There are several theories that attempt to explain why Hillary Clinton was defeated in November, and most of them are at least somewhat credible. Russian interference has been confirmed by 17 different intelligence agencies, that certainly had an effect. Former FBI Director James Comey sending his damaging letter to Congress days before the election apparently tipped the polls in Trump\u2019s favor according to Nate Silver of 538<\/a>. There are some on the left who argue that Clinton didn\u2019t visit the Rust Belt enough, which is a fair criticism (she famously never visited Wisconsin). The new campaign tell-all book \u201cShattered<\/a>\u201d suggests that Clinton was a fundamentally flawed candidate with no political vision to offer to voters hungry for change; that\u2019s harder to quantify but I don\u2019t disagree with the thesis.<\/p>\n

All of these explanations are well and good, but they don\u2019t explain what happened down-ballot. If it were an issue of visiting Wisconsin or being progressive, then why did Sen. Ron Johnson (WI-R) not only beat a very progressive opponent, but outperform Donald Trump by 70,000 votes? If it were an issue of being flawed or out of touch with voters looking for change, then why did incumbent Sen. Roy Blunt (MO-R) whose name is synonymous with insider politics, defeat young, popular, earnest, political outsider Jason Kander? How did Republicans end up winning the popular vote<\/em> in elections for the House of Representatives by 2 million votes?<\/p>\n

In 2016 voters were capable of splitting their ballot even though the environment was hyper-partisan. Take Montana for example, where Democratic Gov. Steve Daines was re-elected while Clinton lost by 20 points or Vermont where Republican Phil Scott was elected Governor while Trump lost by 26 points.<\/p>\n

So, what happened not just in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri, but across America? Broadly speaking, Democratic candidates put resources into turning out minority voters, maintaining the urban white vote, with an emphasis of reaching out to suburbanites, but in the process actively ignored rural voters.<\/p>\n

These rural voters made up 17%\u00a0 of the electorate in 2016<\/a>. By contrast, black voters and Latino voters only comprised 12% and 11% of the electorate, respectively. It\u2019s not that these voters are just unreachable either, as recently as 2008, 45% of Americans living in rural communities were casting ballots for Democrats. But in 2016, Hillary Clinton managed to only win 34% of these voters, and Democrats running for statewide office suffered in similar margins. These voters aren\u2019t necessarily becoming more conservative either, Barack Obama narrowly lost Missouri by 5,000 votes and Montana by 9,000, most of the people who voted in that election also voted last November.<\/p>\n

The entire Democratic Platform in 2016 was a whopping 25,967 words, the section dedicated to rural Americans however was a mere 268 words, just a little over 1% of the platform.<\/a> It wasn\u2019t just the platform, Hillary Clinton\u2019s website dedicated almost as many words to an anecdote about Tim Kaine going to church as they did to rural voters on her issues page<\/a>. Even her very detailed fact sheet<\/a> was somewhat lacking compared to the considerable effort that was put into other issues. In Hillary Clinton\u2019s biggest moment, her convention speech, there were zero uses of the phrases \u201crural\u201d, \u201csmall communities\u201d, \u201cfarmers\u201d, or even \u201cagriculture\u201d. It doesn\u2019t make sense not to at least acknowledge these people.<\/p>\n

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