El-Sayed Narrowly Led Rural Michigan in Democratic Senate Primary

Contrary to pre-election expectations, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed narrowly carried rural Michigan over Representative Haley Stevens in the August 4, 2026, Democratic primary, according to county-level election results. Ahead of Election Day, projections suggested Stevens would hold a significant advantage in rural parts of the state. However, when votes were counted, El-Sayed led Stevens by approximately 0.55 percentage points across rural Michigan.

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The Grocery Cart Divide: How Rural and Urban America Sort Themselves

We hear constantly that rural and urban America have grown apart. The 2024 presidential map made the point in the usual way, a sea of red countryside around dense blue cities, with roughly 90% of counties shifting toward Donald Trump. That divide is real, and it is well documented. What gets less attention is how far down into daily life it reaches.

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Are Rural Law Enforcement Agencies Using Flock Cameras?

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox. According to my analysis of data from the Atlas of Surveillance, a crowd-sourced database of police technology, nearly 800 rural law enforcement agencies use Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) as of December 2025.

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Fire Season: Contamination Warning Disrupts Kitchen at an Oregon Fire Camp

This story was originally published by The Times Journal. EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s another fire season and, once again, fire crews are fighting blazes that scorch untold thousands of acres across the West. But firefighting is much more than being on the front lines of the actual fire. It’s a massive logistical undertaking to keep the operations going, as well as work that comes after the last of the flames are put out.

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Review: Annihilating The Hillbilly Redux: Appalachia’s Struggle Against America’s Institutions

Annihilating The Hillbilly Redux: Appalachia’s Struggle Against America’s Institutions is a profoundly important book for the field of Appalachian studies that shares the author’s personal experiences, his insights, and evidence-based understanding of the ways and means by which the Appalachian Region has been historically exploited. It talks about the deliberate impoverishment of the people by the systematic extraction of the region’s wealth by industries, agencies, and institutions that claimed to be helping them.

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Rural Health Transformation Funds Go to Tech Companies for Innovations

For eight states, about 10% of their allotment from the Rural Health Transformation Fund will go not to rural hospitals, but to tech companies seeking innovative solutions to challenges rural healthcare providers face. The Rural Tech Catalyst Fund takes a tenth of the states’ allocation from the Rural Health Transformation Fund and diverts it to technology companies. Proponents say the fund will provide innovations that will address challenges that are unique to rural hospitals.

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Q&A: The Filmmaker Asking Hard Questions About Wildfires 

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Hillary Bachelder is a 

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Patients Wary of Governments, Companies Pushing AI as a Rural Healthcare Solution

This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Two of the nation’s most powerful health officials predict artificial intelligence will play a key role in solving rural America’s health challenges. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a panel of U.S. senators that AI nurses can provide “concierge care” to rural patients. Mehmet Oz, who leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, …

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Yonder Radio: Rural Gerrymandering, Aging in Place, and Tribal Broadband

Tune in to Yonder Radio for conversations about rural gerrymandering, aging in place in Wisconsin, and tribal broadband in South Dakota. This episode features bluegrass music from 80 Proof Alice.

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What Happened in Rural News This Month?

How closely have you been following the latest stories from rural communities across the country? From trad-wives and public art to data centers and detention centers, this month’s news highlights the challenges, celebrations, and resistance shaping rural life. Take this short quiz to see what you know.

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In Alaska and West Virginia, Credit Unions Innovate to Meet the Needs of Rural Communities

Far western Nome, Alaska, is off the road system — more people drive ATVs and snowmobiles than cars. Credit Union 1 (CU1) took this into account when constructing a new branch in Nome: the drive-through window is lower to the ground than usual. In southeastern Alaska, the credit union’s Skagway branch opened in 2025 in response to a written request from the borough assembly.

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Ozarks Notebook: ‘Outsider Folk Art’ Made of a Million Pieces

Stories speak from the walls of the Eudora Baptist Church. Rather than words, they use images to tell tales of faith, family and community through a gallery of intricate mosaics created by church kids over the past 25 years. Tiny, colorful pieces comprise each work: There’s one made from puzzle pieces, one from buttons, one from small toys. Another uses fishing lures, sourced from church members.

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Medical Schools Work to Address Shortage of Specialists in Rural Healthcare

For many rural communities across the country, the crisis in healthcare manifests as a lack of specialized healthcare. American medical schools are taking note and working toward providing specialists trained in treating rural residents. From Eastern Tennessee’s mountains to the Pacific Northwest and beyond, medical schools are moving their programs directly into the communities that need them the most. While people living in rural communities make up about 20% of the American population, only 9% of physicians across the country practice there.

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A New Public Mosaic in Whitesburg, Kentucky Commemorates the Flood of 2022 While Serving as a Community Archive

In front of a concrete retaining wall in Whitesburg, Kentucky, amidst piles of broken pottery and glass, Lacy Hale sifted through a plastic bag full of jewelry. “A woman donated this,” Hale said. “It was a box full of buttons and pendants and little gems and stones and doodads of all sorts.” Hale selected several pieces from the bag. She held each one up to a turtle-shaped outline that had been painted on the wall.

