Across the red-clay roads of North Texas, neighbors still wave from pickup windows and county-fair ribbons still hang proudly above kitchen tables. Yet we also see shuttered storefronts and anxious parents wondering whether the next medical bill or drought will be the one that breaks the budget. The Cooke County Democrats (CCD) are a small band of ten volunteers, but our commitment matches the grit of the ≈ 3,000 Democrats—and many independents—who call this county home. We fight for policies that honor the dignity of rural life while ensuring that every family, everywhere, gets a fair shot.
1. Universal, Rural-Proof Health Care
Texas leads the nation in rural hospital closures: 26 facilities have shut their doors since 2010, leaving thousands of square miles without an ER bed. When lawmakers in Austin and Washington debate cutting Medicaid or SNAP, they threaten not just budgets but the very survival of clinics, pharmacies, and ambulance services that keep our towns alive. One recent House proposal could strip health coverage from nearly 300,000 Texans, destabilizing the rural hospital network even further.
Cooke County Democrats backs:
- Medicaid expansion on day one. Accepting the federal match would cover 1.4 million uninsured Texans and pump an estimated $6 billion per year into rural health infrastructure.
- A “Homegrown Health Corps.” Offer tuition forgiveness to nurses, physicians, dentists, and mental-health professionals who serve at least five years in rural counties.
- Broadband-enabled telehealth parity. If LTE is good enough for commodity trading, it should be good enough for a cardiology consult.
- Universal coverage as the end goal. Whether called Medicare for All or a robust public option, the outcome must be simple: nobody in Cooke County skips care because of cost.
2. Keeping Texas Lands Working for Texans
In the last quarter-century, 3.7 million acres of working lands in Texas have been converted to non-agricultural uses, with 1.8 million lost in just the past five years. Land values have soared 55 % since 2017, pricing young producers out of the market. Cooke County Democrats believes farmland is a strategic asset, as critical to national security as energy or semiconductors.
Our plan:
- “Texas Family Farm Trust.” A revolving-loan fund that offers low-interest, long-term financing to first-generation farmers and ranchers who commit to stewarding the land.
- Tax incentives for conservation easements. Keep generational ranches intact while giving landowners liquidity.
- Right-to-Farm protection plus Right-to-Clean-Air and Water. Family operations shouldn’t be squeezed by industrial feedlots upstream, nor by suburban sprawl down the fence line.
3. Standing with Producers Through Crisis & Climate
When the 2024 Panhandle wildfires scorched more than 1.2 million acres and killed over 12,000 head of cattle, families lost livelihoods overnight. CCD will:
- Expand the Livestock Indemnity Program to cover fence replacement, hay reserves, and mental-health counseling.
- Fund drought-resilient forage research at land-grant universities, then bring that know-how to small county extension offices.
- Create a state “Climate-Smart Pivot” grant that lets farmers upgrade irrigation, adopt cover cropping, or install solar panels on barn roofs without mountains of paperwork.
4. Better Jobs, Better Pay—Here at Home
Cooke County’s median household income sits at ≈ $72,000, yet 10.9 % of families still live in poverty. That tells us wages lag behind rising costs of housing, fuel, and health insurance.
Our economic plank:
- Raise the minimum wage to at least $15, indexed for inflation. No Texan working full-time should live below the poverty line.
- Rebuild Main Street manufacturing. Offer tax credits for firms that create at least twenty living-wage jobs in counties under 100,000 population.
- Close the rural broadband gap by 2028. A fiber loop is the 21st-century railroad; without it, our kids export their talent to Dallas or Denver.
5. Freedom to Organize & Bargain
Texas’ “right-to-work” statutes have suppressed union membership to barely 4% of the workforce. Cooke County Democrats champions:
- Card-check recognition and first-contract arbitration.
- Portable benefit funds for gig and seasonal workers—ranch hands, oil-patch roustabouts, and substitute teachers alike—so health insurance isn’t tied to a single employer.
- Farm-worker Fairness Act, extending OSHA protections and collective-bargaining rights to the people who harvest our supper.
6. Education: Free, First-Class, and for Life
Great-grandparents built Cooke County college by college-night classes over at North Central Texas College; their heirs deserve no less. Cooke County Democrats will fight to:
- Guarantee tuition-free community college and trade-school certification for every Texan.
- Support universal pre-K so that small-town kids arrive in kindergarten ready to read and thrive.
- Boost teacher pay to the national median plus 10% rural differential; no educator should drive Uber on weekends to afford lesson supplies.
- Reinstate full funding for rural libraries, our county’s de-facto tech hubs and adult-learning centers.
7. Women’s Rights Are Human Rights
When Austin politicians banned nearly all abortions after 6 weeks, they didn’t repeal miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies; they just forced women to travel hundreds of miles for care or carry dangerous pregnancies to term. CCD demands:
- Restoration of Roe-level protections plus robust prenatal, maternity, and post-partum care in every county hospital.
- Equal Pay for Equal Work Act with enforcement teeth; Texas women still earn about 81 ¢ on the dollar.
- Universal paid family and medical leave, because bottle-calves aren’t the only newborns needing round-the-clock care in rural America.
8. Equality & Justice for All
We stand with every neighbor—Black, Latino, Native, Asian, LGBTQ+, disabled, immigrant—who meets discrimination at the school gate, job interview, or polling booth. Our agenda includes:
- Automatic voter registration and two full weeks of no-excuse early voting.
- Ending partisan gerrymanders that let politicians pick their voters instead of the reverse.
- Community-policing reforms focused on de-escalation and mental-health response teams, not military surplus for small-town departments.
9. Responsible Stewardship of Our Tax Dollars
Yes, we’re progressives—and yes, we believe in balanced books. Every program above is paired with concrete pay-fors:
- Close the carried-interest loophole for Wall Street partnerships.
- Reinstate the oil-and-gas severance tax floor last seen in 2014, channeling the revenue to county infrastructure and school bonds.
- End no-bid highway contracts that bleed rural coffers dry while adding tolls nobody asked for.
10. Call to Action: From Ten Voices to Ten Thousand
You may have been told that “Democrat” is a dirty word out here. We disagree. “Democrat” means believing the ranch kid in Era deserves the same pediatric specialist as a Highland Park heir. It means a Valley View teacher can buy groceries without checking payday-loan rates. It means saving the family farm for the seventh generation instead of watching it paved for a distribution warehouse.
Today we are ten volunteers with clipboards and corrugated-board signs; tomorrow we can be ten thousand ballots that tip a state House district, ten thousand letters that push a farm-bill amendment, ten thousand hands rebuilding a hospital wing. We invite you—Republican grandparents worried about prescription costs, independent truckers tired of broken bridges, first-time voters eager for climate action—to join us.
Here’s how:
- Sign up for our once-a-month e-newsletter.
- Donate $10 to fund voter-registration drives.
- Volunteer one Saturday to knock on doors or deliver yard signs.
- Share this platform with three friends and ask where they stand.
Rural Texas is not a political afterthought; it is the beating heart of the Lone Star State. Stand with the Cooke County Democrats, and let’s make sure that heart keeps pumping opportunity for everyone—no exceptions, no excuses.