The Daily Yonder

Rural Voters Lead Turnout in 2026 Texas Primaries  Compared to their urban and suburban counterparts, a greater share of rural voters cast their ballots in the Texas primaries this year. Texas primary voters turned out in striking numbers this week, with early voting fueling a surge that dominated state headlines. By election night, major outlets reported record-breaking Democratic participation in a closely-watched Senate showdown between US Representative Jasmine Crockett and State Representative James Talarico.

Here are the numbers on Texas’s record-breaking turnout this primary season.

Q&A: Ryan Burge on Declining Religious Participation 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. Ryan Burge is someone who wears many hats.

Former rural pastor and social scientist Ryan Burge takes a data-driven approach to studying American religious trends.

“Wuthering Heights” Chooses Style Over Substance The stunning beauty of the Yorkshire moors takes center stage in Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel. But by prioritizing aesthetics and romance, Fennell loses the tensions that make the original work a classic.

The stunning beauty of the Yorkshire moors takes center stage in Emerald Fennell's adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel. But by prioritizing aesthetics and romance, Fennell loses the tensions that make the original work a classic.

A Rural Calling: Ben Fink The first time Gwen Johnson laid eyes on Ben Fink, he was on stage at Kings Creek Volunteer Fire Department performing a shape-note song. Johnson was a board member and a driving force of Hemphill Community Center, a venerable gathering place in the Eastern Kentucky community of Jackhorn. At the time, in 2016, the center was in financial distress.

“...An artist, a teacher, a consultant, a researcher, and a writer…an organizer, a facilitator – a cross-cultural convener,” - Ben Fink helps communities grow, harnessing their sense of local pride and the wealth of their human resources.

Rural Healthcare Is in the Red as Trump Withholds Medicaid Payments to Minnesota Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s geographer. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox. If I’ve learned anything from my reporting on rural communities, it’s that governmental action (or inaction) that hurts America at large often has an outsized impact on rural residents.

Trump’s retribution campaign will disproportionately hurt rural hospitals. Here’s the data.

Two Liberation Movements, Intertwined In the 1700s, 80 million bison roamed much of North America. They were everything to the people who lived among them: shelter, food, clothing, and medicine. Their grazing and moving fostered a whole host of biodiversity. But by the 1800s they had been pulled to the brink of extermination, and the Native Americans dependent on them suffered the loss of food, land, culture, spirituality, and connection.

On rural lands across the country, community leaders are doing the hard and slow work of “braiding together” Indigenous sovereignty movements and reparations initiatives, hoping to strengthen both coalitions.

Virtual Crisis Care Helps Rural Communities Access Mental Health Resources in Emergencies In rural counties where access to emergency mental health resources is limited, Virtual Crisis Care programs are giving law enforcement on-demand access to behavioral health professionals, reducing unnecessary hospitalizations or confinement in jail. Supported by the Helmsley Charitable Trust, Virtual Crisis Care has been active in South Dakota for over five years and adopted by more than 30 rural law enforcement departments.

On-demand access to mental health professionals offers law enforcement new resources to de-escalate crises.

‘We Saw This Coming’: Families Defend Disability Services Amid Medicaid Cuts This story was co-published with KFF Health News. Families of Idahoans with disabilities say their lives could be upended as lawmakers in the state’s Republican-dominated legislature mull sweeping cuts. Services at risk include the 24/7 care that allows a 39-year-old with cerebral palsy to live independently; the in-home caregiving that lets a 26-year-old with brain damage from a hemorrhage at birth stay in his family home; and private duty nursing for a 19-year-old with cerebral palsy who has qualified for hospice care for complications, including pulmonary decline from a spinal cord injury.

Idaho is positioning to slash Medicaid funding as state lawmakers grapple with the effects of the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last year. On the table are in-home care services.

45 Degrees North: Mud Season Mud season is not something Chambers of Commerce feature. Even those of us who love winter have cabin fever by now. Spring is still a ways off. Getting there is a slog. But we made it through the dark days before the winter solstice, and survived that long stretch of sub-zero temperatures in January. For weeks, the world has felt as precarious as the trip down an icy driveway to the mailbox across the road.

For rural people in the north, there's nothing like mud season to nurture persistence for when things get ugly.

Q&A: To This Rural Arts Leader, the ‘Audience is Everyone’  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. John Davis is giving ‘the arts’ a new name in rural Minnesota.

John Davis views art as a way to bridge gaps, spur economic prosperity, and solve problems in rural communities.

Free Union Seeks to Diversify Renewable Energy and Food Supply Chains This story was originally published by Resource Rural. When William Barber III looks across the vast farmscape of Piney Woods in the eastern floodplains of North Carolina, he sees more than fields and trees—he sees the deep roots of his ancestry, where free people of color thrived alongside members of the Croatan and Tuscarora Native Tribes. Known locally as Free Union, the Piney Woods community existed as a multiracial, economically independent, and free community long before the Civil War.

