Tim Nelson shares his view of the top priority for the Iowa Democratic Party. He was formerly the Finance Director for Kim Weaver’s 2016 Congressional Campaign, Communications Director for the Iowa College Democrats, and Intern for the Obama 2012 campaign.

A cursory glance of returns in rural counties will show Democrats getting nearly universally trounced. While this may be a sustainable model for states such as Illinois, where Cook County returns can offset rural voting patterns, Iowa’s cities simply do not have enough Democratic votes to offset rural counties.

In order for Democrats in Iowa to not only survive but thrive in elections to comes, we need to vastly improve our rural outreach. In order to do this, we must strengthen the rural county party apparatuses to meet this outreach goal. This will involve not only increased financing, but sending organizers to rural counties to help improve outreach capacity within county organizations. Furthermore, we should improve our outreach to rural community colleges and private schools by strengthening and aiding the Iowa College Democrats outreach efforts.

While these approaches will not fix all of IDP’s problems, they will go a long way to improving our performance in 2018 and beyond.