Two stories that are at least implicitly about the intersection of rurality with national politics caught my eye yesterday. One is about Byron Dorgan's plan not to run for a fourth term in the U.S. Senate. Dorgan is a Democrat from North Dakota, a state that is rural by many measures.
The other story is about the prospect that Harold Ford Jr., formerly a congressman from Tennessee, will challenge Kirsten Gillibrand for her seat in the U.S. Senate. When she was selected last year to replace Hillary Clinton as New York's junior senator, Gillibrand was pilloried for being folksy and a bit too closely aligned with positions popular in her upstate (rural) New York congressional district, e.g., opposing gun control. Read posts here and here. Today's story, however, suggests that Ford would be presented as an independent thinker and a conservative alternative to Gillibrand, who is now seen by some as being too closely aligned with the state's other U.S. Senator, Charles Schumer.
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