Democrats Look Beyond City Limits - Candidates Turn New Attention To Rural Voters
According to The Washington Post:
The wooing of rural voters is essential to Democrats' hopes for taking back the Senate this November, party strategists say. Rural voters wield real electoral power in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and Arizona -- all of which are being targeted this fall by Democrats.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the Bush administration's economic policies have created an opening for his party to argue that rural voters have a self-interest in backing Democrats. "The way to get in is not to try to avoid being who we are, but put far greater emphasis on the issues of common ground and talk to people in a language that they speak," he said.
The raw numbers are daunting. Exit polling in the 2004 presidential race showed Bush carrying rural areas 57 percent to 42 percent over Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). Similar margins have fueled Republican victories on the state and local levels, where candidates have repeatedly used social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage to advantage over Democrats.
But developments over the past year, such as higher gas prices and increased health-care costs, have created a sense of pessimism among rural Americans, according to more recent focus groups conducted by Agne in places such as Little Rock and Golden, Colo. While Iraq remains the dominant issue for this voting bloc, it is the "growing economic pressures facing these voters that really caused fireworks," [pollster Karl] Agne said.
James G. Gimpel, a professor of government at the University of Maryland, said that while recent Republican struggles have narrowed the partisan gap among rural voters, the perceived liberalism of national Democrats makes any wholesale shift among this group unlikely.
"If you don't prime rural voters on the issues that they care about, a lot of them will go your way because they are Democrats," Gimpel said. "If you remind them of how conservative they are and how liberal the national Democratic party is, those Democrats would say they will vote for the man, not the party."
The wooing of rural voters is essential to Democrats' hopes for taking back the Senate this November, party strategists say. Rural voters wield real electoral power in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and Arizona -- all of which are being targeted this fall by Democrats.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the Bush administration's economic policies have created an opening for his party to argue that rural voters have a self-interest in backing Democrats. "The way to get in is not to try to avoid being who we are, but put far greater emphasis on the issues of common ground and talk to people in a language that they speak," he said.
The raw numbers are daunting. Exit polling in the 2004 presidential race showed Bush carrying rural areas 57 percent to 42 percent over Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). Similar margins have fueled Republican victories on the state and local levels, where candidates have repeatedly used social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage to advantage over Democrats.
But developments over the past year, such as higher gas prices and increased health-care costs, have created a sense of pessimism among rural Americans, according to more recent focus groups conducted by Agne in places such as Little Rock and Golden, Colo. While Iraq remains the dominant issue for this voting bloc, it is the "growing economic pressures facing these voters that really caused fireworks," [pollster Karl] Agne said.
James G. Gimpel, a professor of government at the University of Maryland, said that while recent Republican struggles have narrowed the partisan gap among rural voters, the perceived liberalism of national Democrats makes any wholesale shift among this group unlikely.
"If you don't prime rural voters on the issues that they care about, a lot of them will go your way because they are Democrats," Gimpel said. "If you remind them of how conservative they are and how liberal the national Democratic party is, those Democrats would say they will vote for the man, not the party."
posted by Sid Cottingham | 4:09 PM
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