NEW YORK — A Democratic group is rolling out a new $140 million ad campaign that aims to chip away at Donald Trump’s support among one of his most loyal voting blocs: rural voters.

The ads, from American Bridge 21st Century, will begin airing Monday in the northern battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They are aimed at swing voters in smaller media markets that are less saturated with political advertising and where they hope to reach people, especially women, who may be on the fence.

“We should compete everywhere,” said American Bridge co-founder Bradley Beychok, who said Democrats have too often shied away from rural counties as they have focused on turning out base voters in more urban and suburban areas. In the states that are likely to decide November’s election “Margins matter,” he said.

The ads, part of the group’s broader $200 million effort to defeat Trump, target exurban and rural areas like Erie, Johnstown and Altoona, Pennsylvania; Flint, Saginaw and Bay City, Michigan; and Wausau and Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

They feature testimonials from voters sharing their concerns about a second Trump term. The first round focuses on abortion rights and health care access. In one, a nurse who’s a mother and grandmother bemoans the overturning of Roe. v. Wade and highlights Trump’s own words on the issue. In another, an OB/GYN shares a heartbreaking story of having an abortion late in pregnancy after discovering the child she was carrying had a fatal abnormality.

Future ads will focus on issues like IVF and democracy and freedom as they try to help voters who are turned off by politics and may not be paying close attention to the election understand the stakes this November.

“People are afraid of Trump. And in some cases you have to remind them why,” said Beychok, who said first-person testimonials are the most effective way to reach voters, given the electorate’s broad distrust of politicians.

People “want to hear from voters that look like them, that have similar stories,” said Eva Kemp, the group’s vice president of campaigns. She said they spent years recruiting participants via door-to-door canvassing and other outreach, identified over 1,500 potential voices across the three states and interviewed hundreds.

They include Lori Cataldi, 57, a nurse who works for a local community hospital in central Pennsylvania and speaks in her ad about abortion rights. “If we reelect Trump, what are women going to lose next?” she asks.

She said she was contacted by the group after her husband wrote a letter to the editor that was published in their local paper and hopes her ad will catch the attention of other women who may be undecided or turned off by the current political climate.

“I’m hoping that it just touches people who might be frustrated, who might be tired of it all. I really hope that it resonates in a way that makes them take pause … and say, as tired as they are, ‘I really should look close at this,’” she said.

She called on voters to look past what she called “extraneous issues” like the candidates’ ages or their alleged crimes. “Women need to pay attention to what’s important to women. And I’m hoping that it speaks to other women who are just like me,” she said.

Trump’s dominance in rural countries has been critical to his success. Some 60% of voters who live in small towns or rural areas voted for Trump in 2020, versus 38% who voted for Biden, according to AP VoteCast.

That trend continued in this year’s Republican primary contests. In the early voting states, between 58% and 66% of voters from small towns or rural areas supported Trump, the data show. He was less popular among suburban and urban voters.

Swing voters represent a small sliver of the electorate, especially in a year when both major party candidates are so well known.

Related Articles

Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story

DFL disavows local endorsement of northwestern Minnesota candidate with assault conviction

Tax Day reveals a major split in how Joe Biden and Donald Trump would govern

Minnesota House OKs election bill allowing lawsuits over discrimination

Tuesday’s Wisconsin presidential primary clears the way for main event in November

But the Democratic group has identified several million swing voters it says fit into four broad categories of potentially persuadable voters: soft partisans, volatile voters who readily switch between parties, anti-MAGA conservatives turned off by the more extreme elements of the Republican Party, as well as “double doubters,” which is the name that has been given to voters this cycle who are turned off by both parties’ candidates.

Voters in those groups, they say, are predominantly women and from rural and exurban areas.

“Democrats should have learned by now that since Trump was elected in 2016, women have saved democracy election after election,” Beychok said.

Another ad features Susan Pryce, 74, a retired nurse who lives in Derry, Pennsylvania, and got involved with the project after she lent her neighbor a laptop to record a follow-up interview during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She offered a litany of reasons why she does not support Trump, from his comments maligning the late Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war, to his history of bragging about sexually abusing women.

“I feel like this is the most important election that I’ve ever voted in,” she said, choking up as she described her family’s extensive military history. Her father was a POW in Germany for 21 months during World War II and her husband is a disabled Vietnam War veteran.

“I want to honor everything that they sacrificed,” she said, and make sure “there’s a democracy for us here.”

“I want my grandchildren to know that a good leader seeks that office to serve, not for personal gain or personal power,” she went on. “I want them to know a good leader respects the Constitution — Constitution that all their relatives who served took an oath to … that no one is above the law. That every one of us, including the people at the very top, have to have respect for the rule of law,” she said.

