, Joel, both
agree that it's underutilized. Isaac Wright with the rural
Voter institute is going to join us. The thing to keep in mind is to
go where people already go to listen.
And I think that as Democrats, we've forgotten that so many
times you and I haven't, which is why in a
pretty republican state, you were able to be elected to the United
States Senate, because you don't forget where people go to talk.
And to be part of that conversation, I get a chance to visit
with somebody who's out there making a difference in a world that I live in
every day and that know, I'm a radio
guy. I'm on a number of radio stations talking to people in the rural
area. And then you see someone who's doing what
Isaac Wright is doing with the rural Voter institute, and it
makes you take a step back and say somebody else gets it, somebody else is
willing to work on it. And now I get a chance to visit with them.
Isaac, good to have you on the hot dish. It's great to be here.
It's best described by you. What's the rural
voter institute? So we actually started right after
the 2016 elections. The Truman National Security
Project is a national group that sort of leans into defense and
diplomacy. And they were deeply involved with Secretary
Clinton because she had been secretary of the state Department, et cetera.
And right after the 2016 elections, everybody took shock and said, oh, my God,
what happened in rural America? It was like nobody had been paying attention
for the last few years. And so they came to my business partner and
I, she's originally from rural South Dakota. I'm originally from rural northwest
Tennessee. And know, can you guys put together an autopsy of
what happened in the election to give it convention? And so we did. But then
we turned around and said, you know what? The autopsy has already been written. These
numbers are there. We can see what happened.
That story is out there. Let's turn to how we do a better
job as people in office, as elected officials, as
candidates, talking to voters in rural communities, talking with
two way communication. And so we said, between the two of us, we've
spent 40 years at that point in our lives in
campaigns and office holders offices. And we said, we'll just turn
to that treasure trove of research that's out there, all the polling that's been done
and focus groups. And it turned out there hadn't been in ten or 15
years. So we turned to social science and folks who
specialize in rural communities, social science, social
psychology, and looked at and realized that a lot of the problems weren't
values based, they were communications based, and how we
communicate values, how we do a better job of talking with people, not talking
at people. And so we sort of created a thesis on how people
do a better job in public policy and public office,
communicating with rural communities. And then it sort of took off from there, and it
started taking up more and more of our time. And eventually it turned into the
rural voter institute. And some folks know, here's funding if
you want to go fill that gap in research that you see is lacking.
That passion came from mean,
Isaac. It did. I mean, not giving up on rural areas where every day you
got to get in your pickup, go somewhere and have somebody ticked off if you
got the wrong bumper sticker on. I mean, that passion comes from
somewhere. So tell me, what drives mean.
Where'd you grow up? What do you remember? I mean, explain to people what it's
like to think what you think
and live in one of these rural areas. So I grew up in rural northwest
Tennessee. When I was growing up, it was about an hour's drive to a chain
restaurant. Now they've got an applebee's in the county's next door, which is a big
deal. I remember my senior year of high school, we got the first and still
the only super Walmart in the county, which meant there was something legal
for us high schoolers to do past 08:00 on a Friday night. That was a
big thing. And my hometown, my home county, anyway,
was where Ms. Pauline Gore was from. That was.
She was. Miss Pauline was a hometown hero. She was the first
woman to graduate Vanderbilt law School. My grandmother knew
her. I wound up my first job on a campaign, was on the
staff of the Gore campaign. And then I saw my home county
vote against Al Gore despite
his ties to our community. And
it blew my mind. And I have watched that change over the years.
I did Mike Biebee's races for governor in Arkansas. You probably remember
him. He was the last democratic governor of Arkansas and learned a lot
from that. He was a guy who
had an agenda for the state, had a clear vision,
and he got reelected. Let's see, in 2010, which
was an anti incumbent, anti Democrat year, if you remember. It was a rough
year. And he got elected with a larger margin of
any governor of either party that year on the
ballot as an incumbent southern Democrat in a red
state. And he did so after, in his first term, he passed the
two largest tax increases in state history and the largest tax
cut in state history, remaking the tax code to be more progressive.
But he spoke to people on a values basis and about why it mattered.
And he was all about making people's lives better. And so those experiences
together made a big difference for me. Both my parents were first generation
college students. I grew up with GI Joel and transformers. And I know my
parents sacrificed for me to have that opportunity. And there were opportunities
for them because of people in public office who saw the opportunity
that if we open the door, there are people willing with hard work to
come through that door and change generations. And I was a product
of that generational change. And I don't see how you come from that,
how you have that experience and you don't want to continue that opportunity for other
people. So you no different than myself, other than
age. You're younger and you're out there getting after it,
yet where I'm kind of the old crippled, two fake knee guy now, but
you're sitting there and you're saying, what can we do about it?
