Tish Smith Burnett is a grandmother, a western Kansas farm wife, a frail 55-year-old with a debilitating illness — and lately something of a small-town villain.
It’s politics, she said. And how it’s talked about in and around her small town of Scott City, Kansas.
“I tried to get both sides to see the value in each other. And I got slammed by both sides.”
That includes relatives and friends she’s known for nearly half a century.
Making both sides mad might seem like quite a trick, she said.
But most Kansas farmers voted for Trump three times. And many are squeezed by tariffs and Trump’s Iran war. And Democrats, while their Kansas prospects aren’t assured, seem to be surging nationally.
Burnett’s experience is now common in the U.S., says Daniel Yudkin.
Most people don’t rage-flame other people, said Yudkin, a social scientist who has researched thousands of Americans about how they talk politics with each other. But enough succumb to make social media and family gatherings toxic.
A life-long Republican, (and former two-time Trump voter), Tish acquired critics first by posing polite but direct questions about Trump to red-inclined friends and relatives before and after the 2024 election. She also posted about immigration sweeps, saying that they are cruel and damage the farm economy.
“Bunch of dumb-ass people,” one Trump supporter wrote to her, after she touted an anti-roundup protest in Scott City. “They need to be deported too.”
And then in August, seeing a lot of blue-inclined people trashing Kansas farmers online (for supporting Trump), she publicly pleaded on Facebook with the blue folks to stop.
Both sides slapped her down.
“A cousin railed at me on Facebook,” Tish said.
“‘Get a life,” a Republican relative wrote. “No matter what Trump does in your life you think it’s wrong.”
“A relative told me I’m brainwashed,” Tish said. “People unfriended me. People no longer look at me in the grocery store — people I’ve known since fifth grade.”
The pushback comes at a time of growing disapproval of Trump’s policies, including in rural areas. Democrats aren’t riding high approval ratings either.
But two years into a second Trump-term they often supported, family farmers in Kansas feel increasingly on the brink.
Going into Tuesday’s election, I’ve spent nine months talking with rural Kansans. I asked why they’ve been voting how they have. And what they think now after the tariffs and the war. And how and why politics in rural Kansas has become so venomous.
Their tales could be depressing but Yudkin was not. His work and data have been featured in international news coverage; political parties have used his data to track voter motivations.
He’s trying to figure out how we could value each other more, and specifically what might encourage us to do so.
We’ll get to that.
We’ve become too tribal, he said. Less interested in discussion and facts, clinging too hard to calcified, predictable arguments that alienate some and bore others in what he calls “the exhausted majority.”
Two-thirds of Americans “are sick of the way politics is done.”
Some lean red, others lean blue. But they agree politics needs revision.
Yudkin has spent years studying how our narratives might be a key antidote. Not merely stories. But iconic tales that bind people into something larger than themselves.
Republicans and Democrats each have narratives, he says. But they can leave out 67% of Americans, who need their own narrative. He’s working to find it.
“We’ve got to find a way out of this tailspin,” he said. “All sorts of (social) indicators are flashing red.”
Getting what they voted for?
Farmers of all political stripes told me their challenges have accelerated since January 2025, and threaten to wipe out long-endangered family farms.
Farming itself will survive with consolidation, ag economists told me. But smaller farms, most of which survive year to year on marginal profits, bank loans and luck, could die.
It’s not just about Trump. Years of droughts and storms worsened conditions.
And we all suffer. Farmers’ challenges are also why inflation and grocery prices have risen for all.
Not that it brings much empathy for either side.
Some farmers I talked with bristle when they hear: They are getting what they voted for.
“Hey,” one said. “A lot of city people voted for Trump, too.”
The blame game obscures a bigger loss of small-town rural culture that’s accelerating.
Some farmers would not talk with me, politely saying goodbye. A few, just before they hung up, said that they hoped I’d get the word out about what’s happening to farming.
Some did talk.
“The small farmer, the family farmer, he’s got a bright red dot on his forehead right now,” said Vance Ehmke, who grows grain on 14,000 acres in western Kansas.
