Missouri as a "largely rural" state

Just a quarter of Missouri's population live in "rural" areas as defined by the Census Bureau, but according to this New York Times story about Senator Claire McCaskill's re-election bid, it's a "largely rural state."  Here's the full paragraph:

In a largely rural state that’s trended increasingly red as conservative voters abandoned the Democratic Party — President Trump won here by 19 points in 2016 — being labeled “out of touch” is something Ms. McCaskill can ill afford, particularly with a vote looming on whether to confirm Mr. Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominee, Brett M. Kavanaugh. 

Polls show Ms. McCaskill in a statistical tie with Mr. Hawley in a race Republicans view as one of their best opportunities to pick up a Democratic seat.

Earlier in the story, Stephanie Saul notes that McCaskill, now rich thanks to a marriage to a St. Louis real-estate developer, has "come a long way from the McCaskill & Son feed mill her family once operated in the southern part of the state," Rolla to be specific.  Her opponent, Republican Josh Hawley, is Stanford- and Yale-educated. Nevertheless, Saul asserts that he fits in better in the rural parts of the state, like the so-called bootheel (the story's dateline is Portageville), because he wears jeans and cowboy boots.  (The bootheel is not only rural, but also notoriously poor; read more here, here and here).  I note that Hawley's webpage says he grew up in Lexington, Missouri, in "rural Lafayette County," but that's more precisely exurban Kansas City, where he attended a private high school.  Lafayette County is part of the Kansas City Metropolitan Statistical area. 

Though Saul seems to give the rural nod to Hawley, McCaskill has at times successfully played  the downhome card: 

In past elections, she has been able to pick off rural and Republican votes with her image as a common-sense Missourian, tough on law and order as a county prosecutor and tough on public expenditures as state auditor. She has frequently invoked the populist Missourian Harry S. Truman and emphasized her moderate voting record and her small-town Missouri roots, endearing herself to Missourians with brash talk, sometimes off message — once telling Tim Russert that she didn’t want her daughters around Bill Clinton.

McCaskill also survived a tough re-election bid in 2012.