Opinion | Can This Ex-Republican Revive Democrats in Rural Ohio?

Chris Gibbs, a farmer who raises soybeans, corn and cattle, spent much of his adult life as a leader of the Republican Party in Shelby County, Ohio. He rose from vice chair of the local executive committee to party chairman, a role he served in for seven years, until 2015. Last fall he was elected to a far tougher job: chairman of the Democratic Party in Shelby County, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats more than eight to one.

The story of his political conversion offers a glimmer of hope to Democrats in otherwise inhospitable terrain and a possible path forward in places where the party has withered. His pitch? At a time when Republicans must fall in line behind Donald Trump, Democrats have the chance to rebrand themselves as the party of freedom, a concept valued by rural people everywhere.

In today’s Republican Party, “You either speak with a Trump voice or you’re vaporized,” Mr. Gibbs told me. We chatted on a recent evening in his garage in Maplewood, after we searched his pasture for newborn calves. (We found three.) “In the Democratic Party, everybody gets a voice. You don’t always get your way, but you get a voice.”

Mr. Gibbs, 65, long identified as a moderate Republican, of the sort Ohio used to be known for, in the era of Gov. John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman. He started to feel out of step with the party in 2014 as it turned against immigration. Nevertheless, in 2016 Mr. Gibbs voted for Mr. Trump, hoping for the best.

He quickly grew disillusioned by Mr. Trump’s lack of statesmanship. Then came the tariff war with China, which ate into the value of Mr. Gibbs’s soybean crop in 2018. He wrote a scathing opinion essay in a local paper that compared the American farmer to Stormy Daniels. Both had gotten “screwed” by Mr. Trump, he wrote, and been offered cash to keep their mouths shut.