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Why Rural America Isn’t a Lost Cause for Progressive Ideas [yesmagazine.org]

 

For the past seven years, Jess King has directed a business development nonprofit in her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She watched the community’s poverty rate climb to 30 percent over that time, well above that of the state’s two largest cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. She also saw how state and federal policy influenced the very real decisions of real people in her community, often in increasingly negative ways. Fed up, in 2016, she decided to run for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 16th District to try to reverse those trends.

“I started feeling like the work that I was doing was just a Band-Aid on a broken system,” King says. “It just really, really continued to hit me from a policy perspective.”

King is running a progressive, grassroots campaign in a district where Donald Trump won and incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker won 53 percent of the vote in the 2016 election. The mostly rural district is populated with Amish farmers, devout Mennonites, and people who mostly feel they’ve been left behind by national politicians from both parties.

[For more on this story by Ivy Brashear, go to http://www.yesmagazine.org/new...ssive-ideas-20180129]

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