Former Kansas U.S. Senator Pat Roberts brought it up when I called him. “And we all lose,” he said.
In the year before Trump’s tariffs, Kansas lost 700 farms, while the U.S. lost 15,000. The Department of Agriculture is only now tallying what’s happened since.
Twenty-seven agriculture leaders, mostly Republicans, warned Trump and Congress. In February they warned that tariffs were prompting “the widespread collapse of American agriculture.”
“The policies of this administration have caused tremendous harm,” the ag leaders wrote.
Politics is supposed to solve problems. When one side suffers, their concerns get aired and a chance to be addressed.
But politics these days is often about attacking rather than accomplishments. Farmers and small, rural towns suffer in the meantime.
Days after ag leaders warned of “collapse,” the President attacked Iran. Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off supplies of oil, natural gas and fertilizer coming through.
Farmers gasped at the resulting sticker shock. Grocery, gas and diesel prices shot up. Kay Prather, whose husband farms in north-central Kansas, saw fertilizer double in price.
Bill Pannbacker in Washington County said diesel doubled and fertilizer jumped hundreds of dollars a ton.
Vance Ehmke said his fuel costs jumped from $25,000 last year to $50,000.
His fertilizer would have jumped from $50,000 to $100,000, but he and his wife Louise cut deals with livestock feed lots. They scooped up truckloads of free intestinal product to cover half their 14,000 acres.
Credit: Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle
What the neighbors think
Should Trump-supporting rural folk be blamed now for their suffering? Social media critics often savage them for their Trump votes.
So why did they vote for him? And what do they think now? Farmers gave a host of reasons: They didn’t trust Harris. Democrats have ignored them. Urban people belittle them.
Immigration policy had gotten crazy, especially under Biden. A businessman would boost the economy. They hate anything “woke.”
And Trump would have their backs by fending off threats such as Chinese piracy.
“The Chinese steal more than $600 billion (of intellectual property) from us every year,” said Erica York, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation who is based in Manhattan, Kansas.
But a trade war with China did little to help farmers.
Grain imports have been cut, costing Kansas farmers billions. Roberts and York worry that our market share will go — permanently — to Argentina, Brazil and elsewhere.
The government should go hard on China, York said.
“But tariffs are taxes on goods, so they raise prices and hurt trading partners. And partners retaliate.”
A coalition, not a cult
Republican voters, including many Trump voters, are “not a monolith, says Yudkin, the social scientist. “They are a coalition.”
He’s the director of More in Common, a nonprofit organization doing research to bridge political divides.
In a study, “Beyond Maga,” published this year, the group surveyed 10,000 Trump voters, and put them into four distinct groupings.
“MAGA hardliners” are strongly religious and are Trump’s “fiery core.” (They make up 29% of Republican voters)
Anti-woke conservatives: Don’t carry the same devotion, but “they hate anything woke, they regard it as the greater threat,” Yudkin said. (21%)
Main-line Republicans are mostly disinterested in politics, mistrustful of all politicians, but traditionally vote Republican. They care a good deal about two big Trump concerns: Border security and cultural stability. (30%)
Lastly, the “reluctant right” group voted Trump mostly transactionally rather than devotionally. Trump, they think, was “less bad” than Harris. (20%)
Given how diverse their beliefs are, Yudkin said, there is room for reasonable discussion rather than denunciation.
That’s the point Tish Smith Burnett says she tried to get across to blue voters recently.
“And they trashed me.”
Neighbors
Some farmers declined to be quoted because they worried “about what the neighbors might think about us talking.”
When I first heard that, I thought: What?
But then Tish described her blowback from speaking up.
“We get pulled farther and farther to opposite sides until we stop seeing human beings and start seeing enemies,” she wrote to her critics, on a recent Facebook post. “Somebody needs to be brave enough to start building the bridge.”
She’s hardly a firebrand: Soft voice. Six grandkids. Lifelong Christian. No college degree. A lifelong medical condition that can make her heart pound. Last month, she collapsed at home, and ended up unconscious before doctors stabilized her. This happened again two more times in October.