Free Union Farm will train local BIPOC farms on sustainable practices and renewable energy solutions.

Reimagining Rural Innovation: Part 2 Startup accelerators were born in urban innovation hubs. But the next wave of impact belongs to rural communities. Considering the local conditions are so often overlooked for rural settings by outsiders, the need for a rural-centered accelerator program that anchors startups around the true needs of rural communities seemed obvious and critical for advancing rural innovation. From this insight, AscendRural derived its guiding belief: Accelerators in rural areas may create the greatest impact when designed to broker pilot-ready partnerships that validate and scale solutions for rural communities.

What AscendRural is learning while designing a rural-centered accelerator.

As Data Centers Look to Rural New England, Maine Considers a Moratorium When local officials in rural Wiscasset, Maine, voted on November 4, 2025, to pause a data center discussion in the community of around 4,000 year-round residents, it may have been a sign of what’s to come. As the nationwide expansion of data centers arrives in New England, questions about electricity prices, grid reliability, and impact on water resources are forcing elected leaders to pump the brakes.

The bill’s advocates want answers about how data centers will affect energy costs in the region, which already has some of the country’s highest electricity prices.

Ancient Skies, Ancient Wisdom At first blush, the structures in New Mexico built by the Chacoan people and those in Ohio traced to the Hopewell culture bear little resemblance. The Chacoans, accommodating the arid desert of their home, constructed stone communal dwellings with apartments and kivas, or round gathering rooms. The Hopewellians, in their fertile midwestern fields, formed massive geometric earthworks for ceremonial or burial purposes.

Indigenous architecture from Ohio to the Four Corners region continues to awe researchers, revealing just how deeply these ancient cultures understood the rhythms of the cosmos.

Q&A: Megan Torgerson Is Reframing Rural Conversations 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. Megan Torgerson is the producer and host of…

The host of the award-winning documentary podcast Reframing Rural talks about her upbringing and storytelling goals.

Jesse Jackson (1941-2026)  Sometime in the spring of 1988 I got a call. I was then Executive Producer of Appalshop Films, part of a multi-media Appalachian cultural center here in Whitesburg, Kentucky. On the other end of the line was Anne Braden. Anne was a famous civil rights activist. Martin Luther King praised her in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail." When Anne was a Louisville Times reporter, she and her husband Carl were charged with sedition because they purchased a home for a Black family in a restricted white neighborhood.

Remembering his trip to Hazard, Kentucky.

“His & Hers” Lacks A Cohesive Tone, Leaving Its Small-Town Mystery in the Lurch Editor’s Note: A version of this story also appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox…

Netflix’s His & Hers is packed with twists and turns, but its attempt to juggle campy mystery mechanics with genuinely traumatic subject matter results in a jarringly confused tone.

 Craft Mentors Bring New Makers Into The Fold In The Appalachian Weaving Community In Kingsport, Tennessee, the Overmountain Weavers Guild hosted the final day of their intro to handweaving course. The course takes place each August, and in 2025 there were about 15 students, ranging in age from 12 to over 70. “I know from sitting here, that what you most want to do is go to your loom,” said Marita Schwartz, as she welcomed students to class.

 Craft Mentors Bring New Makers Into The Fold In The Appalachian Weaving Community

In Kingsport, Tennessee, the Overmountain Weavers Guild hosted the final day of their intro to handweaving course. The course takes place each August, and in 2025 there were about 15 students, ranging in age from 12…

A Rural Calling: Dalton Barrett “Don Julio.” “AT&T.” “Ruby Tuesday.” “Call of Duty.” These are among the stamps on small bags of street drugs that Dalton Barrett has recently gathered. “Frosted Flakes.” “Megamind.” “American Greed.” The “Monopoly” logo has been around for a year and a half now, Barrett said, but the ingredients within it have changed substantially. In fact, while most people may have a rough idea of what they’re purchasing within each of these packets, the full composition is far from certain.

The leader of the EMS Post Overdose Response Team in rural North Carolina is using innovative measures to fight the ever-changing street drug crisis in his community.

Dialysis Care in Rural America Limits Choice 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. For millions of rural residents, the nearest dialysis clinic lies outside their county – or is owned by DaVita, a for-profit company with a documented history of kickbacks to doctors and involuntary patient discharges.

Dialysis Care in Rural America Limits Choice

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. For millions of rural residents, the nearest dialysis clinic…

Ozarks Notebook: Reclaiming Local News Newspapers write the stories of small towns. For generations, their newsprint has informed locals of goings on – of major events, of their leaders’ activities, but also just of daily life. They also created a sense of connection in rural communities where people may live far apart. In relatively recent years, many Ozarks papers have been gobbled up by ownership groups.

