Analysis: Tailoring Democratic rhetoric to win over rural North Dakota voters seems unhelpful
President Trump, carrying"Make Our Farmers Great Again!" hats, departs the White House on Aug 30. By Philip Bump Philip Bump National correspondent focused largely on the numbers behind politics Email Bio Follow April 25 at 5:28 PM To hear many Democrats tell it, the story of the 2016 election was simple.
This seems sort of obvious on the surface. Of course a presidential candidate should try to appeal to Americans across the political spectrum. The problem, though, is that shifting a national message to appeal to a rural North Dakota voter almost necessarily means shifting it away from an urban voter in a state such as Florida.
So why not just talk to them? It’s true that rural counties are more likely to vote Republican, but they also, by definition, have far fewer residents. Let’s look more closely at the assertion that Democrats need to appeal to rural voters to win presidential elections. In 2010, Indiana and North Dakota were the 29th and 41st most-rural states in the country, respectively. Like most states, though, they’ve been getting consistently more urban over time, according to data from Iowa State University. Even as they’ve gotten more urban, each consistently still votes more Republican than the nation overall.
On the other end of the spectrum, the pattern looks more the way we’d expect. The most heavily urban states tend to vote more Democratic than the country on the whole, though Nevada, the third-most-densely urban state, tends to look more purple.
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