Obama reduced Democrats' rural vote deficit; rural voters still part of a shrunken GOP coalition

Barack Obama won the presidency "by increasing Democratic margins in urban areas and by slightly decreasing the party's losses in rural and exurban areas" compared to 2004, Bill Bishop and Tim Murphy write for the Daily Yonder, following a state-by-state analysis of the vote.

These results differ in some cases from exit polls, which ask voters whether they live in urban, suburban or rural communities, but the differences generally appear to be within or close to the polls' margins of error. For details, click here.

"Four years ago, George Bush ran up large margins in rural and exurban counties to overcome John Kerry's 3.7 million vote advantage in the cities," Bishop and Murphy write. "John Kerry lost the rural counties in battleground states by 15 percentage points. Obama was able to narrow that deficit to seven." (Read more)

At the moment, white rural voters are part of a shrunken Republican coalition "that may shrink with time," Alec MacGillis and Jon Cohen write in The Washington Post: "older, working-class and rural white voters, increasingly concentrated in the Deep South, the Great Plains and Appalachia." Retiring Rep. Tom Davis, whose Northern Virginia district elected a Democrat to succeed him, told the Post that as Republicans continue "to cater to their culturally conservative rural base, they continue to alienate educated voters."

"But the shift is also explained by the transformation of many suburbs as they become more developed and cosmopolitan," MacGillis and Cohen write. "Bush prevailed in 2004 because he combined his rural base with just enough votes from the suburbs. But the Democrats have steadily been expanding from their urban base for the past decade. It is a shift that points to how the parties' basic messages have changed, with Republicans increasingly employing cultural themes that resonate most in rural areas -- such as Gov. Sarah Palin's appeals to 'pro-America' small towns -- while Democrats have focused on suburban concerns such as education."

As for Obama's "Appalachian problem," the reporters confirm it: "The biggest region where McCain improved on Bush's numbers was the spine of Appalachia, running from Tennessee up to southwestern Pennsylvania, where he managed to flip some depressed steel counties. But these gains were in places that are, in many cases, losing population." (Read more)

The Roanoke Times' Appalachian example is Buchanan County, Virginia, where "the Democratic candidate for president lost to a Republican for the first time since 1972," reports Laurence Hammack. Coal was an issue, he writes, but "Many residents of Appalachia seemed troubled by the stark differences -- racial, cultural and by some accounts religious -- between themselves and Obama." (Read more)

The phenomenon wasn't only Appalachian. The map below, adapted from The New York Times by Matthew Yglesias at ThinkProgress.org, shows in red counties that were more Republican in 2008 than 2004. McCain did better in three states than Bush did in 2004: Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana.
While Obama narrowly lost Missouri, which had been the most reliable bellwether state, he won six of its rural counties, five more than John Kerry carried in 2004, notes Darryl Swint of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Read more)