Are Democrats again crashing and burning in rural America?

Read this analysis from Elena Schneider and Catherine Boudreau for Politico.  An excerpt follows:

As Democratic presidential candidates descended on the Iowa State Fair, a plane buzzed overhead, an ominous warning fluttering behind it on a banner: “Focus on Rural America.” 

Democrats hoping to win the White House in 2020 recognize how critical that advice is after 2016, when Hillary Clinton turned in strong performances in many cities and suburbs but lost rural voters 2-to-1, falling short to President Donald Trump by slim margins in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats clawed back some gains in rural counties in the 2018 midterm elections, and they want to build on that momentum in 2020.

The story quotes Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, at length: 

There’s good reason to worry because the reality is this: There’s a fundamental values gap between the mainstream Democratic Party, which tends to be more socially liberal and cosmopolitan in its outlook, and rural and small-town voters.  Unless a candidate can build bridges across that gap on the basis of values, it’s very difficult to make any policy proposal matter. 

Right now, no one is building those bridges. [But' if you can move rural voters, even a few points, it becomes possible to win in states you can’t otherwise win.