they lost between 2012 and 2016, a net gain of about six percentage points in the region. By comparison, Democratic gains in suburban areas were roughly a point or two lower."
Fascinating article, thanks. The rural pinkening wave was mostly from younger and unmarried whites voting Democrat, and they're not just the kind of deplorables who voted "other" in 2016 but also previous Trump voters. We only regained
half of the rural vote lost during Obama's second term alone, though, and that means a lot more potential.
Presidential elections are very different from midterm, of course. Do we go after the rural vote? We desperately need to break the increasingly extremist Republican hold on most of America, and how do we do that if we cede huge regions of the nation (with electoral college multipliers) to them? Wins these years are often by narrow margins. Shouldn't we use that to fix America, turn narrow losses into wins and then work on solidfying them?
In other words, the change in rural America’s electoral margins didn’t occur only because Trump’s core supporters stayed home on Election Day — the shift happened because voters changed their minds after 2016 and, consequently, might be inclined to continue to support the next Democratic presidential nominee in 2020. ...
Voters who switched their political allegiance in 2018 would figure to be prime targets for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee. ... And in the event that most do return to Trump, even small declines of rural support for a president who won narrowly in 2016 would seriously undermine his re-election campaign. ...
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