She also voiced concern about women’s rights, describing how women once needed their father’s or husband’s permission to have certain medical procedures or to get a credit card.

“When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I just felt that I had suddenly become a second-class citizen,” she said. “I’m really worried that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that we’re going backwards.”

She said she lives in a rural area that’s very conservative, but noted a neighbor had recently put up a “BYEDON” sign, giving her hope.

“I really believe just from the last year, from interactions with people that there are more people that feel like I do but are just quiet and going about their lives,” she said. “We’re going to make our voices heard with our vote.”

Associated Press polls and surveys reporter Linley Sanders contributed to this report from Washington.

By WAFAA SHURAFA, JOSEPH KRAUSS and SAMY MAGDY (Associated Press)

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Aid workers are struggling to distribute dwindling food and other supplies to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by what Israel says is a limited operation in Rafah, as the two main crossings near the southern Gaza city remain closed.

The United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees said 360,000 Palestinians have fled Rafah over the past week, out of 1.3 million who were sheltering there before the operation began, most of whom had already fled fighting elsewhere over the course of the seven-month war between Israel and Hamas.

Israel has portrayed Rafah as the last stronghold of Hamas, brushing off warnings from the United States and other allies that any major operation there would be catastrophic for civilians. Hamas has meanwhile regrouped in some of the most devastated parts of Gaza that Israel had previously claimed to have cleared with heavy bombardment and ground operations. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Thirty-eight trucks of flour arrived through the Western Erez Crossing, a second access point to northern Gaza, Abeer Etefa, a spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Food Program, said Monday. Israel had announced the opening of the crossing on Sunday.

But no food has entered the two main crossings in southern Gaza for the past week.

The Rafah crossing into Egypt has been closed since Israeli troops seized it a week ago. Fighting in Rafah city has made it impossible for aid groups to access the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel, though Israel says it is allowing supply trucks to enter from its side.

For the past week, the Israeli military has intensified bombardment and other operations in Rafah, while ordering the population to evacuate from parts of the city. Israel insists it is a limited operation focused on rooting out tunnels and other militant infrastructure along the border with Egypt.

Israeli forces were also battling Palestinian militants in Zeitoun and the urban Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, areas where the army had launched major operations earlier in the war.

Etefa said WFP is distributing food from its remaining stocks in the areas of Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah further north to which many of those escaping Rafah have fled. Inside Rafah, only two organizations partnering with WFP were still able to distribute food, and no bakeries were operating in the city.

“The majority of distributions have stopped due to the evacuation orders, displacement, and running out of food,” she said. “The situation is becoming increasingly unsustainable.”

Almost the entire population of Gaza relies on humanitarian groups’ distribution of food and other supplies to survive. Amid Israeli restrictions and obstacles to aid distribution from violence, some 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza face catastrophic levels of hunger, on the brink of starvation, and a “full-blown famine” is taking place in the north, according to the U.N.

The director of the Kuwait Hospital, one of the last functioning medical centers in Rafah, said medical staff and residents living near the facility have been told to evacuate. Sohaib al-Hams warned that any evacuation of the hospital itself would have “catastrophic consequences.”

Israel has also ordered new evacuations in northern Gaza, even after hundreds of thousands of people fled in the opening weeks of the war.

Mahmoud Shalabi, the senior program manager for Medical Aid for Palestinians, a U.K.-based charity, said he was recently ordered to relocate from Beit Lahiya in the far north to Gaza City.

“I have left my house several times now, along with my parents, who are both older than 70, my three children and my wife,” he said. “The journey of terror and displacement is beyond words.”

Related Articles

Letters: Boorish behavior disrupts graduation, undermines support for the cause

Seth Greenland: Have we learned nothing? The protester’s taunt, ‘Go back to Poland,’ is grotesque

South Africa again requests emergency measures from world court to restrain Israel’s actions in Gaza

US says Israel’s use of US arms likely violated international law, but evidence is incomplete

Heavy fighting in Gaza’s Rafah keeps aid crossings closed and sends 110,000 civilians fleeing

The war began when Hamas and other terrorists stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking another 250 hostage. Terrorists still hold about 100 captives and the remains of more than 30 after most of the rest were released during a cease-fire last year.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its figures. Israel says it has killed over 13,000 militants, without providing evidence.

Israel marked an especially somber Memorial Day on Monday, with ceremonies across the country commemorating fallen soldiers, including the more than 600 killed since Oct. 7, most in the initial attack.

During the day’s opening ceremony at Mount Herzl cemetery on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed once again to defeat Hamas.

