Maxed Out is our weekly column spotlighting some of our favorite women in media and their favorite corners of the internet.

Natalie Fertig wasn’t exactly planning to strike out on her own after taking a buyout at Politico in May. She was a state politics reporter there for nearly seven years before she saw the writing on the wall that Politico was doing a huge reorg and knew that it was time to go. What she thought was going to be a frustrating job search turned into something more hopeful — and a lot more promising.

Natalie ended up starting a Substack after Politico called Out of State, where she could cover the rural politics beat on her own terms. The project turned out to be just the morale boost she needed after years of pitching stories on this beat with only modest success.

So far, she’s racked up several hundred loyal subscribers to her Substack who read her weekly dispatches and boots-on-the-ground reporting on America’s heartland, which is brimming with big developments as the midterms come into view. One of the biggest stories Natalie’s covered so far was about a small Pennsylvania town where residents stood up to their local politicians to block the development of a data center. The fight against data centers has been happening everywhere, but in rural America it’s become emblematic of a larger shift in how some voters are thinking about political power — one that could have an effect on this year’s midterms.

In that sense, Natalie has a unique vantage point on what rural voters in some politically consequential parts of the country are thinking and feeling heading into November. For this week’s Maxed Out, Natalie talked about some of the things she’s hearing on the ground, going the independent route and what she’s reading on the internet.

What led you to break into independent life and to leave Politico?

Well, I would not say that it was the timing I was looking for to be venturing out on my own thing, but it was the timing that life gave me. So when it became clear that Politico was reorganizing and that I would be one of the people that would be encouraged to take a buyout because of the role that I was in, I started telling people, "Hey, if this happens, I think my silver lining on this — of leaving a job that is reliable and gives me health care and all of the nice things that come with being a staffer — is going to be that I'm going to run after that thing I've always wanted to report on, which is rural voters and rural people." I'm freelancing a story right now for another publication that I was looking into eight or nine years ago before I went to Politico. Rural people were always a topic that I held close to my heart, being from rural America, and so I just said, "Hey, while I'm searching for a new job, however long that takes, I'm going to try to write stories on that topic and launch a newsletter."

And frankly, when I launched the newsletter, I thought maybe 50 people would subscribe to it. This type of reporting does not often get a lot of focus and a lot of attention in newsrooms. The number of stories I've pitched that were specifically focused on rural Americans over the last decade is very high, and the number that I actually got greenlit is very low. So I think in some ways — I hate to use the word gaslit, but — I was kind of gaslit into thinking that I was the only person that cared. And then I launched the newsletter. I've been going for two months, and I have almost 500 subscribers. I don't know that 500 subscribers is a runaway success, but it is more than I expected to get.

That’s interesting to hear that you weren't getting as many of those stories greenlit at your old job, but there's clearly an appetite for this kind of coverage. Why were you drawn to this beat?

I'm from what we would call “close-in” rural, which means you're rural, but you're close to the city. So I don't drive an hour to a hospital; it's half an hour. The grocery store is 12 minutes away, which I've been told by my city friends is crazy. But for me, that felt pretty close. But culturally, I grew up rural, and being around those types of people makes me happy. I just like being around them. But also, the entire reason I got into journalism was because I felt like nobody cared about us. We were close to Portland, Oregon — even though I grew up in Washington state, Portland was the largest metropolitan area, so that was the TV news we had — and all of the news was always just things happening in Portland, happening in New York City, happening in D.C. or L.A., and it never felt like it was about anything that was happening in my community. And I left not because I didn't like my community, but because I wanted to actually go see those things in person. And I felt like we didn't matter. Presidential candidates didn't come to us because we were a red dot in a blue state, so no one cared.

That's kind of where I'm coming from when I go into any of these communities. I was in Pennsylvania last week, and I'm not from Pennsylvania, but I can walk into that town, and when they talk about feeling unheard or feeling left behind, I know that feeling. And I'm not saying rural people at all are the only people who experience it. I think there's a lot of people in a lot of different places who experience it, but I know their specific sort of — me and my friends jokingly call it "rural rage." It's just this underlying simmer of feeling betrayed by everybody who's not rural — by the cities, by the state governments, by the federal government, by corporations, by utilities. I still go home to my parents' house, which again is not that far away, and this video call that you and I are doing right now would be cutting out every 30 seconds, because rural broadband is still a really serious problem. People in rural areas do not have access to the same basic internet services that you do if you live in a suburb or a city, and we've been talking about it for a decade, and it's still bad. That is the kind of thing that I wanted to be able to highlight. Living in D.C. and working for a wide range of news organizations … I can speak urban East Coast now. I couldn't a decade ago. So I now have the training to explain rural issues and why they should actually matter to people in positions of power that I didn't when I really wanted to start doing this eight years ago, and I think that's honestly the main difference.

From the people that you've spoken to so far in the rural areas that you've covered, what are people saying about how they're feeling about the midterms? 

