Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found that rural votes can make or break presidential elections.
Kenneth Johnson co-authored a study with UNH Professor Dante Scala, looking at what would happen if Democratic candidates gained or lost just 3% of rural votes across various swing states. They found that states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could tip favorably toward either party by a small margin in those rural areas.
“Our point is just that you can’t ignore rural America,” Johnson said. “That rural America is still relevant even though it represents a small part of the vote.”
For the study, Johnson looked at rural voters in presidential elections from 2008 to 2020. Using the turnout from the 2020 election, the research team modeled what would happen if just 3% of people shifted their votes for a Democratic candidate in the 2024 election or voted otherwise.
“Democrats don’t have to win in rural America,” Johnson said. “They just have to get enough of the rural vote to allow their advantage in metropolitan areas to produce a majority. This motivates our research asking what would happen if a Democrat could 3% more or 3% less in rural areas of these seven battleground states in 2024.”
After the 2020 election, Johnson and Scala found that President Joe Biden won in swing states by bigger margins than former President Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They also found that Biden did better than Hillary Clinton in rural areas.
Johnson said that rural and urban voters are often pitted as a dichotomy, but he notes that rural voters across the nation often vote differently than their rural counterparts.
For instance, in most rural towns in America, Democrats do not constitute more than 50% of votes. However, in New Hampshire, Johnson said, Democrats can get the majority of both rural and urban votes.
“So in that sense New Hampshire is a little different than these battleground states where the Democrats never get the majority in a rural area,” Johnson said.
Johnson said that while rural voters do not make up the majority of the electorate, courting them counts.
This story was originally published by New Hampshire Public Radio. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.