“We are determined to win this struggle. We exacted and will exact a high price from the enemy for their criminal acts. We will realize the goals of victory and at the center of them the return of all our hostages home,” he said.

At 11:00 A.M. on Monday, sirens announced two minutes of silence, and a formation of four fighter planes flew over Jerusalem and the surrounding areas.

Protesters and hecklers interrupted some of the ceremonies, reflecting growing discontent with the country’s leaders that has brought thousands of protesters into the streets in recent months. Critics blame Netanyahu for the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to happen and for the failure to reach a deal with Hamas to release the hostages.

Months of internationally mediated talks over a cease-fire and hostage release ground to an apparent standstill last week after Israel launched its incursion into Rafah. Israel has refused Hamas’ central demand for an end to the war and the withdrawal of its forces from the territory, saying that doing so would allow Hamas to regain control and launch more Oct. 7-style attacks.

Netanyahu has vowed to continue the offensive until Israel dismantles Hamas’ military and governing capabilities and returns all the hostages, goals that remain out of reach even after one of the deadliest and most destructive military onslaughts in recent history.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, which has provided crucial military and diplomatic support for the offensive, has expressed growing impatience, saying it won’t supply offensive arms for a full-scale Rafah assault.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Sunday that Israel could face an “enduring insurgency” if it doesn’t come up with a realistic plan for postwar governance in Gaza. Israel has rejected U.S. proposals for the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza with help from Arab states because those plans depend on progress toward the establishment of a Palestinian state, which Netanyahu opposes.

Krauss reported from Jerusalem and Magdy from Cairo. Associated Press writer Lee Keath in Cairo and Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem contributed.

The Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Minnesota Department of Transportation are unveiling six dual-language English-Ojibwe signs along Highway 61 later this week in far northeastern Minnesota, to mark river crossings and the reservation boundary.

Three of the river signs are outside the Grand Portage reservation, between the tribal community and the city of Grand Marais. It’s the first time MnDOT will post signs in an Indigenous language outside reservation boundaries.

An image of the new dual-language Ojibwe-English sign. (Courtesy of Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa)

“It’s definitely a positive first step in recognizing the connection that we have not just to reservation lands but throughout ceded territory,” said Erik Redix, Ojibwe language coordinator for the Grand Portage Band. “And that recognition really benefits not just Indian people, but it benefits everybody.”

A ceremony is planned for Thursday, May 16, at 11 a.m. for the unveiling of the first sign, at Manidoo-bimaadagaakowinii-ziibi, the Ojibwe name for the Devil Track River, just east of reference post 113.

Redix said the original indigenous language names often have a lot more meaning than the English versions. Take the Devil Track River. It’s Ojibwe name translates to “spirits going along on the ice.”

“And we don’t quite know unfortunately, we don’t have the oral tradition or the archival documents to figure out exactly, like in the case of Flute Reed, where that kind of English name came from.”

Other rivers where dual-language signs will be posted include the Reservation River, whose Ojibwe name is Mashkiigwagamaa, which translated means cranberry marsh lake. Wiisaakode, the Ojibwe name for the Brule River, means burnt wood.

About a decade ago MnDOT developed a Dakota and Ojibwe language signage program to develop dual-language signs on highways that traverse tribal lands, to help tribal communities in their efforts to revitalize Native languages and to inform travelers of original geographic place names.

Three years ago the agency posted 12 highway signs in northeastern Minnesota to mark the boundaries of the 1854 treaty, signed by the Grand Portage, Bois Forte and Fond du Lac Bands and the U.S. government. The bands retain rights to hunt, fish and gather within that ceded territory.

Most of the tribal communities in the state, including Fond du Lac, Grand Portage, Leech Lake, Lower Sioux, Mille Lacs, Red Lake and White Earth now have dual-language signs posted at their borders. Many also have signs at rivers within their reservation boundaries.

Some counties, including St. Louis and Cook, have also developed programs to place dual-language signs on county roads.

The Grand Portage Band hopes to eventually install signs along all rivers in the Band’s traditional territory, which extends down the North Shore of Lake Superior to near Two Harbors. Redix said it’s part of a broader effort to restore indigenous place names.

“That connection to older Indigenous knowledge that had been honed over decades and centuries and passed through families, and if we can bring a little bit of that back, I think that’s an effort worth doing.”

Related Articles

Open house for Riverview Corridor rapid bus, modern streetcar options on Tuesday

Uber, Lyft say they’d leave Minnesota under ‘compromise’ rideshare wage bill

Amtrak to add second daily train between Twin Cities and Chicago, via Milwaukee

St. Paul’s Union Depot to receive historic locomotive visitor on Final Spike Anniversary Steam Tour

Forest Lake intersection where students were struck slated for safety update