Most recently is this CNN story out of Nevada, where Trump recently appeared at a rally in Minden, population 3001, in the northwest part of the state, not far south of Reno. (This is not Trump's first appearance in Minden). The context you need for this excerpt from Dan Merica's story is that Adam Laxalt is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, challenging Catherine Cortez-Masto and Lombardo is challenging Demcrratic governor Steve Sisolak :
“We believe that rural Nevada is the key to turning our state back,” Laxalt said during a stop late last year in Winnemucca, a mining town of under 8,000 people in northern Humboldt County.
Nevada, which Trump lost twice, represents one of the biggest tests for Democratic power in the 2022 midterms. The party holds all but one statewide office in Nevada, and Democratic presidential nominees have carried the state in every election since 2008, buoyed by the strength of the late Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid’s so-called Reid Machine. But those Democratic margins have been declining and after closures around the coronavirus pandemic dramatically affected Nevada’s tourism-centric economy, Republicans see a strong chance to make gains in the state, hanging their hopes on Lombardo’s bid to unseat Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and Laxalt’s challenge to Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
A CNN poll released on Thursday found no clear leader in either race: Laxalt and Lombardo had the support of 48% of likely voters compared with 46% for Cortez Masto and Sisolak.
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The urbanization of Nevada has long allowed Democratic candidates in the state to run on one strategy: Run up the vote total around Las Vegas, win narrowly or at least stay competitive in the Reno area and lose big in rural Nevada. Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the Senate, followed this strategy in 2016 when she lost every Nevada county, except Clark, but still won a first term by over 2 points.
In recent years, that strategy paid even greater dividends as Washoe County, the second largest in the state, has tilted toward Democrats. Democratic presidential candidates have carried Washoe County in the last four presidential elections, while Sisolak and the state’s junior senator, Jacky Rosen, both won the county in 2018.
Another great piece is this commentary from Sarah Vowell of Montana, who writes of cross-party efforts to field and support candidates who can be successful against radical Republicans like Matt Rosendale, the Congressman from what was the state's only congressional district but who is now vying for the state's first district, which is the eastern part of the state. Here's the part of Vowell's commentary that touches on rurality:
Here in the western mountains where I live, the First District could be competitive for Democrats if the college towns and Indian reservations can outflank clumps of Trumpists and armed Christian separatists. But when I asked Dorothy Bradley — a Democratic icon since she got elected to the state legislature as a 23-year-old in 1970 — about the Second District, she replied point blank, “A Democrat can’t win in eastern Montana.”
She is, however, floating a Plan B. In April, Ms. Bradley invited to the Capitol in Helena her opponent in the 1992 gubernatorial race, Marc Racicot, the two-term governor and former chair of the Republican National Committee. In the contest for the House seat in the eastern district, they endorsed an independent, Gary Buchanan, who is running against Montana’s current at-large representative, Republican Matt Rosendale. The Bradley-Racicot endorsement was a singular milestone in Montana politics, as if the C.E.O.s of Pepsi and Coke called a truce to sell some Dr. Pepper.
President Biden’s plea to rational Republicans and independents to vote for Democrats in the midterms, as a ploy to root out authoritarian Republican extremists, could persuade the already persuadable. But winning the popular and electoral votes in 2020 does not change the fact that he lost in about 2,500 of the nation’s 3,000 or so counties. While the Republican Party spurns observable reality, the Democratic Party has alienated most of the continent (which is also unrealistic in a republic if governing is the goal). In landscapes where, as former Senator Conrad Burns described eastern Montana, there is “a lot of dirt between light bulbs,” defending pluralist democracy might require a pluralist task force. Realistic Democrats allying with Republican defectors and the unaffiliated to elect civic-minded independents could look like the bipartisan coalition backing Mr. Buchanan and an experiment south of here in Utah.
* * *
Mr. Buchanan oversaw “Build Montana,” a program focused on beefing up what’s now the economic pillar of tourism. He created the still ubiquitous “Made in Montana” label to promote homegrown products, a marketing ploy I fall for every time I face life’s jelly and jam dilemmas. Endangered fossil fuel towns might appreciate his experience with tough transitions. And his fealty to the right to privacy in the Montana Constitution, which guarantees abortion rights (for now), provides an alternative to Representative Rosendale’s rigid opposition.
Mr. Buchanan told me that when he’s out campaigning in the eastern district, he meets Montanans who have never heard of the category of independent, but they instantly see themselves in that word.
