Overwhelming support in the nation’s least populated counties was key to Republican victories in the last two presidential elections. But a new bipartisan survey indicates rural voters are not so reliably Republican in 2008.
The poll indicates that Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, cannot count on rural voters to provide him a winning margin in the November presidential election. Double-digit margins in places beyond cities and suburbs are credited with giving President George W. Bush his margins of victory in 2000 and 2004.
In head-to-head match-ups, the rural voters surveyed split evenly between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican McCain. Each garnered 46 percent of the rural vote in the poll.
That’s a stunning reversal for Clinton, who rated as unpopular as “illegal aliens” in a similar rural survey done just last year.