It's a good question. I think something that everyone needs to understand about rural people is that their baseline is different from a lot of people that I talk to in suburban and urban areas, and that is a baseline of skepticism and frustration with all of the parties and all of the systems. I think that feeling is growing across the board, not just in rural areas. But even when I was a kid, back in the '90s, that's how rural America felt about politics. And so a lot of times, the choices they're making, they view as the better of two evils. 

I think Donald Trump making people really excited in 2016 was unique, and that's why he won. He was able to go into rural areas and make people think that he was talking about them. I can still point out certain things he said. Everyone made fun of him talking about raking the forest, but if you grow up in a heavily forested area, you know that clearing out underbrush is incredibly important to wildfires. So there's a whole group of people out there who heard him say that, and while D.C. and New York were joking about it, they felt heard in a way that those communities don't usually feel heard. So I would say the excitement around Trump was that they actually felt like someone came and talked to them.

But this election, it's the opposite. It's gone from the baseline of frustration and "no one really cares about us" to actively opposing, almost. When I was talking to folks about data centers — I think data centers are a really, really good example of this — I think it's empowering rural people to start to feel like they can fight the system. Instead of looking at a political world in which it was always a race to the bottom between the two parties for who's going to pass a couple policies that might help rural people sort of get by a little bit, it's become "nobody's going to pass any of those policies, and we need to take things into our hands ourselves." More people are registering as independents. More people are leaving behind their personal feelings of being a Republican or a Democrat. I'm hearing it from both sides. I think Republicans definitely are on a deeper hit list for rural folks in this election, but I was hearing it about Democrats in the last election, and it could totally flip back the other way in the next election if Democrats take power in Congress and don't make rural people's lives better. So it is similarly frustrated, but it is uniquely combative about that frustration in a way that I haven't [seen]. I think rural people are waking up and being like, "We can do something about this, and maybe we should."

I was reading your story about that Pennsylvania town that blocked the construction of a data center in their neighborhood, and I'm curious what you think about the whole data center debate, because I feel like that could be something that could sway the midterms quite a bit. How important do you think that is going into November, and how could it influence rural voters to potentially lean Democrat?

Well, one thing to remember about places like rural Pennsylvania is that a lot of these places used to be Democrat. Clinton won [about half] of rural counties in America in the '90s. These places are not decades-long Republican. They just felt betrayed by the Democratic Party. They felt like Democrats sided with environmental policies, or sided with the big banks during the Obama administration, or sided with someone who wasn't them. So that, I think, is important to remember in the context of what happens in this election.

The polling is showing — you talk to folks, it's showing — that rural voters are starting to swing [away from Republicans]. I think if we had a system that was not so entrenched in two parties, these people would be genuinely ready to just vote for something else, a third thing. We're seeing it in places like Nebraska, where there is an independent who's ready and who may win. And in Montana, if things had gone differently with the Democratic candidate there, there was an independent running for Senate who may have won. [Rural people] just also — as farmers, as people who work the land, as people who work in forests — are consistently aware of how voting or not voting deeply impacts their everyday lives. So they keep voting, but they're looking for something different, honestly.

What are some other big issues that you've been hearing from the community?

I think one of the biggest — and data centers actually kind of ties into this — is just economic populism. I've been surprised at the number of people in rural areas who've talked to me about antitrust. They're like, "Break up the corporations." It's not just AI. They're like, "We don't have a local hardware store anymore because everyone goes to Walmart," or "We don't have a local gas station" — the guy that used to own the local gas station now just works at it because it's owned by Shell or BP. And that is really frustrating to a lot of [people]. Health care ties into this as well — big health care companies, kind of venture capital health care, that come in and take apart a lot of rural hospitals. I'm not exactly sure yet where it will lead, but it is this other groundswell that I'm starting to hear from people all across the country. I'm going to Iowa right now. I was talking to farmers last week, and they were complaining to me about corporate [agriculture]. So whatever world you're in, there's a corporation that you feel like is making way more money than it needs to, and you can't get by.

And I know people in cities also feel like this, but I think for folks in rural communities, when your hospital closes, there's not another one. And if the local gas station closes, now you're driving 25 minutes, 30 minutes to get gas. It's more visceral, in your face. So honestly, I think the party that can lean into the antitrust stuff and the breaking up of corporations — let's be clear, both parties have their corporations. They're different policies and different industries, but Republicans are for this corporate section, and Democrats are for this corporate section, and rural people just don't like any of it. That's the overall theme.

I was talking to Mike Madrid, who is a Republican Latino strategist based in California, and I want to quote him because I keep repeating this: He called data centers "the tip of the spear." He was talking in the context of rural Latino voters, but I think it's for all rural voters. This is the thing that they can change, that they are actually having success fighting right now, in a decades-long frustration against big energy companies and big ag companies that come in and buy up all the small farms, and free trade that took jobs out of the country — all this stuff that felt like it was happening so much higher above them, and they couldn't do anything about it. They can actually do something about data centers. So it's all part of this complete breakfast, to quote a '90s commercial.