And here is a Huffpost piece about how a Democrat can survive in "Trump Country," and it is about U.S. Congressman Matt Cartwright, dateline Honesdale, Pennsylvania, population 4458. An excerpt follows:
Speaking at a Wayne County Democratic Committee meeting last Sunday, Rep. Matt Cartwright (D) denounced Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election — and his plans to appoint people who might meddle in future results — in no uncertain terms. He called them “undemocratic” and the “definition of wiping away [the] American right to vote.”
But to a woman in the crowd sporting a “Biden” baseball cap, Cartwright hadn’t gone far enough.
“Fascism! Fascism!” she interjected.
Rather than indulge her, Cartwright disarmed her and her fellow party activists with a joking rejoinder. “There’s that ‘f-word’ again!” he said, prompting laughs.The brief exchange was lighthearted — and in another context, it might be entirely insignificant.
But Cartwright, a five-term incumbent from the Scranton area, is no ordinary member of Congress.
The former trial lawyer is one of just four House Democrats currently representing districts where President Donald Trump won in both 2016 and 2020. Reps. Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Cheri Bustos of Illinois are not running for reelection. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine is seeking another term.
But unlike Cartwright, Golden was first elected in 2018, sparing him the ordeal of having to run down-ballot from Trump during the unexpectedly lopsided 2016 election cycle.
“Cartwright has obviously proven himself as a guy who can pass through fire,” acknowledged Mark Harris, a Pittsburgh-based Republican strategist who is not involved in Cartwright’s reelection battle.
Cartwright’s decision not to label Trump-inspired election denial as “fascism,” even in front of a loyal Democratic audience, speaks to his winning formula in a largely blue-collar and white corner of northeast Pennsylvania where his survival has defied a rightward shift.
“You don’t win anybody over with name-calling. Fascists were Nazis, OK?” Cartwright told HuffPost in an interview at a downtown Honesdale café following his remarks. “I don’t use inflammatory language.”
Lastly, there is this story out of Wisconsin by Henry Redman for the Wisconsin Examiner. The headline is
"Ahead of razor thin elections, are Democrats overlooking rural Wisconsin?" First some background from the story, where cities tend to be Democratic strongholds and rural areas are typically Republican strongholds.
In 2012, Barack Obama carried 35 counties on his way to winning Wisconsin with nearly 53% of the vote against Mitt Romney. In 2020, Joe Biden carried 14 counties on his way to winning the state with 49.6% of the vote against former President Donald Trump.
23 counties flipped from Obama to Trump from 2012 to 2016 and only two, Door and Sauk, flipped back to Biden in 2020.
And here's a bit about what is happening now in the run up to the midterms, in which the Republican candidate for governor is campaigning in Milwaukee, but Democrats running for statewide office (Mandela Barnes for the U.S. Senate and Tony Evers is seeking a second term as governor).
Democrats running and voting in rural parts of the state are questioning if the party will show up to fight for votes in the small communities across rural Wisconsin.
They see a party that failed to put a Democrat on the ballot in two congressional districts and a national party that they feel has written them off.
“The Democratic Party has abandoned us,” says Jayne Swiggum, a Democrat running to unseat Rep. Loren Oldenburg (R-Viroqua) in the state’s 96th Assembly District. “That makes those of us around here feel like, ‘Oh, apparently we aren’t important enough.’ You know, that flyover state feeling, that makes me mad. But yeah, I do think that the Democratic Party has forgotten us. It used to be the party of working people. It still wants to be but it’s not. It can be again. But truly it has forgotten us.”Jeff Spitzer-Resnick, an attorney who recently moved from Madison to Adams County, got so frustrated with the lack of outreach from Democrats to him and his new neighbors, he started paying to put ads supporting Democratic candidates in the local weekly ad mailer.
“It appears, for frankly no good reason, that the Democratic Party has written off rural Wisconsin, which is a horrible mistake,” he says. “A lot of Wisconsin counties are Obama-Trump counties. That means there are swing voters who can vote for candidates as opposite as Obama and Trump. In a purple state with razor thin margins, why wouldn’t you put as much into every part of the state?”
State Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) is running for the open seat in the state’s 3rd Congressional District. Made up of largely rural parts of Western Wisconsin, the district is one of the most closely contested in the country. Pfaff, the former secretary-designee of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, can’t afford to ignore the rural parts of the district in his race against Republican Derrick Van Orden, but he says he recognizes the way voters in these parts of the state have felt left out by the modern Democratic party.
“I will say this, I will never abandon rural America. I’m a Democrat, I was raised a Democrat, raised with rural, Democratic values,” Pfaff says. “We didn’t talk about partisan politics in the house. We just talked about things like hard work, dedication, resilience, and we were part of a community.
“But, you know, the Democratic Party needs more rural voices,” he adds. “And the national Democratic Party needs more rural voices, without a doubt.”
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