What can we do about it? How can we connect with rural
voters. And you say that the autopsy had already
been done. I get it. I understand it. I'm just
wondering if anybody's willing to read the autopsy report,
which basically would tell people that they
don't understand what the rural voter does
once they get up in the morning to go to bed at night anymore. They
just don't get them. They don't understand the men and
women who, on any given day, they could be sitting next to in
church. I mean, how often do you hear people in public office
talk about the wage gap in rural America? Right. Rural Americans make
$0.75 on the dollar compared to their metropolitan counterparts in this
country. And we have all these huge problems with
brain drain, with upside down population pyramids as
our generation, the people my parents age, for example, are getting older,
and there are less and less people to take care of them. And that's just
not just like nurses and medical facilities, but that's literally their adult
children to come by and check on them and those kind of things, because people
are leaving to find economic or educational opportunities
in other places. And if we don't care for the communities that
power America, those communities could.
And I think one of the things we've seen in our research, and we've collected
data for, what, going on five years now in midwestern
battleground states with rural and small town voters. One of
the things we've seen is there is a very real fear
that the rural way of life is under attack. And you know what? There's some
truth to that. There are economic threats,
there are predatory threats out there that really
pose a threat to the viability, long term of our
communities. When I was growing up, I remember, which I'll just brag
for a minute, my senior class was the biggest senior class of my high school
to graduate any county in county history. There were 126 of us. That's
double the size of my class, for the record. That's why I'm
bragging. Exactly. And not everybody made it
through, but we gave it a shot. But I was around during
school consolidation. Right. That was part of the reason why we had such a big
senior class. And at the time, in our community,
in the communities in our region, there was this fear that if your school was
consolidated, your town would go under. That was the bedrock of your
community. And what we found in our research is
over 20 or 30 years. Oh, I'm admitting how old I am. That
hurts. That perception of threat has changed
dramatically. And right now, the threat is this fear
of main street small business. And if our main street,
small businesses, go under, so will our community. And when
we've talked to folks about how they define those small businesses,
that's not just like the mom and pop hardware store, although it is that,
but it's also the coffee shop. It's the guy who prepares your taxes every
year. If those businesses go under, there
is a real threat to the viability of the community. And that's one of the
big concerns, that we have to do a better job. People in public office have
to do a better job of addressing. And it's not just about talking at
people, right? It's about talking with people. Clearly, what you're doing
is trying to teach people how to connect and do the very things that you
just said. But I think what you and I have in
common, and a lot of people wouldn't be able to say that,
is that we understand their daily
life because we live it. It's what and who we are.
And somewhere along the line, progressives forgot
that or woke up in the morning, didn't care about it. And
I don't know which one it is or if it's a little bit of both,
but it's still there. For 19 years, I've
worked in AM radio. Granted, we're on FM, we're
simulcast, and we're out there on the World Wide Web, which is great, too. But
my job was in AM radio. And if you listen
to people on the coast and you talk to them about AM
radio, they just roll their eyes and think, the Ford shouldn't even have an AM
radio state in it. Know? Okay, best example
I can give, Isaac, and I'm curious what you think about this.
So I'm sitting in the shop with all my buddies, right? Guys that I grew
up with, hunting, fishing. So we're drinking beer. This was a couple
of years ago. We're sitting in his shop, and one of
my friends looks at me and he says, I just can't take you anymore.
You're so liberal, and
I can't listen to you anymore on the radio. And
I said to him, now, remember, we're in his shop. And I said to
him, I said, well, that's your choice. You don't have to
listen. I mean, there's a reason we're number one. Somebody is listening, and there's
a reason we're making money because somebody is listening. But
since we're in your shop, let's go out back and let's turn on the
combine. Let's turn on the tractor, let's turn on the terrorist and let's find out
what you were listening to when you shut them off. And he looks at me
and he goes, you know, Joel, you can really be an
ass sometimes. He was listening to me. He
was listening because that's what they listen to. They don't always
have to agree, but they're going to find something in there. They're going to find
something in there that's worthy of a conversation. And somewhere
along the line, people forgot how to connect with rural
voters that way. He didn't necessarily like my
politics, but he was willing to listen to them, which
means that the other people in that room drinking beer with us were sitting there
going, he got you. You see what
I'm getting at, Isaac? Absolutely. I've been on a few
bird hunts before when I knew the topic of
politics was something that divided us. But as long as I was the one hitting
the birds, nobody argued. At the end of the day,
that's. A great way to put it. So how do we
fix it? My biggest problem
now when I go out and recruit candidates to run is I can't
win with that letter behind. My mean, there's no way I can win with that
letter behind. So it's gone beyond
winning elections to now having people not even want to
run for them. Yeah. Cornell did a study recently
about exactly what the drop is when you put a
d beside somebody's name for office. Now, this is saying, let's say that we
read Joel Hykamp's bio, right? Talked to people about it,
said, would you support Joel Heitkamp, yes or no? Then you do the same
thing, but you say, Joel Heitkamp, Democrat, and what
difference does that make in the drop off? And they regionalize it around the country.
