Hello again. I'm Chuck Todd and welcome to meet the press reports. This is where we explore a single topic in depth.

Today, we're going to look at how the Democratic Party lost rural America.

Let's start here. In 1996, Bill Clinton, as he was running for a second term, he won 1,117 rural counties.

That was good for about 50% of all American rural counties as defined by the Department of Agriculture.

12 years later, and Barack Obama's first successful term, he won 455 rural counties.

All told, that accounted for about 23% of all rural counties at the time.

You can already see a significant decline.

Well, guess what? 12 years later, in 2020, it got worse.

Joe Biden won just 194 rural counties running against Donald Trump. That accounts for just

about 10% of all rural counties in the United States. And there's no indication the party's

standing has improved at all. Here's our March 2022 NBC poll, where the Democratic Party's favorability rating

is a lackluster 14 points underwater overall. And look at this. In rural America, it's 41 points

underwater. The only place where it's positive these days is in urban America. So why does all

this happen? And could this trend spell long-term doom for the

Democratic Party and essentially block them from ever controlling the United States Senate again?

We're going to go to North Carolina with NBC's Antonio Hill, where voters are losing interest not only

in the Democratic Party, but in the small D democratic process itself. But there's perhaps no better place to tell the story of the

Democratic Party's problems with rural voters than in the state of Iowa, which is where we

recently talked to some remaining Democrats. In northeastern Iowa, Democrats know their brand is in

trouble. A cluster of Mississippi River counties mirroring the toxic national environment

for Democrats in rural America. In 1992, Democrats won 51% of the rural vote. By 2016, that number

was just 35%. And rural voters have been identifying as Republicans by wider and wider margins.

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