RVI Report: Biden Narrows Rural Deficit; Path for Democrats with Rural Voters Evident

The Rural Voter Institute spent the summer engaged in research with swing state rural voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota. Polling and focus groups presented a path for Democrats up and down the ballot to improve their margins with rural voters, by changing how Democrats communicate with rural voters.

A rural-voter-only poll of 400 rural/small-town Wisconsin voters found Biden narrowing the gap to only 13 points with Trump among rural voters in Wisconsin, a dramatic narrowing of the margin with rural voters in the state from 2016. Comparing the current rural voter margin with 2016 exit polls, Trump was beating Hillary by 27 points (62/35). Further, this is an improvement over 2018 rural voter margins when exit polls showed then Scott Walker over Tony Evers in the Gubernatorial race by 21 (60/39). This project collected dramatically more rural interviews than would be included in a traditional statewide survey. A 600-sample statewide survey would yield fewer than 150 rural interviews – and would require a sample size of over 1600 voters to secure the 400 rural interviews completed in this project.

The series of focus groups across all three states and the Wisconsin poll bore out a path for Democrats to hold, or even further narrow, the gap with rural voters up and down the ballot. This memo looks broadly at identifying the segments of the most persuadable rural voters and how to better communicate. Our research found multiple effective arguments for moving persuadable rural voters. More importantly, our research found that the gap with rural voters was less an issue of “what” Democrats were communicating than “how” they communicate.