Since Bill Clinton beat Robert Dole in 1996, Democrats have lost all subsequent national elections in rural America. In 2000, the party brass made a calculation that with limited resources, the Democrats’ best bet was to invest in growing metropolitan communities, especially with college-educated voters, and to double down on advantages there with Black, Hispanic, and other constituencies of color.
The Republicans, with an aggressive media strategy, lots of cash, and the help of conservative Christian broadcasters, quickly filled the political vacancy in rural America — one that had favored Democrats in most cycles since the Great Depression. Rural America quickly became a firewall for Republicans. In a country with a population that is more than 80% metropolitan, rural, in broad strokes, has limited clout. But if rural operates as a voting bloc, then it has power. In 2024 Trump took 91% of rural counties and won rural overall by a 32-point margin.
The political boneyards are filled with armchair analysts and grand explanations that make too much out of what happened before the votes are all counted.
Nonetheless, here is what happened in the Midterms.
First data sorts indicate that Rural America cut the Trump 2024 victory margin in half for 2026 Republican candidates. Some of that came from party switching and some from deflated Republican turnout, but the collapse of the rural GOP firewall, combined with a robust urban and suburban turnout, changed the political map. Best guess, the Democrats will emerge with a total of 30 governorships, 56 Senate seats, and 260 members in the House.
More granularly, the rural voter shift gave Democrat Annie Andrews the South Carolina Senate seat over Darline Graham. Rural votes flipped the North Carolina House delegation from 10-4 R, to 11-3 D. Kansas and Iowa, reeling from tariffs and healthcare cost concerns, flipped their senators to D and likely both governors. In Georgia, more than half of the counties that switched from red to blue were rural. In the Rio Grande Valley, where immigration policy is more than a talking point, Texas saw the most dramatic shift to Democrats in this entire cycle, bringing in a new U.S. Senator and all the state constitutional offices from Governor to Railroad Commissioner. In the rural Mississippi Delta, we see voters fueling the most surprising upset of the cycle, with underfunded African-American Scott Colom narrowly beating incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith and taking a game-changing 27% of the state’s white vote as well. And Jamie Davis, a Black farmer, lost his Louisiana Senate race by fewer than two percentage points with virtually no money from the national party.
Given the country’s polarization, there have been years of intense discussion about the health of American democracy, especially among Democrats. They sincerely ask, “Can this experiment survive?” Democrats have looked at the grip of red-state Trump voters as evidence that the founders were ill-prepared to handle this moment and such a riven nation.
And the current list of imperiling threats includes obscene spending by both special interests and billionaires on the take, unchecked government interference, out-of-control gerrymandering, as well as systematic disinformation coming from Fox News, Russian troll farms, and fake AI phone banks. One book that made the rounds, White Rural Rage, charged rural communities with systemic racism and proffers the case that rural hatred for urban America is what fuels creeping authoritarianism.
In response to the dangers, good government nonprofits and university-based initiatives seek to abolish the Electoral College and eliminate the perceived advantage that poor small states have over wealthier big states. And an associated point of reference is the disproportionate unfairness of a parliamentary system where every state has two senators no matter the state’s population or importance.
Seven months ago, in association with Lake Research Partners, we polled rural voters in the Senate battleground from Alaska to Maine. We found a distinct advantage for Republicans heading into the elections. But below the surface of party preference, we saw uncertainty that was off the charts. We found anger at corporations, exasperation with politics as usual, and a broad sense that rural voters felt like they were out there on their own. And last April when we polled, the war with Iran was still in its early days, gas had just crept above $3 a gallon and ground beef had not hit $7 a pound. None of those economic indicators got better by election day.
Maybe last Tuesday was not a crystalline moment where the nation came together in common purpose — perhaps it was just a momentary combination of anger at the war, a lot of staying home, and the cost of gas. But perhaps the top remedy to what’s wrong with American democracy is what’s essential to democracy.
Voting.
What if voters take the system back? What if voters themselves value participation over division and cynicism? What if we get over our fragility and vote no matter who calls our candidate trans, corrupt, racist, or gay? What if voters demand Democrats show up in rural areas, and Republicans show up in urban areas, and political debate becomes more than shopworn campaign rhetoric? A girl can dream, can’t she?
I will stipulate the need for reforms. Take dark money out of elections. Certainly, the House of Representatives is long overdue for another expansion that would make the Electoral College more representative. Also, we could combine election day with Veterans Day and honor voters with a federal holiday that makes turning out far easier.
The moral of the story could be that next time we are not obligated to fall for the same old meanness. It could be that we don’t have to assemble ourselves into opposing bile-spitting armies. Democracy does not require us to muscle up and look tough. We could just show up and help out.
Election results analysis in this commentary was heavily informed by the original reporting on the midterm results in rural America by the Daily Yonder’s staff.
Find all of our midterm reporting and analysis here.
Dee Davis is president of the Center for Rural Strategies and publisher of the Daily Yonder.
The post Commentary: Midterms and the Rural Vote appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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