A local paper in the Ozarks does “scrapbooking” of its county’s history for the generations to come.

Alabama’s ‘Pretty Cool’ Plan for Robots in Maternity Care Sparks Debate This story was originally published by KFF Health News. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, but Alabama officials’ plan to use robots to improve care for rural pregnant women and their babies is real. During a January White House roundtable touting the first grants to states under a new $50 billion rural health fund, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz called the idea “pretty cool.” Later that day, Sen.

Alabama, a state with one of the nation’s highest infant mortality rates, is betting on robots to help fix its maternal care crisis. But the state’s plan for telerobotic ultrasounds in rural areas has raised doubts.

Wyoming Wants To Make Five-Year Federal Rural Health Funding Last ‘Forever’ This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Wyoming officials say they have a plan to make five years of upcoming grants from a new $50 billion federal rural health program last “forever.” The state could tackle rural health issues long into the future by investing its awards from the Rural Health Transformation Program, the director of Wyoming’s health department, Stefan Johansson, told state lawmakers.

State officials believe they’ve found a way to extend the life of federal Rural Health Transformation Program money Wyoming is receiving as part of last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — by investing most of it.

Advocates, Economists Question Effects of Rural Health Transformation Fund In December, the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced his office would begin rolling out the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) funding, but rural health advocates are divided on what it will mean for rural communities. The RHTP funding aims to replace cuts from the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) passed on July 4 of 2025.

Many experts point out that the program was designed with “innovations and new ways of implementing rural healthcare” in mind, not preserving rural hospitals by offsetting cuts to Medicaid from One Big Beautiful Bill.

Reimagining Rural Innovation: Part 1 Rural innovation faces constant funding opportunity gaps. Rural businesses represent 12% of all U.S. firms but receive less than 1% of venture capital (VC), with more than half of all VC flowing to just five major metro areas. This isn’t just a venture capital problem. The pattern holds for federal dollars. Counties are more likely to receive federal funding when they have greater staff capacity and payroll spending.

Why rural communities need a different kind of innovation accelerator.

45 Degrees North: Voting While Female It's been very, very cold here at 45 degrees north. Cold enough to freeze water pipes, and then some. Once those pipes are frozen, people don't always make the best choices about how to thaw them. Sometimes their choices end up setting their home on fire. For those still trying to fathom why so many rural people voted for the current administration, try thinking of their situation like frozen pipes: They had problems.

In this era of performative politics, it's hard to know which legislative actions are credible threats and which are useful distractions. So let's be clear: This is one threat to act on now, while there's time to acquire needed documents.

Q&A: Journalist and Filmmaker Jon Bonfiglio In September 2025, my colleague Ilana Newman and I canoed 50 nautical miles down the Hudson River to spend time in and report on the environmental issues faced by the rural communities between Albany, New York, and New York, New York. Our trip was led by journalist and filmmaker Jon Bonfiglio. Jon has canoed down the same stretch of the Hudson River every summer for a decade.

The journalist and recent producer of Against the Current, a documentary film about the Hudson River Valley's history of music and activism, talks about his relationship with the region and the river.

Cuts to Childcare Grants Leave Rural Students in Limbo Major changes to a federal childcare grant program have forced student parents across the country to scramble for care in the middle of the academic year. The disruption has been felt by rural student parents acutely, where childcare options are already limited and losing access may push students to pause, or leave, their studies. More than a quarter of undergraduate students nationwide are raising children, and childcare shortages are disproportionately severe in…

Changes to a federal childcare grant program forced rural student parents to search for alternative support in the middle of the academic year.

Community Builds Keep the Cold Air Out Neighbors helping neighbors. In a nutshell, that’s one way to describe the WindowDressers build. It happens in school gyms, American Legion Halls, churches - any place where a few tables can be grouped together, and people who didn’t know they had rudimentary carpentry skills can construct insulating window inserts that keep cold air out and warmer air inside a home, where it belongs.

Started in a Maine church, WindowDressers relies on volunteer groups to build insulating window inserts for winter. These “community builds” cut costs and strengthen neighborhood ties.

End of Enhanced Obamacare Subsidies Puts Tribal Health Lifeline at Risk This story was originally published by KFF Health News. Leonard Bighorn said his mother tried for two years to get help for severe stomach pain through the limited health services available near her home on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana. After his mom finally saw a specialist in Glasgow, about an hour away, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, Bighorn said.

Tribal insurance programs give Native Americans access to affordable health care when the Indian Health Service falls short. Those plans are threatened by the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.