Realignment in Middle America: Not Left or Right but Local

On a recent evening in Monrovia, Indiana, a crowd packed into the local coffee shop angry about a proposed data center. Before the meeting started I chatted with Mikey, whose family had lived in the area for generations. He told me he doesn’t like being involved in politics, but the coming data center is just “too much.”

The multi-generational crowd spanned the political spectrum. Raucous and lively, people talked over each other sharing strategies, research, and feelings of anger, betrayal, and fear. All aligned against the 500-acre Google campus that had been sited and decided without any community input.

After that meeting in Monrovia, we held a hearing on data centers at the Indiana Statehouse, where people from 40 mostly rural counties attended. Again, the political ideology in the room ran nearly the whole spectrum. But everyone agreed that we Hoosiers must have more say over the decisions that shape our lives.

I’ve been in a lot of rooms like this recently in small towns and rural areas that are reeling from stacked crises. People are animated against the forces that dropped down data centers and ripped out local hospitals. But, feeling unrepresented by either major party, they often have nowhere to go.

I run a grassroots independent organizing group in southern Indiana. For the past nine years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours in living rooms, church basements, and public meetings across small towns and working-class communities.

What we’ve found is not a deeply polarized electorate locked into red and blue camps, but communities where civic life has been hollowed out. The organizations that once made it possible for ordinary people to shape decisions are gone. City and county meetings are empty. Local media has collapsed. There are few groups to join. The only politics left is far away — loud, divisive, and not something we do together.

But now, people in the communities like the ones I organize in are rapidly re-entering public life, ready to roll up their sleeves and make an impact where they live. People are fed up. They don’t want a data center in their backyard. Grocery prices remain through the roof. Wages are stagnant. Housing options are terrible. AI is terrifying people. And loneliness is killing them.

The same story is playing out in towns losing their hospitals, with people being kicked off Medicaid, and in communities bracing for the next catastrophic storm. Across all of it, people are starting to look for a way to take back power locally.

Again, these fights aren’t partisan. Nearly half of Hoosiers now identify as independent — about the same as the 45% who now identify that way nationally. That’s a record high. Even in the recent Indiana primary, which drew national attention and significant money, turnout hovered around just 17 percent of eligible voters statewide.

This is not evidence of centrism so much as political homelessness. People feel unattached and unrepresented. Both Democrats and Republicans have spent decades nationalizing politics: centralizing strategy, messaging, and focus. A disconnected public is easier to mobilize in bursts and speak to through national narratives. State and local party leaders function as mouthpieces for these national political clubs rather than advocates for their own constituents.

In the process they have undermined one of the most essential components of democracy: that regular people have a place to shape what happens in their communities. A democracy where people have no real say on the ground cannot hold.

But in Indiana and across the country, people are being pulled back into public life by real material pressures: skyrocketing housing costs, failing healthcare systems, extreme weather, massive data centers, and brutal immigration enforcement.

Still, the difference between places is stark.

In Minnesota, where I organized for years, there is still a baseline of civic infrastructure — organizations, relationships, and places where people can come together and act. When pressure hits, there are places for people to go — as they did during the protests against ICE in Minneapolis. But in much of the country, including Indiana, that infrastructure has collapsed.

If we want a democratic future in Middle America, we need to rebuild the organizations, relationships, and public spaces where ordinary people can practice power together. We need to see regular people not as liabilities to manage, audiences to manipulate, or voters to mobilize, but as the democratic foundation of the country itself.