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45 Degrees North: Write-in Votes

The weekend before one April election, I got a text from a friend about the upcoming county board of supervisors race. Our district had one candidate on the ballot. A last-minute write-in campaign was starting for someone else – someone I would have voted for. Unfortunately, the deadline for filing as a “registered write-in candidate” was the day before the would-be candidate decided to stand for office.

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Q&A: Chris Jude on Organizing a Rural Music Festival

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Chris Jude is founder of the…

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Yonder Radio: ‘Drunk Angels’, Feral Cats, and Cherokee Pottery Traditions

Tune in to Yonder Radio for conversations about feral cats in Idaho, Cherokee pottery traditions, and "drunk angels" in Appalachia. This week's musician is the Gladson Family Band.

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Research: Some Rural Residents Are Trading Nutrition for Shelter

As U.S. home prices reach historic highs and proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Program (SNAP) are underway, the health of low-income rural residents is becoming a cause for concern. Meeting nutritional needs is already a challenge in many rural areas, which tend to have higher food prices, less variety, and lower quality fresh meat and produce. How will changes to food assistance alongside rising housing costs impact the health of rural communities?

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In “Yesteryear,” Homesteading for ‘Likes’ Becomes a Cautionary Tale

One of the buzziest books of the summer sees a social media star learn the hard way that rurality is more than an Instagram backdrop.

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A Tale of Two Behavioral Health Systems, or How the State Border Determines Who Gets Access to Mental Healthcare

In July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) mandated significant health care funding cuts and policy changes related to low-income health insurance programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) administration. As of April 2026, 1.59 million Americans had lost their Medicaid insurance because of OBBBA-related cuts. Because of the bill, an estimated 13 million more people will lose their insurance over the next three years.

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Rural Americans Are More Evangelical, but not Necessarily More Religious

In the majority of nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties, the most popular Christian tradition is evangelicalism, according to my analysis of data from the U.S. Religion Census, a county-level, once-per-decade dataset that reports the number of congregations and adherents in American faith groups. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that rural people are more religious than their urban and suburban counterparts. More on that later.

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Community-Building Program Targets Division in Small Towns

When Meredith Dean started the first Community Works chapters, she saw people reengaging in politics. “We were seeing more and more volunteers coming in who had been totally disillusioned with politics across the board, or had just been disengaged Democrats, or had never been involved, — and yet they were coming in through Community Works,” said Dean, the national director of Community Works.

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ICE Seeks “Zombie Prison” in Rural Minnesota

An empty 1,600-bed private prison has sat idly on land that was once a soybean field in rural Appleton, Minnesota since the prison failed and, as a result, tanked the town’s economy in 2010. Now, ICE is seeking to reinhabit the bones of Prairie Correctional Facility (PCF) and use it as a new detention facility, according to a federal contract…

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Questions Remain on Rural Health Transformation Funds Effects on Rural Hospitals

Across the country, states are grappling with how to allocate their portion of funds from the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) created in 2025. But whether those federal dollars will help keep rural hospitals open is still up for debate. Money from the program was proposed as part of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill, passed last year, along with budget cuts to Medicaid.

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Q&A: West Liberty City Council Member Dana Dominguez

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week. Dana Dominguez is a city council member in West Liberty, the first majority Latinx community in Iowa.

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Yonder Radio: Combatting Appalachian Stereotypes, Maternal Healthcare, and Art Church

Tune in for conversations about combating Applachian stereotypes through photography, maternal healthcare in Texas, building a community art center in an old church, and more. This week's featured artist is Sarah Burton.

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Submissions Are Open for the 2026 Best in Rural Writing Contest

The Best in Rural Writing Contest has returned for 2026. The contest, organized by the rural writing collective The Milk House, welcomes both fiction and nonfiction submissions and hopes to showcase the best of rural stories from around the world. Milk House Founder Ryan Dennis is a teacher living in Galway, Ireland, with deep roots and a passion for rural life.

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“Shiners: Voices from Owsley County” Documentary Shows Rural America in a Positive Light

For high school students from a small Eastern Kentucky county, competing in – and winning – a regional theater competition is a big deal. Even a bigger deal: the play they performed, “Shiners,” is one they collaboratively wrote about growing up in rural Appalachia in one of the poorest counties in the nation. The PBS documentary “Shiners: Voices from Owsley County…

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The ‘Hub-and-Spoke’ Model for Addiction Treatment in North Carolina

Holly Warren was recently leafing through one of her old medical school textbooks, trying to recall how much instruction she’d received in addiction medicine – trying to recall, “Did we even talk about this? Was it even on our radar?” “And it really just wasn’t,” Warren said. She received an excellent education two decades ago at East Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine, then at Duke University for internal medicine.

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Vermont, Other States Test ‘Gentle Infill’ as One Potential Tool to Tackle Housing Shortages

A vacant lot sits between two houses on a residential street. The vegetation is a bit overgrown but otherwise unremarkable. It helps keep the street from being an unbroken string of single-family homes or duplexes, and contributes to the middle-class, neighborhood vibe. Nothing wrong with that, but at a time when there aren’t enough homes for all the people who would like to buy one at a price they can afford, this asset might get put to a more productive use.

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