And I'm not going to necessarily get it exactly to the number. Right. But
ballpark, it's about a 13 point drop in rural
northeast. These are strictly rural and small town voters in the regions of the
country. In the southeast, it's a little more than that.
And I think the biggest drops were around 21 points in the
Midwest and 23 points in the west. Think about
that. Somebody that says, I agree with your values. We
share the same values. I trust you. I believe in what you're going to
do. And the minute you put a letter by their name,
21 point drop in support.
And so one of the things we've got to do is just address the brand
deficit, right? Because it's not about the values. It's
even less about how we communicate than it is about the brand. Although communication is
a key point. But Democrats for
decades stopped defining themselves in
rural and small town America. And in politics, if you don't define yourself,
somebody else will do it for you. And that's exactly what happened.
And the problem is now, when you hit certain buzzwords, when you
communicate the wrong way, a brick wall goes up and nothing
else you say is going to get heard. And when we don't hear each other,
that's when problems happen. That's when things break down. And so we have
to do a better job of communicating. You said something earlier that really triggered a
thought with me, and you made a brilliant point about
how we define ourselves, people from our communities, how
we define ourselves, and how it makes us define the way we relate to the
world around us. And there was actually a study about
that by the journal of the Rural Education
association where they found that
adolescents, and we all go through that phase in adolescence right when we're trying on
personalities. For me, it was, I had the
hawaiian shirt on in high school and the big jeans with the
bottom that you couldn't see the sneakers, and you'd even know I was wearing the
right sneakers to skateboard, which I didn't know how to ride a skateboard, and I
was president of the four H club. But what we're doing is we're going through,
we're trying on different personalities in adolescence to define our
own identity. And that's part of that process. Well, what
they found in the study was one of two things generally
happens with rural adolescents in America.
Either they reject the rural identity, and we all know those folks.
They're people we grew up with who move away, and they say, well, you wouldn't
believe where I come from. And they put onions in their red eye
gravy. That's a shout out to my friends in North Carolina. But they
make those comments and wisecracks about where they grew up, and they put it
down. That's rejecting the rural identity. Or the other
thing happens, what psychologists call overbinding.
And they overbind to the rule identity. It becomes a
fundamental part of how they define themselves, how they
define the world around them, and how they define the way they relate to that
world. And so when we take that for granted,
when people in public office take for granted that a
fundamental part of how you define yourself is then haunted by the
fact that there is a $0.75 on the dollar wage
gap because of where you live, not because of
how hard you work, not because of the kind of work you do, but because
of where you live that. That becomes a fundamental
thing to be addressed. And when you start off in a
conversation and it just hurts my heart when I hear people walk in and
say, I'm here for your vote. I'm going to bring rural broadband to your
community. Man, you just talked right
past everything that rural broadband matters for.
You just missed the boat. And we have to do a better job. People
in public office have to do a better job of having that fundamental,
foundational conversation of the values that
matter. I've got two theories that I want to float by you
and get your take on. The first being that we're the victim
of our own success. When I was growing up in North Dakota,
every state executive branch
position that was elected was held by Democrats, everyone.
We had two U. S. Senators for
years that were Democrats, congressmen. For years, the congressmen had
sagged into being the senators. It was that
easy to predict who was going to be the next United States senator.
And my theory on some of this, and in my old
legislative district, for you folks that haven't listened to the hot dish
that much, I served for 14 years in the state
senate, and I think we succeeded. And
you're talking about the things that we absolutely need to do now and
at least acknowledge now. But I'm going to give you an example of
my district. We build bobcats. We build
skid steers there. Okay? So, yes, it's farming based, but it's
also got an industrial base, right? And so a big part of my voting
block were union boys, union men and women
who I marched the line with in the rain for three days because they were
making them work Saturdays without even talking to them. Because
we didn't strike because of pay. They struck because of respect.
Right? So we got that fixed. We got workers comp
fixed. We got family leave fixed. We got
the state to acknowledge certain levels of pay
fixed. We got all this stuff fixed. And the minute we got it fixed,
they started voting Republican. And when you asked them why,
they said the same thing. Gods and guns.
