“THE NEW RURAL HOPE”

Democrats’ performance in rural counties last year comes with one big caveat: They still trail Republicans in rural voter share. No one I spoke to in Democratic circles thinks the party can suddenly win a majority of rural voters; Trump’s hold on many voters in these communities is strong. But the GOP’s hold on rural regions is showing a  few cracks, particularly in areas with Trumpian candidates: In almost all the 2022 cycle’s marquee statewide races, Democrats did better than Biden did two years before.

A December Axios story featuring analysis from the moderate Democratic group Third Way encapsulates those raw numbers. In most battleground states across the country, Democrats improved on Biden’s rural county vote share, from 1 percentage point in the Arizona gubernatorial contest to 15 percentage points in the Pennsylvania governor’s race. There may still be even more room to improve. Biden did worse among rural voters in 2020 than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

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).

Of course, the 2024 presidential electorate will be very different from the electorate that turned out for the midterms. In 2022, Democrats framed Trump-backed candidates as extremists, which helped Democrats overperform in suburban and urban areas that have drifted toward them while also persuading some rural voters to see Republican anti-abortion efforts as forms of overreach. That same strategy isn’t guaranteed to work in 2024. Trump’s presence on the 2024 ballot could also give other Republican candidates a boost, Lucas Holtz, a political analyst with Third Way, told me.

But there’s another set of numbers from the 2022 midterms that provides even more hope for Democrats and that should force them to think seriously about the kind of presence they need to have in rural America: the number of Trump voters who flipped to Democrats during the midterms.

Holtz and the Third Way team looked at the raw data behind the Associated Press and NORC’s 2022 midterm exit polls (also known as AP VoteCast) and found that many of the statewide Democratic candidates who improved on Biden’s rural voter numbers did so by winning over significant chunks of rural voters who voted for Trump in 2020. For example, 15 percent of rural and exurban Trump voters ended up voting for Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and 12 percent of Trump 2020 voters cast ballots for Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona.

And again, candidates that didn’t win, like Democratic Senate candidates Cheri Beasley in North Carolina and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, still flipped about 4 and 3 percent of rural Trump voters each last year.

Click here to read Winning Back Rural Voters, Part I of 4 “Long Standing Trend Reverses”