As progressives brace for the return of Trump at the head of an emboldened MAGA movement, pundits struggle to understand how Democrats failed in the 2024 federal elections and argue about what to do next. Yet almost no one seems to notice the places where working people actually won.

Won, you say? Yes, in state and local elections, working people did win, from Washington State to Missouri, North Carolina to Maine. These victories bring nuance to our understanding of the election results and of our political geography. They offer insights into how we can weather the next four years, and emerge with a stronger and more united movement for social justice. 

In Washington State, 64%  of voters rejected a rollback of the state’s capital gains tax, an initiative launched by investor and far-right megadonor Brian Heywood. This ballot measure would have stripped away $2.2 billion in funding from schools, climate defense and health care to line the pockets of the ultra-rich. 

Washington State has long been a haven for the wealthy because it has no personal and corporate income taxes. Instead, the state raises revenue through sales taxes, which take a bigger bite out of the paychecks of low-wage workers than from the hefty salaries of executives. In 2023, Washington passed a capital gains tax on the sale of stocks and bonds to redress this inequity, and the measure sets aside more than $500 million every year for schools, early learning, and child-care programs.

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“This millionaire wanted to steal billions of dollars from our kids’ schools and childcare, cut thousands of climate and care jobs, especially in rural areas,” said Stina Janssen from Firelands Workers United  (FWU), a group that went door-to-door in rural areas to defeat the measure. “We said ‘Hell, No!’”

In Missouri, 58% of the voters approved Proposition A, which increases the minimum wage to $15 from $12.30 and extends sick leave protections to hourly workers and those employed by small businesses. This minimum wage bump will benefit as many as one in four workers in the state, according to the Missouri Budget Project. 

“We saw 500,000 people vote for Trump and Prop A,” said Kai Sutton from Missouri Jobs with Justice  (MOJwJ). “So while we’re disappointed in federal and state elected official outcomes, we remain curious about how to reach this overlapping set of people and bring them into power building and organizing that actually improves their lives.” 

And in North Carolina, voters defeated the Republican Mark Robinson, a self-avowed “Black Nazi” in his run for the governor’s office, as well as Michelle Morris, a QAnon conspiracy theorist who ran for state schools superintendent. They also broke the Republicans’ supermajority in the state legislature, preserving Democratic Governor Josh Stein’s veto powers.

“In North Carolina, statewide, working people won,” said Vicente Cortez from Down Home North Carolina (DHNC), which knocked on 636,874 doors during the campaign. “So every time our new governor vetoes bad legislation – the next abortion ban, the next bill to fund a school voucher program, he is doing it with the power of working people under his pen.”

Cutting through partisanship

Sutton, Cortez, and Janssen agree the right issue – and the right coalition – can galvanize working-class voters across the political spectrum.

“We fought back hard together with many other groups – unions, tribes, and other People’s Action affiliates, including OneAmerica and Washington Community Action Network,” said Janssen. “And we won in a landslide.”

To get the minimum wage increase and paid sick leave on the ballot, MOJwJ organized with Missourians for Healthy Families and Fair Wages, a coalition supported by the Fairness Project, which brought together over 150 labor, community and faith-based organizations, including the NAACP, AFL-CIO, UAW, ACLU and the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri with more than 500 business owners to support the measure. MOJwJ gathered more than 100,000 of the 210,000 signatures submitted to get Prop A on the ballot.

After several months of issue testing, Down Home identified Mark Robinson’s pledge to ban all abortions in the state as the existential threat that would motivate working-class voters across party lines.

“Even for the most conservative voters in North Carolina, that was a bridge too far,” said Cortez. “A thing that was motivating white voters in rural North Carolina was that they universally agreed that North Carolina should be a state where abortion is accessible and women should have the right to choose.”

Working with a core group of allies convened in a field cohort by America Votes – the Carolina Federation, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, Siembra NC, North Carolina Asian Americans Together, and the state chapter of the AFL-CIO – the groups forged a shared strategy and divvied up the state to make voter contact. Down Home took on 25 counties, all rural, and knocked on 636,874 doors. While this is 15% of the 4.3 million total voters the coalition contacted, Cortez emphasized the role walking down dirt roads to reach rural voters played in  achieving statewide success.

“Our doors are farther apart,” he said. “And since Down Home talks to everyone in North Carolina, we were able to really get out there and do the hard things, like talk to white Southerners in the backwoods about abortion.”

Grassroots groups like Firelands, MOJwJ and Down Home have good reason to feel proud of these victories: they earned them the hard way, with shoe leather and grit.  They logged thousands of hours in one-on-one conversations at doors and on phones. “We deep canvassed on the issue for two years, and it paid off,” said MOJwJ’s Sutton.

Every vote was hard-won, and these efforts overcame massive spending by MAGA megadonors. In some races, the margin of victory came down to fewer than fifty votes. But a win is a win, and in a year when voting maps are awash in red, these groups can feel rightly proud when they see how the voters they engaged bucked the national trend.