Gods and guns. And I went to the union meeting and I said,
you guys, I mean, you didn't vote for my
successor here. You beat him out. I was there
with you. I was in that line with you. And they said, your party is
just so out of touch with who we are today. I
went home mad, and the next morning I woke up and I
didn't know if I should have been mad at them or myself.
And I'm really curious what your take on that is. Isaac,
let's break that into two topics, but that's okay. Let's talk about God. Let's talk
about guns. Guns first, I'm a hunter. In fact,
I made a decision a few years ago. My kids and I, the
only meat we consume in the house are things that we
harvest ourselves. Now, that said, man, if I'm out on a road trip,
Taco Bell is my guilty pleasure. But when I'm at
know, it's venison, it's elk, it's wild turkey,
it's pheasant. When I can get an invitation from a
friend in the Dakotas, I'm just dropping a hint there. If you want to give
those fake knees a workout, it's open, buddy. You come on up. But
it's stuff we harvest ourselves, right? So obviously, I'm a firearm owner.
I'm a hunter. And when we talk about
guns, we have to face a certain reality of. There are
different segments of gun owners having this conversation,
right? There are those who are hunters who have
the firearm. I have my great great
grandmother's single barrel 20 gauge that she used
to shoot snakes off the front porch of the cabin. Let me tell you something.
When you harvest a squirrel with that for dinner, that's a cool thing, right?
And there are people who have those firearms because they are part of our family
tradition. They've been passed down. They are part of how we put meat on the
table, right? Those are folks that we can have a serious conversation
with, that their values often more closely in line with us than anybody
else. Because when I talk to my buddies who are deer hunters,
they don't want the guy who's a prepper, who's never hunted
deer before, who's preparing for the zombie apocalypse. So he takes his
AR 15 out to the deer stand and he's just going to shoot wildly because
you know what? They're going to hit me or my kids, right? We're only one
field over. So those folks we have
a serious conversation with to be had about gun safety, about
responsible gun ownership, about conservation. Because you know what? My
kids are eating the fish out of the water. They're eating the animals that were
roaming that land. Those things matter to us. Then there's the other
set of the folks who say, I need
500 assault weapons because I'm
preparing for when the government falls in the zombie apocalypse. We're not going to be
successful in that conversation. Let's not force a round hole
into a square peg. If your firearms are because you're planning to
overthrow the government, we're not going to agree on this stuff.
Right. But if they're there because you're putting meat on the table, because this is
part of your family tradition, culture. Yeah. We have a conversation to
be had. So that's number one. Number two on God. And
this is something we've actually studied some at the rural voter
institute. And that's a serious conversation. And in
fact, I'll reference, I was raised baptist, and if you've ever been to baptist training
union, which was something I don't think they do anymore, but many decades
ago, I had a pastor in my childhood make the point,
you can never argue somebody into changing their mind, but you can love them
into it. And that's part of the conversation we need to have is
about quit arguing with people and
start being the things, practicing the things that we
preach, live in the change, if you will. But
when we talk about faith and we talk about people of faith, one thing
is people need to be genuine. Right. If that's genuine to you, to talk about
your faith tradition. A big part of my
political conviction comes from Matthew, chapter 25. Right. When Jesus said,
we will separate the sheep and the goats, we will judge
believers based on how they treat the sick, the poor,
the widow, the orphan. Right. These are things why I believe people
should have access to health care. Right. But if
it's not part of your tradition, if that's not part of who you are,
don't force it. But if that faith tradition is real for you, be open
and talk about it. Right. Respecting other people's beliefs.
But people want to know what motivates you, what brings you to believe
the things you believe. Because if
you are putting food on the table, if you are saving,
because one day you hope you might get to retire or put a kid
through school, then you probably don't
have the chance to sit down and read the New York Times, the state
daily, the local weekly newspaper, cover to cover and watch the evening news
every single day, to know every vote your elected representative
took. Right. But, you know, if you can turn your back and trust them while
you go live your life. And that's why people want to know what our
convictions are. We also found that talking in
moral language, right, simply saying right and wrong
is just as effective. Being able to
say, Democrats are often cursed
with the fact they're right. And they think that if
they just explain the numbers over and over logically, everybody in the world will
believe them. But that's not how we work as human
beings. It's not how we make decisions. And so we have to
do a better job of saying, hey, my tax plan
is the right idea because all the numbers work on a spreadsheet. And we have
to do a better job of saying, hey, this tax plan works because the
billionaires at the top who've profited the most from the american dream they had
the chance to live, have the bigger responsibility to put
back, to make sure that everybody has a chance to live that american dream
than the person who's stocking our grocery shelves. They shouldn't carry that burden.
