I get the sense that what the Party can do, if it needs to do anything, to engage with rural voters

[gratuitous]

1. Get out the frickin' vote!

Fastest, surest way to victory is to turn out as many voters as we can.

If I understand the clip from the Post story, the question was about education, Gillespie turned it into a peroration about the chimera of clean coal, and Northam tried to answer the question about education, "rather than push back." Push back against what? Isn't the moderator supposed to, you know, moderate the discussion, and not let one candidate or the other scupper away from answering the question? But in the Post's report, Gillespie's failure to answer the moderator's question and the moderator's failure to require an answer from Gillespie turn into Northam's fault.

The "real problem" on display here isn't any alleged failure by Northam to connect with rural America (whatever that means).