Boston is less than a three-hour drive from Chloe Maxmin’s hometown of Nobleboro, Maine. But when she arrived at Harvard in 2011 for her freshman year of college, the environmental activist encountered a whole new world.

“When I was organizing in high school, I always felt very alienated by protest and mass gatherings of people,” Maxmin says. “I lived in such a small place and that never happened. It just felt really foreign and scary to me.”

Maxmin found a friend in Canyon Woodward, a fellow freshman from North Carolina. Maine and North Carolina are separated by several states and the Mason-Dixon line, but their involvement in campus activism around the Keystone XL pipeline — and their rural upbringings — bound the two together.

“We used a public bus together for the first time, and were very confused about how that works,” Maxmin laughs. “Neither of us grew up in places that were even remotely near a public transportation system.”

At Harvard, Maxmin and Woodward often talked about how to bring the types of movements they saw on campus back to their hometowns. Politics, they thought, could be a good start. Maxmin decided to run for state legislature in her home district in Maine in 2018, and called on Woodward to move up from North Carolina to manage her campaign.

Together, they achieved the first-ever Democratic win for a legislative seat in a district that had voted Republican by a 16-point margin over the past three elections. Maxmin is now the youngest woman serving in the Maine State House.

And the two say they knew how to connect with an electorate that didn’t necessarily share their progressive views.

“The communities that are kind of out there, they have to rely on each other and the neighbors,” Woodward says. “You actually just have to go face-to-face and listen and have conversations with all the people in your community, even if you don’t agree with them.”

Ask any politico about why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, and at least part of their answer will point out how the Democrats are losing touch with rural voters. National polling shows that the number of registered Republicans in rural counties has grown by about 10 percentage points over the last decade. In 2016, the Democrats’ famous “blue wall” crumbled in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — and showed serious cracks in Minnesota — due in part to those states’ large swaths of rural voters. And Democrats have struggled in local politics as Republicans have dominated state legislatures, helped in part by rural voters’ outsize influence.

Things haven’t changed much since 2016: President Trump’s approval rating in September 2019 was at 60% in rural areas of the Rust Belt and Great Plains, a significant bump from his national approval rating.

But progressive rural organizers say residents outside cities and suburbs are far from a lost cause. Maxmin and Woodward find themselves at the vanguard of organizers working to change the perception of progressive politics by listening to voters who have been long overlooked.

District 88, which Maxmin represents, contains part of Kennebec County, one of more than200 pivot counties that went for Trump in 2016 after voting for Obama twice. It also contains portions of Lincoln County, where 100% of the population lives in rural areas — one of the most rural counties in the most rural state in the U.S., according to 2010 census data.

Maxmin and Woodward were surprised to learn just how alienated voters were from the Democratic party when they started knocking on doors. “So many of the people that we talked to had never been contacted by a Democratic candidate for any office before,” Woodward says. “Many of them hadn’t been contacted since 2008, in Obama’s campaign.”