she DOES seem to do better in rural areas in quite a few states, even without republican crossover. I remember the nail bitter in Missouri where Barack was behind by quite a lot, until the St. Louis votes started pouring in. Their pattern of wins/losses matches quite well (with exceptions, of course) the blue/red areas in the general. So yes, she is winning among the DEMOCRATS in these areas, but in the GE most of these places will stay red, no matter who is on the dem ticket. A case in point is where I live, rural area in southern IL, heavily republican. Yes, there was an usually large vote in the primary, BO won (IL after all :-)) but barely, but come November I doubt that even BO can carry this district, even less Hillary.
The bottom line: I think that a counter-argument can be made that these rural areas are the within-state equivalent of states like WY that "do not count".
Edited to add BC's actual comment from yesterday (via Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/8/10717/36921/773/472134)
"She said yesterday and she said the day after her big wins in Texas and Ohio and Rhode Island that she was very open to that and I think she answered explicitly yes yesterday," Clinton began, referring to Hillary's own answers on the topic in recent days.
"I know that she has always been open to it, because she believes that if you can unite the energy and the new people that he’s brought in and the people in these vast swaths of small town and rural America that she’s carried overwhelmingly, if you had those two things together she thinks it’d be hard to beat. I mean you look at the, you look at the, you look at the map of Texas and the map in Ohio. And the map in Missouri or -- well Arkansas’s not a good case because they know her and she won every place there. But you look at most of these places, he would win the urban areas and the upscale voters, and she wins the traditional rural areas that we lost when President Reagan was president. If you put those two things together, you’d have an almost unstoppable force," Clinton went on to say.
She would win back the Reagan democrats?? :rofl: :rofl: