Democrats face uphill battle in rural Midwest; voters mistakenly think stimulus did no good

Democrats are facing a tough row to hoe in the rural Midwest as the economy languishes and their party leader's approval ratings in the region drop. "According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last month 55 percent of Midwesterners disapprove of the job President Barack Obama is doing, six percentage points higher than the rest of the U.S.," Douglas Belkin reports for the Journal, noting more broadly, "66 percent of rural Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, five points more than U.S. voters as a whole." Rural voters have trended Republican for a decade or more.

Democratic House incumbents in the Midwest, including Joe Donnelly and Baron Hill in Indiana, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in South Dakota, Debbie Halvorson in Illinois, Leonard Boswell in Iowa, John Boccieri in Ohio and Ike Skelton in Missouri are facing the anti-Democrat fervor. Even in North Dakota, where an oil boom has kept the unemployment rate at a nation-low 3.7 percent, Democratic Rep. Earl Pomeroy trails Republican challenger Rick Berg by 3 points after winning by 24 in 2008.

A Pew Research Center survey finds that a smaller percentage of rural and suburban Americans than those in urban areas say they have lost ground during the recession. Despite a Congressional Budget Office study that found unemployment would have been 0.7 to 1.8 points lower without the economic stimulus package, polls show most voters don't think it did any good, and pro-Republican ads are saying likewise, so Democrats face an uphill battle defending their spending record. "I'm disgusted with the entire party," Cliff Wehrman, a 58-year-old North Dakotan who said he no longer supports Pomeroy even after voting for him in 2008, told Belkin. "Who do they think is going to pay for all this?" (Read more) FactCheck.org analyzes the impact of the stimulus.