Out of all the stories that you have written, including ones for Out of State, what are some that stand out most to you?

That's tough. I'm going to pick two. In my cannabis coverage, I did a lot of work in Southern Oregon and Northern California, which were the areas of America that traditionally had these big cannabis industries. The very first thing I wrote for Politico, before I was even on staff there, I wrote for the magazine, and I spent a week in Garberville, California. It had been a hub of unlicensed cannabis activity. FBI raids in the '70s, that kind of thing. And I spent time with a bunch of people who were second- and third-generation weed farmers. The number of people who broke down crying to me in those interviews — I can still feel how I felt so powerless. I was like, "I can tell your story. I don't know if it'll do anything." Legalization completely changed the economics of the industry. Everyone went out of business. Garberville was boarded-up buildings. The beautiful, wonderful, lovely community that they had was essentially just eviscerated. And it's the same story that's happened all around rural America, but in coal towns and timber towns. I've had the same conversations in timber country in Oregon, in coal country in Pennsylvania, and it's just these communities saying, "Once upon a time, we had this beautiful way of life, and now it's gone."

[And after my data center story], I was talking to one of my friends about this — I was like, "This experience felt so different to me, and I don't know why." I realized that it was because [the people I talked to] were happy. I'm not used to walking into rural America and having optimistic, happy people.

[In Pennsylvania,] they ran up to me and they were like, "No, come in. We want to talk to you." It wasn't them being standoffish. They were so happy, and they were still rural people. There were still a lot of things that were culturally similar. But I realized that I hadn't seen people with hope. Even though they were like, "Screw all the political parties, we're re-registering as independents, we don't trust Republicans or Democrats," they suddenly actually felt like there was something in the world that they could do that would make their lives better. And I realized that in eight years of going into rural communities, I had not experienced that before. Optimistic, hopeful rural people. I didn't realize it was an oxymoron until I was presented with it, and then I realized how rare it is that I have seen them.

I know that you used to work at McClatchy as well, which went through a pretty big round of layoffs a couple weeks ago. How detrimental is it to people who live in rural areas like this, where that might have been their only voice to amplify what's going on in their communities?

Personally, I think it's one of the biggest crises in America today. I think it's not just detrimental to rural people; I think it's detrimental to the entire democratic system. The reason the U.S. Postal Service exists is because people in the frontiers of America wanted newspapers to be delivered to them so that they would be informed voters. Ultimately, the way that I view my job is that I'm here to create an informed electorate. And if there is not news that is relevant to people's lives, the only thing they are getting is talking points. It's not useful to every community to just have the big talking points that are going to be printed in the New York Times or the Washington Post about the One Big Beautiful Bill. You need that big picture, but the Washington Post isn't going to go in and be like, "Omaha, Nebraska, is going to lose three hospitals," or "Vancouver, Washington, is going to get $3 billion to build a bridge." They don't get into the nitty-gritty of how it actually impacts everyday people. That's local news's job.

Those skills that a journalist [has] — I think we still need those at the local level. I think [7%] of [newspaper employees] in America work for the New York Times now, and the New York Times is fantastic. But unless the New York Times is going to stand up a network of local news with people based in 50 states, I don't know how they cover America the way that America needs to be covered, especially rural communities.

Now we get into the Maxed Out part of the interview! What's your daily average screen time on your phone? And, open-ended, what do you like to read, watch and listen to?

Oh my God, my screen time is so bad. If I'm in a seven-hour thing, I feel good. I have ADHD — I got diagnosed with it at 37, that classic, high-performing women with ADHD who never get diagnosed. So I am a perennial doomscroller. I have put limits on my phone to try to keep me from doing that. Someone in one of your newsletters was like, "I do five hours." I was like, "In what world? That's crazy." If I can get under eight, I feel good about myself.

What am I reading? I really like fantasy and dystopian novels. [I'm] finishing up the 'Red Rising' series, which is like 'Hunger Games,' but not YA — it's fully adult, and it's super, super good. It was also really weird reading it while I've been traveling around to rural communities who are fighting data centers. I highly recommend it for folks who like dystopian novels. It's really well written.

Podcasts — I'm a rural kid, so we're the musical theater kid, but we're also a jock. When 'High School Musical' came out, I was like, "Why is that weird? That's normal." So I am a jock, and I really like 'Scuffed,' which is a soccer podcast. I like it just to check out and think about something that's totally different. For news, I'm your classic BBC World Service, NPR 'Up First' kind of girl. I'll pick and choose my New York Times 'The Daily' and Vox podcasts depending on the subject. And I also just really like nerdy history podcasts when I have the time or I'm on a long drive. Oh, and forever and ever and ever, '99% Invisible' is the greatest podcast of all time. I still have not finished all of the episodes. I save them for long, hard drives through rural America, and every single one of them is interesting, and I love it.

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