New insights into the rural vote?

Christian Paz reported last week in Vox under the headline, "Democrats have a huge opportunity to win back rural voters."  Here's an excerpt: 

[A]s the 2024 campaign map begins to take shape, Democratic candidates, the state and national parties, and their outside partners will have to make a choice about how seriously to invest in outreach and persuasion operations in these communities. Democrats have long struggled in rural communities, but their decline in support has only accelerated in recent years, cementing the idea for many that the party caters to highly educated and primarily urban voters. That narrative has only entrenched itself since the ’90s, when former President Bill Clinton essentially split rural voters with his Republican opponents in his two presidential campaigns and won over 1,100 rural counties in 1996. Since then, Democratic presidential candidates have endured dramatic losses in rural areas: in 2008, Barack Obama won 455 rural counties; in 2020, Joe Biden won only 194.

That crumbling of rural support has led some in the party to write off this section of voters entirely. Biden’s 2020 victory is illustrative of this dynamic: He won the presidency despite winning just 33 percent of rural voters. (Trump won 65 percent, up from the 59 percent he won in 2016.)

But the 2022 midterms reversed that slide.

If Democrats decide to take these communities more seriously this cycle, activists, strategists, and former candidates say the party stands to shore up its margins in battleground states and make up for any possible loss in support from the suburbs. If candidates and their campaigns show up and work with the right local partners, they might have a better chance of replicating some of the rural progress they made in 2022. 

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The brightest spots for Democrats came in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Gov. Josh Shapiro, respectively, improved on Biden’s performance in rural counties by 10 and 15 percentage points. Candidates like Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) improved by more than 6 points — and even candidates who lost, like former Rep. Tim Ryan in Ohio’s Senate race, still improved on Biden’s numbers (winning 4 percent more support from these counties).

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Until 2022, it seemed to many rural Democrats and progressive activists that the Democratic Party leadership was content to abandon these communities to Republican dominance. Especially after Trump’s rural dominance in 2020, the narrative that Democrats had given up competing beyond the suburbs had solidified among many in the party. Rural Democratic politicians, like [former Montana governor Steve] Bullock, who lost a Senate election in 2020, were beginning to sound the alarm ahead of the midterms.

Now, however, Bullock is more optimistic:  

We have a long way to go as a party, but I think that certainly we saw through the midterms that you can’t cede any parts of the country.

Don't miss the rest of this interesting feature from Paz.