FOR Americans who love road trips but despise Democrats, the Obama years have been a golden age. Rural America does not like this president—an antipathy that only deepened between his election in 2008 and his re-election four years later, when he picked up just 37% of rural voters. Add that trend to a decades-long swing of southern states away from the Democratic Party, and the size of conservative America, measured in square miles of majority-Republican territory, has grown and grown. In 2012 the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, won fully 77.9% of the counties of America (though, sadly for him, those counties are home to just 42.7% of the population). With a bit of planning, you can drive across the lower 48 states from east-to-west or top-to-bottom without entering a single county won by Mr Obama in a presidential contest—though you’d need a stomach for barbecued meat, country music and conservative talk-radio.
Small wonder that so many Democratic campaigns focus on cities and college towns, hoping to offset rural losses by running up huge margins of victory among such groups as urban youngsters, non-whites and highly educated liberals. In contrast Republicans need...Continue reading
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