Tish worked for nonprofits, in foster care, for Head Start. She’s semi-retired, and married to a semi-retired farmer, Bryan Burnett. She’s not just a grandmother but a great-grandmother. Her condition, postural orthostatic tachycardia, can get her in quick trouble: The heart beats abnormally fast when a sufferer stands up. It’s kept her bedridden often in her 55 years.
Scott and Lane Counties, where she’s lived all her life, together voted 2,473 for Trump over 347 for Kamala Harris in 2024.
Credit: Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle
How to irritate people
What got her crossways with blue voters started in August, when she put up a long post on a popular private Facebook group, for Democrat women where only women can post, called “Be The Bear.”
“She instantly became one of my favorite posters,” said Rebecca Yoder-Shetler, the Bear’s founder and chief curator. “Smart, thoughtful and kind.”
“I’m writing this from Western Kansas, otherwise known as the Red Sea of politics,” Tish began, in her Aug. 18 post.
If people want to change rural voters’ minds, she wrote, “Screaming at them, calling them stupid or treating every Republican voter like a lost cause is not going to do it.
Responders, incensed, wrote back at her the same day. Lots of them.
“I get the sentiment. but at some point they need to grow up and start taking responsibility for their choices,” one critic wrote. “The constant placating of people who will almost never actually change is exhausting.”
“Hard to show someone understanding and respect when they have refused to show anything but vitriol toward anyone who doesn’t support Trump and Republicans,” wrote another.
Tish replied: “Not everyone has to build the bridge. But please don’t burn it down while some of us are still trying to get people across it.”
“A lot of Trump voters are good people,” she said later. “I know many.”
“You cannot approach a lifelong rural Republican sounding like the exact caricature of a Democrat they’ve been taught to distrust for decades and expect them to suddenly listen,” she wrote the critics. “Their defenses are up before you finish your first sentence. I’m saying find the issue they care about. Healthcare. Their farm. Their grocery bill. Their kids’ school. Social Security. Start with that.”
One changed mind
Here is how Tish ticked off her red-inclined neighbors.
It started during the pandemic. She got mad when she put her Mom in a nursing home, and then couldn’t visit — while people around her said COVID-19 was overblown and spurned masks and vaccines.
In 2016 and 2020, she and her family had voted for Trump. “I liked that Trump wasn’t a politician. And he could really speak.”
But in 2022, the Kansas Legislature put a constitutional amendment in the August primary about abortion. It went too far for her.
She thought the amendment would pass. But Kansans overwhelmingly voted against it.
In 2024, she refused to vote for Trump.
She also couldn’t vote for Harris.
She disliked Trump’s approach to immigration and tariffs during his first term.
Then came the second-term anti-immigration push — and tariffs and the Iran war. Bryan was renting out his 1,600 acres. His renters’ expenses jumped.
“Anyway, I started saying things to people. I started asking questions.”
People started giving her side-eye. The reaction was swift, and with many people abrupt, she said.
“Only a fool cannot see the true patriotism he is bringing to the forefront of politics,” one wrote.
“Are these truly your personal thoughts?” A relative wrote: “Over the past few months your negative narrative towards our currently seated president has been non stop. I’ve yet to see a single positive post.”
“The ire that comes out of some progressives. It’s a phenomenon. It grinds my gears to see what some commenters say about farmers. Posts that make me cringe: Farmers are dumb, farmers suck … screw farmers.” Rebecca Yoder-Shetler, Be the Bear’s founder and chief curator
‘Everybody is somebody’
The angry way we talk with each other has deeply upset former senator Roberts, who still thinks highly of Trump. It has led to the paralysis we see from Washington, and led also to the threats to family farms — and America’s small town culture.
This isn’t merely a farm thing.
“Urban voters need to pay attention,” he said. “Rural culture makes up the best part of the American soul. Now it’s dying on the vine. And we all lose.”
Shrugging at that outcome would be stupid, he said.
