Strengthening democracy requires bridging the rural-urban divide. Polarization isn’t just ideological. It’s geographic. Urban and rural communities are deeply divided on a host of policy issues and partisanship, both in the US and globally. While these divides are deep, they are not natural – data shows that geographic polarization only materialized in the 1990s and deepened in the last generation. This suggests that while troubling, the divide isn’t necessarily permanent. Join Notre Dame’s Democracy Initiative and a convening of over 100 senior scholars, elected officials, political party leaders, and public policy practitioners from democracy and urban/rural think tanks, associations, and nonprofits on the topic “What can depolarize rural/urban politics?”