How Democrats Lost Rural Voters—and How to Win Them Back

In 2008, President Barack Obama made major inroads with rural voters—a feat that Democratic candidates hadn’t been able to achieve since the 1992 and 1996 victories of Bill Clinton. 

Obama won 9 million votes from rural America and flipped 179 rural counties that had voted Republican in 2004. He still lost rural voters 45 percent to 53 percent, but his performance was a big improvement over 2004, when President George W. Bush crushed Democratic candidate John Kerry among rural voters by 19 percentage points.