“Everybody is somebody in a small town. You’re outdoors a lot. Teachers can pay attention to you. Everybody knows you, takes care of you.
“And you can actually see what you’re creating — that there’s purpose to it.”
Yoder-Shetler, that Democrat activist, lives on a dirt road outside Hutchinson.
She knows nasty politics, from both the red and blue devotees.
She’s lived on her family’s 5-acre farm for 10 years, and made herself well-known.
She’s been stalked. Approached aggressively. Her campaign signs taken or run over. But she’s also repulsed by the way Democrats talk about farmers who voted for Trump.
She founded the popular Be The Bear to support Kamala Harris weeks before the 2024 election. It’s for Democrat women only, has 37,000 followers and is organizing get-out-the-vote efforts.
She lives with her husband and children on five acres near Hutchinson, with goats and other creatures. Raised a farm girl.
“The ire that comes out of some progressives. It’s a phenomenon. It grinds my gears to see what some commenters say about farmers. Posts that make me cringe: Farmers are dumb, farmers suck … screw farmers.”
She believes farmers have voted against their own interests in supporting Trump. But Democrats lose by gloating.
She has kicked many farmer-bashers off the Bear. Kept ranters off entirely. “I can be ruthless about that.”
“I’ve even had urban women write in a condescending way about me: ‘Why does an agricultural woman who lives on a dirt road run this forum? You’re rural, you don’t know anything, you should turn the forum over to an urban person who knows how to organize.’”
She hates all of it — the venom, the cruelty. Even though this year her campaign signs have stayed standing.
Leaving the door unlocked
Deep into the backlash comments of August, feeling frustrated, Tish confessed to Bear commenters.
She despises much of what Trump has done. But: “I’m still a registered Republican voter.”
She asked the group to leave the door unlocked for people to change their beliefs.
“Because somebody left that door unlocked for me.”
“I voted for Trump twice, in 2016 and 2020,” she told me. “My husband was pro-Trump. My church was pro-Trump. A church elder stood up before elections and told us who to vote for. My church had a lot of influence on me, good or bad, but when I found my faith at last, I held onto church real tight. That was my new identity.”
She shifted publicly last year.
Her critics kept-trash talking her rural neighbors anyway.
Stubborn thinking is ruining relationships and politics, she said.
Congress may be dysfunctional because our culture is too, Yudkin believes. And unnecessarily so, he said, based on what thousands of Republicans, independents and Democrats have said in surveys.
He posed the following statement to Americans, and asked whether they agreed:
America should be built on a deal of rights and responsibilities. The country should guarantee its citizens what they need to live up to their full potential: education, opportunity, and dignity. People in turn have a responsibility to use that potential to improve themselves and give back to their country and community.
Eighty-three of the Democrats agreed. So did 81% of independent voters.
And 77% of the Republicans also agreed. We’re not nearly as far apart as many of us think, Yudkin said. Thousands of opposing Americans “don’t have a solid grasp of what their political opponents actually think.”
Respondents also want change: 80% of Americans do not believe politicians care about people like them. And 85% think politics needs significant reforms.
If so many of us feel left out by division, what might work instead?
“There’s no silver bullet,” out of the doom loop, he said.
Reforms of government institutions, like the Electoral College, voting procedures and gerrymandering, might help. And finding a way to amplify moderate voices on social media.
But Yudkin is more interested in bottom-up reform. Some community-centered efforts are working “to stitch our country back together.”
Meanwhile, he and his collaborators are crafting a new narrative called “potentialism, based on the simple idea that everyone has a gift and a responsibility to share it.”
The idea is that if we have a compelling narrative, we’ll argue less and work together more.
We’ll become less estranged.
We can’t ever give up on people, Tish Smith Burnett said.
Tish is learning how to make do with fewer friends and relatives to talk with. So far, so good, she said. She’s adjusting, and seeing relationship dynamics with different eyes.
“People say mean things about me.
“But I’ll give them grace.”
This story previously appeared on The Journal.
Copyright 2026 High Plains Public Radio.