It's going to take a change. Know folks who are
listening to this podcast have the opportunity to make, to demand
better from those who make decisions about who goes out to talk
about what topics. Yeah, Isaac, tell people where they can
find the rural voter institute. Tell them how they can get active. Learn from it,
take advantage of it. Ruralvoterinstitute.org. We have five
years worth of studies published there on our website you can pull
down and read. We do trainings at party
conventions and meetings across the country. You can write in through
our website to talk about those. Our latest report came out this
week and it's about the important role of terrestrial radio. That's AM
FM radio in small town in rural America and what a cornerstone it is
and how it is an important medium and how to best use the
medium to communicate with people, to talk about our values, about where we
stand. Isaac, I could do it all day, man. Here's my word
to you, okay? You get yourself an out of state license. You come up
here mid October, November, by noon you will have your
limit. When it comes to, I'm there, I'm there.
I've been hunting South Dakota for years. I want North Dakota to push past
my record. I'm in. All right. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming on the hot dish.
Thank you. It's been great.
The problem is as Democrats
nationally, we don't get it or we don't care. One
of the two. But it's seen as know, hey,
nobody listens to am radio anymore. You know what? In the rural area, they
listen to AM radio. And if Rush Limbaugh taught us anything,
it was the fact that he can affect politics through the radio.
And it worked. It absolutely worked. And if people don't
acknowledge that, then they do so at their own peril.
Yeah. And shows like yours give us a look
into leading political indicators. Right. The
postal service in North Dakota was horrific when I was in
the Senate. It hasn't improved much. And there's pockets of
North Dakota. Here's a great story. Well, it was in the
middle of a huge hiring problem. I mean,
lots of workforce. And so the post office thought they were going to nickel and
dime it. So they basically replaced some of the old time rural
postal carriers with new postal carriers.
Unfortunately, those people didn't know how to deliver the mail. And my
favorite story, Joel, is up in Minot, North Dakota. This woman
got hired to deliver the mail by some company that came in
and underbid the old time rural postal carrier.
And what she was, she was addicted to
story. And so I remember this story. So she
would put all the mail in the first mailbox along the road
because she knew when that know when she went out to get her mail,
she would say, oh, I've got Mildred's mail, I've got Clarence's mail. She'd
drive down and deliver the mail for so this woman could drive back to
Mina and play. So I am not
exaggerating. We found bags of mail in the ditch
where people had just thrown the mail in the ditch.
The point I want to make is when you raise some of these
issues that are happening on a show like yours where people can call
in, all of a sudden you get a handle on what people are talking about,
what they care about, what their fears are, what their concerns are, what their
hopes think. I don't think there's a
better medium in America, in rural America, than
rural radio. And that's true, actually. I want to make this point.
It's very significant on reservations. Tribal radio is
huge. Oh, absolutely. It's great. It's a
wonderful way to communicate. And people can do it
without folks knowing who they are. Anonymity, I mean,
that's the key, right? My show, for example,
they're mad enough to call in. They're happy enough to call in. Whatever reason they
call in. They can do so without
everybody knowing who they are. And that's the beauty
of it. They get a chance to, for the first time ever, not
sit there and be outed for whatever belief they have. Yeah. And one thing I
would say for the folks who listen to us who are
curious about this, there's a number of radio stations. In fact, I'm going to give
you a call signal, KFGO. When you ask
Alexa to play Kfgo, she says,
kfgo, the mighty 790. It's so
much fun. But anyone can listen to rural radio. And I really
think that political operatives across the country ought
to spend some time just dialing in and listening to
what people are talking about. You don't need an expensive focus group if you can
find a talk show where people feel like they can
call in and talk about what's going on. And the people who are talking,
they're trying to convince you, Joel. They're trying to convince your
listeners that they're right.
Well, thanks so much, Joel. Enjoy your vacation. Enjoy
your. I think it might be your first honeymoon. Last time I
remember, you were too broke to take a first honeymoon. So this might be your
first honeymoon. Well, we were too busy buying diapers on our first
honeymoon, just getting ready for it. So,
yeah, there's a reason. I had grandkids at a very young
age. Okay, well,
listen, thanks, Joel, for joining me, and we hope
you all will tune in once again to the hot
dish. It's where we go. Comfort food for middle
America. Please continue to listen, and
if you're interested in what we do at one country, check us
out at
onecountryproject.com. And if you have suggestions or for topics or
for anything else, please email us at podcast
at
onecountryproject.com.