DES MOINES — Democrats have a surprising group of voters to thank, in part, for their sweeping victories in the midterm elections Tuesday.
Rural counties across the country swung more than 15 percentage points toward Democrats this year compared with 2024. While rural communities remained more Republican than Democratic, their support waned significantly, hurting GOP candidates who relied on the typically deep-red voting bloc.
From Maine to Texas, weakened Republican support in rural areas contributed to flipped Senate seats and governor’s offices. House districts with significant rural populations in Wisconsin, Kentucky, Iowa and elsewhere swapped their Republican lawmakers for Democratic ones.
Republican candidates were hurt by President Donald Trump’s policies including the war in Iran and tariffs, which pushed up the price of diesel, fertilizer and farm supplies ahead of the fall harvest season. Trump’s effort to lower meat prices by increasing beef imports also outraged ranchers.
The average farmer would need nearly twice as much money — around $600 per day — to run a combine daily throughout a 40-day harvest this year, said David Kochel, a longtime Republican political strategist originally from Iowa.
“Add to that supply chain nightmares like fertilizer, tariffs, beef imports from Argentina and you’ve got a giant economic mess in rural America. And it was all avoidable,” Kochel said.
Democratic candidates sought to highlight these pain points and, in some cases, made rural campaigning part of their strategy.
Iowa’s Democratic senator-elect, Josh Turek, visited farms and small towns over the course of the campaign. He spent Monday, the final day before Election Day, campaigning in four counties in western Iowa, each of which voted for Trump by more than 20 points in 2024. They still swung toward his GOP opponent, Rep. Ashley Hinson, but by a much smaller margin.
“This is a math problem, and I think that too many Democrats over the last decade have looked at this math problem incorrectly, which has been” to maximize turnout in the most populous counties, Turek told The Washington Post last month. “They haven’t spent enough time trimming the margins in these deeply red communities.”
Rural counties and small cities in Kansas swung 20 points toward Democrats on Tuesday, helping to elect Democrat Adam Hamilton over GOP Sen. Roger Marshall. Hamilton, who ran campaign ads calling to suspend the federal gas and diesel tax, is the first Democrat elected to represent the state in the Senate since 1932.
Smoke-jumping firefighter Sam Forstag is the first Democrat elected to Congress from Montana in 30 years. He ran on a progressive platform and said voters wanted more answers on how to afford their lives while recoiling at politicians aligning with corporations.
“Long before affordability was a buzzword, housing has been a huge issue here in Montana,” he said in a call with reporters.
And James Talarico, the Democratic senator-elect from Texas, campaigned in deeply Republican parts of the state, hammering the administration’s impacts on farmers and ranchers. In South Carolina, rural voters may have made the difference between a victory for Sen.-elect Annie Andrews and Darline Graham.
It’s too soon to tell whether the swing came more from a significant boost in Democratic support or Republican voters sitting out the election, said Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College who has studied rural voting patterns.
But “whatever happened in rural areas — because something did happen — it was very key to deciding a lot of these electoral outcomes,” he said. “It is historic, and I never throw that word around.”
About half of rural voters said they believed the economy was worse off than when Trump returned to office, according to a KFF and Associated Press poll conducted in August. The cost of fuel, health care and groceries topped the list of worries.
Those economic conditions seemed to play a role in dampening Republican enthusiasm. In rural Adair County, Iowa, voters kept mentioning the economy ahead of the election to Brian Rohrig, 70, co-chair of the county GOP, as he tried to push Republicans to show up.
“The Democrats are trying to make a big thing out of it, and it is — the cost of living’s higher, people are maybe earning more but it doesn’t seem like it,” Rohrig said after an event for Republican gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn on Saturday.
Rohrig told other voters while door-knocking for Republican candidates that the tariffs are bringing jobs and investment back to the United States, including a massive proposed steel plant in Lee County touted by Trump. He said he found farmers remained “very supportive” of Republican issues.
After the results came in, Rohrig still didn’t feel the president’s economic policies were to blame. The party shouldn’t “try to reinvent the playbook” just yet, he said Wednesday. “Trump needs a string of wins that he can take and show to the Republicans that this is the right way.”
Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies, a nonpartisan rural advocacy group, said Republicans were on solid footing in rural communities if the dominant midterm issues were cultural.
“But this time it became transactional, because people can’t afford a bag of groceries or a tank of gas or they can’t pay to get their kid to the doctor,” he said.
Some Democrats are cautioning their party not to overinterpret the results as an endorsement of Democratic policies. Former Democratic congresswoman Cheri Bustos, who represented a rural area of Illinois, said the results reflect frustration with Trump and not love for Democrats, and urged her party to work on “building trust.”
Democratic strategist Celinda Lake said the party “squandered” an opportunity to build trust and organize with rural voters nearly a decade ago.
“It’s an opportunity to build back in rural America,” she said.
Amber Phillips, Theodoric Meyer and Eric Lau contributed to this report.
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