“What we saw in North Carolina proves that year-round base building and organizing works,” said Cortez. “Not only do we have to run highly effective field political programs, but we have to be with our people building leadership and building trust in the communities if we want to see the changes that we need.”

Leading with values

The strategies deployed by Firelands, MOJwJ and DHNC share some common traits. All three organize year-round on carefully chosen issues that affect working people in both rural and urban areas, and form open-door coalitions with allies who align on these issues.

“We cut through the partisanship and won in rural and red parts of the state,” Janssen added. “We had an unapologetic, class-conscious message: Blue collar, not billionaires. That connected with working-class people’s frustrations with the cost of living and wealth inequality.”

These groups also use deep canvassing, a technique that engages people through conversation around their deeper values, hopes and fears. Deep canvassing takes time, patience and investment, but it pays off: this technique has proven to be far more effective than traditional techniques of political persuasion in academic studies. It wins.

“When you have real conversations with working-class folks about their values, you can buck a national trend, where we’re seeing the entire country take a right-wing turn,” said Cortez. “Not only did it deliver electoral wins, but y’all, the races that we won to break the supermajority and to protect abortion rights, to defend our public schools, and to protect working-class people, tell me that field programs work.” 

Firelands, MOJwJ and DHNC are all part of People’s Action’s Rural Cohort, a group of 14 state-based groups who are members of the Chicago-based organizing network. They have met over the past six years to develop a shared power analysis and strategy to turn back the rising tide of white supremacy and Christian Nationalism in rural areas, along with the massive flood of dark-money advertising and misinformation that promotes them, and to win back Republican-dominated statehouses. 

Deep canvassing and year-round, relational campaigns are key elements of the Organizing Revival, an initiative People’s Action launched in 2023 to share strategy and scenario planning to strengthen member-based, powerbuilding groups across the country in the most effective techniques of on-the-ground organizing.

Twenty-one national partners in the Organizing Revival – which brings together all of the major networks of grassroots organizing groups including Gamaliel, Faith in Action, Community Change, the Center for Popular Democracy, the Working Families Party and the National Domestic Workers Alliance – have signed on to The Antidote to Authoritarianism, a call for unprecedented collaboration to build a stronger national movement for social justice. These groups are hosting a series of regional gatherings which will culminate in a national gathering in 2025.

Rebuilding civic infrastructure

People’s Action’s Rural Cohort has also developed a shared playbook for rebuilding civic infrastructure in rural communities that treats rural areas not as an afterthought, but as essential to the fight for social and economic justice in the states. This starts with finding and electing grassroots leaders, so communities can start to feel the power of “movement governing.”

“Having somebody like Antoinetta, who comes from the community and understands what the working-class needs, is game-changing,” said Cortez about Antoinetta Cash Royster, a social worker and Down Home member who was elected as a first-time candidate for County Commissioner in rural Person County. “Next time our members run an issue campaign, if they want to take on Duke Energy or fully fund their public schools, they’re going to have one of our own on the county commission that makes those decisions.” 

The Maine People’s Alliance, which is also part of the People’s Action rural cohort, has helped claw back the state’s legislature and Governor’s office from Republican control over the last two cycles by supporting progressive candidates up and down the ballot – two-thirds of MPA’s endorsed candidates, from school board to the statehouse, won in this election. They also helped Democrat Jared Golden win reelection to the U.S. House, overcoming $6 million in dark-money spending to elect his MAGA rival, former NASCAR driver Austin Theriault.

“Perhaps the secret to winning the working class isn’t about aligning strictly with the left, right, or center,” writes Ben Chin, deputy director of the Maine People’s Alliance. “Most regular people — across races, classes, and geographies — just want leaders who fight passionately for their beliefs, accept their wins and losses with humility, and still find ways to make tangible progress.”

Victories like the ones in Maine, Washington State, Missouri, and North Carolina show that progressive organizing can thrive even in rural communities. When organizers help blue-collar Americans make meaning of their struggles, they come to see how progressive policies benefit them where MAGA slogans don’t. Staking out common ground in rural areas and small towns in this way will create an important check on the MAGA movement over the next four years, as the Trump administration seeks to roll out the most divisive elements of its agenda – from mass deportations to ending public education and health programs – nationwide.

Yet perhaps just as important, as clear as day these victories point a way forward for progressives from our current political standstill. As the organizers on the ground in Maine, Missouri, North Carolina, and Washington know, the red maps we see on network TV obscure the fact that ​​rural America isn’t MAGA country. Our nation’s intertwined crises – of housing, health, climate, affordability and despair – hurt people in small towns and big cities alike. 

If we, as a movement, organize tirelessly and strategically around the issues that matter most to working people where they live, we can win – just as groups like Firelands, Missouri Jobs with Justice and Down Home have done.

“Let’s go, y’all,” said Down Home’s Cortez. “Let’s get back up, lick our wounds, then let’s go f’ing fight.”