"Meet the Press" takes up the Democrats' rural voter problem

Meet the Press ran this segment on May 1, 2022.  I'm pasting parts of the transcript below, with a focus on quantitative data revealing just how poorly Democrats have done recently at garnering the rural vote: 

CHUCK TODD:

Up next, in the last two decades, the number of rural counties won by the Democratic presidential candidate has fallen by a whopping 83%. 

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Taking a look at election results over the past few decades, it shows us a flashing warning sign for Democrats. The nation's urban/rural divide has deepened. Democrats have increasingly lost support in rural America.

In 1996, then-President Clinton, he won a whopping 1,117 counties, rural counties, including all but 20 of Iowa's 99 counties. Basically, he won half of the nation's rural counties. But in 2008, Barack Obama won less than half of that—just 455 rural counties—even though he had won a popular vote by seven points nationwide. That's all the rural counties he could win. Fast forward to 2020, the number shrunk again. Joe Biden won just 194 counties. That's just 17 percent of the total that Bill Clinton won in 1996. 

And the latest NBC News polling shows you that the problem has not gone away; it's gotten worse. Trust me. Terry McAuliffe in Virginia knows this. Yes, Democrats have an advantage in the urban areas, 24 points on the generic congressional ballot. But as you move out geographically, the Democratic numbers shrink and the Republican numbers grow and grow big time: 34 points right now. The number appears to be growing. For our current episode of Meet the Press Reports, I traveled to Iowa. I talked to voters about why the Democratic Party is simply hemorrhaging rural support.

What then follows is evidence of the nationalization, if you will, of the Democratic Party, including this conversation with Ruby Bodeker, who ran for a seat in the Iowa state house in 2020.  Bodeker lost.  

RUBY BODEKER:

They got annihilated in 2020—Democrats—did here in Iowa in the state races. 

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I feel like an exhausted rural Democrat. I'm tired. I feel like there's a lot of weight on me. Like, I honestly just want to be done a lot of days. I mean, I have four kids. I have a full-time job. I'm a single mom. I work. I don't even make $15 an hour, and I am tired.

There's more to the segment than is transcribed here, and it's worth a view in its entirety.