Joe Biden has a confession to make to rural America.
And it caught the Democratic Party leadership off guard.
In an interview with the New York Times Biden admitted that he and the Democrats “forgot” all about the roughly 60 million rural Americans who voted for President Donald Trump’s in the 2016 election.
Biden seems to think rural voters flocked to Trump because “they just feel forgotten.”
“I think we forgot them,” he added.
He may have a point.
His comments perhaps best reflect what critics often point to as the game-changing moment in the 2016 election — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s glaring absence in the state of Michigan leading up to the vote.
Democrats have had four years since then to come up with a new strategy.
But according to the election results, Biden and the Democrats have their work cut out ahead of them. Fox News and many other mainstream media outlets have noted that Democrats again suffered major losses among rural voters in Congress.
In Iowa, Kansas, Montana, and North Carolina, Democratic challengers all lost major races where party officials had expected them to threaten the status quo of Republican incumbents. According to a report by The Atlantic, while Biden unsurprisingly earned countless votes in the cities and suburbs, he was destroyed in small-town regions.
At the current count, he only won 509 counties — just over one-sixth of all America’s counties — a number close to Ms. Clinton’s total. Bill Clinton, by contrast, won around 1,500 counties — or nearly half the country — in both of his elections.
So while Biden says he has his sights set on salvaging trust between rural voters and Democrats, it seems he still has a long way to go in winning over their voters.
The Horn editorial team