Texas in the Rear-View Mirror? How the Democratic Party Ignores Rural America and Underperforms in Elections

Abstract Political observers have asserted that Democrats have stopped campaigning for rural votes. Despite this refrain, little quantitative evidence has assessed its veracity. We also do not understand the broader electoral implications of these potential geographic changes in party organizing. To explore these questions, we merge two novel data sources on county party organizational capacity with county-level election data and survey data from the CES. Since 2016, the Democratic Party has failed to declare a party chair in about 20% of rural counties and did not field a candidate for Congress in nearly the same, while Republicans filled all but 4% of rural chairships and contested every rural seat. With broader data from Texas, we show even larger percentages of rural counties have uncontested State Senate and House seats. These changes are associated with decreased Democratic vote share in statewide races, turnout, and campaign contact. We estimate that the Democratic Party loses some of the rural vote in statewide elections by failing to organize and compete for it.