07/28/2026
I have a new op/ed in today's Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette criticizing mass media's lack of engagement in rural congressional elections and urging more national attention.
Again, the piece is behind a paywall, but I'm including an image of the published page and pasting the text below.
Please, take a moment to read.
__________
Pay Attention!
We matter and we’ve been ignored for too long.
A vote cast by a representative of NY-21 counts exactly as much on the floor of Congress as a vote cast by another representative from Manhattan or Brooklyn. One member, one vote, whether the district is a rural expanse the size of several New England states or a few square miles of Upper East Side real estate. And yet the coverage isn’t remotely proportional. Open any national news outlet’s political vertical during an election cycle and you’ll find deep, granular reporting on a handful of marquee races: the Senate contests, the presidential battlegrounds, the odd suburban swing seat that fits a tidy narrative... Districts like mine, the ones that stretch from dairy farms to former mill towns to Adirondack hamlets, get a paragraph if we’re lucky, usually filed under “can Democrats win back rural America,” as though we’re a case study rather than nearly 780,000 people trying to get through a tough political winter.
This is a decision made by taste-makers about where attention, and by extension resources, are allowed to flow. National coverage shapes national fundraising, which, in turn, shapes which campaigns can afford to buy ads, staff, and the basic infrastructure of a competitive race. When outlets decide a district isn’t “interesting” enough to cover with any depth, they’re helping determine whether that district’s candidates can compete… at all.
We are not a concept; we are actual people fighting for our political lives. I am watching this play out up close as chair of the Fort Edward, NY Democratic Committee. We are significantly outnumbered in voter registration; we are underfunded compared to a self-funded opponent; and still, by every account, this race is almost a dead heat because the people here are paying far closer attention than the national press seems to think we’re capable of doing. We are not a curiosity. We are a constituency, the same as any other, with the same capacity to be organized, persuaded, and mobilized, if anyone in the national media bothers to make the case for us.
There’s a deeper irony here. The same commentators who lament that Democrats have lost touch with rural America rarely assign a reporter to cover what’s happening in rural America’s competitive races while they’re happening. The story arrives after the fact, as an autopsy not as coverage. By then it’s too late to really matter.
So consider this commentary from one of the Forgotten Districts, written right now in the thick of a tight race. NY-21 is not a symbol of something abstract. No, we are an real place with actual candidates and what's up for grabs is a congressional seat with a vote that counts the same as every other vote in Washington D.C.… and this district is currently a battleground in a way that could tell you something real about where this country is headed.
Pay attention to us, not because we’re a metaphor for what’s wrong with the Democratic Party, and not because we make a nice feature once every four years. Pay attention because we matter in exactly the same mathematical sense that every other district matters. Ignoring us until Election Night is like reading the last page of a Willa Cather novel first.
Brian P. Katz is a retired English professor and chair of the Fort Edward Democratic Committee in Washington County, NY.
