Iowa, Idaho, or Indiana?

I remember the process of beginning to realize what it meant to be from somewhere. 

After I got to college on the East Coast, a well-meaning friend once admitted she could never quite keep straight whether I was from Iowa, Idaho, or Indiana. Things like that shifted my relationship to my hometown, making me appreciate where I came from more, precisely because of how overlooked and underestimated it was to some.

Maybe you know something of that feeling. 

I've been thinking about it a lot this year, traveling to places that remind me of my home in “flyover country.” Montana. Oklahoma. Rural North Carolina and Georgia. Places where pundits don’t expect Democrats to have any business showing up.

A few weeks ago I was in Butte, Montana, campaigning to get corporate money out of state politics. The next day I was in a barn with string lights in western NC, stumping for a fourth-generation farmer running for Congress in a district Trump carried by ten points.

I go to these places because people can tell the difference between a political project that writes off their county and one that shows up and makes the case. The defiant pride in where you come from that I felt as a young man? I see it everywhere – in Tulsa, in Butte, in the Lehigh Valley, in places that have been told again and again that nobody's coming.

We're coming. But only if we have the resources to do it.

So, I’m asking you to join me: Will you chip in whatever you can today to help us get everywhere we need to be?

Thank you,

Pete