Straddling The Political Divide, This Rancher Says There’s A Way To Bridge It

On a recent grey and drizzly morning, cattle rancher Shelley Proffitt welcomed us to her family farm in rural Kings Mountain, N.C. We piled into her pick-up and rode along for the last of her day’s chores, watching her toss fistfuls of hay across a field for her cattle. We had come to visit Proffitt, a 47-year-old registered independent as part of NPR’s election series Where Voters Are. Her countryside community, like many rural communities across America, has voted differently from its neighboring big city of Charlotte in recent years, and we wanted to understand what has driven that chasm.