Rural Voters Turning Their Backs On The GOP?

The rural vote has traditionally been a pretty solid bloc for the Republican Party. Of course their (our?) small population makes them pretty marginal on the national level, at the congressional district level, rural voters are swing voters in many states and they have been very supportive of the GOP. For example, Al Gore received only 37 percent of the rural vote in 2000 and Kerry fared only a smidgen better in 2004 with 40 percent.

Therefore, it is a bit of a shock to see a new poll from The Center for Rural Strategies, conducted by democratic and republican pollsters.

The poll of rural voters in 41 contested congressional districts with significant rural populations found Democratic and Republican candidates running a dead heat, with each party receiving 45 percent of the possible votes. In six contested Senate races in states with significant rural populations, rural voters favored Republican candidates 47 to 43 percent, but the gap falls within the poll’s margin of error of 4.3 percentage points, making a statistical tie.

The most important issue on rural voters’ minds is the war in Iraq, followed closely by jobs and the economy and terrorism and national security, the poll found. Strikingly, nearly three-quarters of the respondents said they knew someone who has served in the armed forces in Iraq or Afghanistan.

This backs up something I have been trying to hammer into recalcitrant skulls in the local party: that the war matters locally... A LOT.

It will be interesting to see if this holds up through the last six weeks as both parties drop the big negative bombs. Usually, in the face of nausea-inducing negative ad, overload voters just sort of reset back to their default patterns.