The Rural Vote in America's Heartland

10:45 A.M. EDT

Real Audio of Briefing

MR. DENIG: Good morning, and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. A special welcome also to journalists assembled in our New York Foreign Press Center. We are very pleased to be able to present to you yet another in our series of pre-election briefings and hope that you will find this one equally useful.

Before we proceed with today's briefing with Jerry Hagstrom, we have a brief introduction about an important publication that is, I think, of great interest and use to foreign journalists and other foreign audiences overseas. And to introduce this publication I will introduce Mr. Alex Feldman, who is the Coordinator of the Office of International Information Programs at the Department of State.

Alex.

MR. FELDMAN: Thank you very much, Paul. I just wanted to bring to your attention a publication that was just released on the Internet, and there are also copies here in the Foreign Press Center for those of you who are here physically today. It's called, "The Issues of Democracy," and it's available on our website, which is www.usinfo.state.gov and you can find an incredible amount of information here about the election on a lot of issues which are sometimes confused, things like what are democracies all about, what Congress, the Electoral College means and how it works and why it's important to a U.S. democracy, what campaign finance rules have changed and what they mean, and also how we deal with third parties in our election. So I would just recommend that you go to our website and take a look at that. Articles are written by knowledgeable experts who have often appeared here in the Foreign Press Center, including Charlie Cook, Tom Mann and John Zogby.

So I just wanted to bring that to your attention. The other piece that I wanted to bring to your attention is our Election Focus newsletter, which is also available at our website. Paul.

MR. DENIG: Thank you very much, Alex. Now I'd like to introduce our elections expert for today. I'd like to welcome back to our podium a frequent and very welcome visitor, Jerry Hagstrom, who writes for the National Journal. Mr. Hagstrom is a well known expert on various aspects of the national elections and one of the areas in which he is a particular expert is in rural and agricultural politics, and so we're very pleased today that he'll be addressing the topic, "The Rural Vote in America's Heartland."

After his opening statement, we'll have time, as usual, for questions. Thank you.

Jerry.

MR. HAGSTROM: Thank you. I'm very happy to be here again today and to see some familiar faces in the audience, and also some new faces, some young faces, and I'd like to say a special welcome to the people at the Foreign Press Center in New York. I had been invited to speak there this year and I just haven't been in New York, so it's nice to be talking to you long distance, if not in person.

Well, I'm going to talk to you today about a subject that I believe most of the national U.S. media ignores: the rural vote. And it's something that's a little bit hard to understand, hard to put together, and, of course, the other problem is that it's a little bit hard to report on because it's so scattered. It's a lot easier to go and do a story on something that's taking place in a big city or a suburban area.

I'd like to start off by noting that people would be very aware that President Bush won what are known as the red states. If you look down, if you look at that famous red and blue map, of course, President Bush won most of the states in the center of the country and the deep south that we think of as the agricultural, rural states of the country.

But behind that simplistic notion, the situation with the rural vote is much more complex. First of all, I would tell you that the rural vote constitutes about 23 percent of the vote nationwide. Now, that is not all farmers. Only 2 percent of the American people live on farms. But what we're talking here is about 20 to 23 percent of the American people who live in rural areas, and these would be people who are outside of our big cities and suburbs, if you are going according to statistical devices used by the federal government to register where our population is, but basically outside the standard metropolitan statistical areas.

Now, since I have mentioned already that Bush won the farm states and also that in this year's election he is also considered to be ahead in the rural areas, the question is: Why are we even talking about this? Well, the fact is that rural Americans do have a history of switching their votes, and I also find them very, very divided over which way they should vote. And the reason for the division within rural America -- and this is not just this year; this has been true, I would say, at least for 30 or 40 years -- is that rural Americans are conservative -- and I will explain that in a moment -- but they are also more dependent on the federal government than the average person in the United States.

Now, what about the conservatism? We normally associate the conservatism with opposition to abortion, opposition to gun control, opposition to gay marriage and, you know, other conservative social positions. I would say you could, in general, make the point that they are more conservative on these issues, but on those specific things it really depends more on religion than it does on place. You know, if people are Catholic, if they are Evangelical, if they are from one branch or the more conservative branch of the Lutheran Church, they are more likely to be conservative on those issues. But you have lots of rural Americans who are from what we call the mainstream Protestant churches or also what we would call ethnic Catholics, as opposed to faithful Catholics, and those people are not necessarily conservative on all those issues.

Now, there is one other factor here, and that is that many people who are not going to live a highly conventional lifestyle leave rural America. They are more likely to have moved to one of the cities, one of the urban areas, and so you have fewer people in rural America who are not living, you know, a life in a family of a husband and wife and children. I mean, that is a factor. And so to some degree, you don't have quite the diversity of voters, or, if they are divorced or gay or whatever, they are probably not going to talk about it very much, they're not going to make the rights of such people to be a political issue.

The other point I wanted to make about the conservatism, though, of rural Americans is that rural Americans tend to be conservative in the way that they live. They're not flamboyant. They don't like to run up debt, except perhaps to buy farmland. And so therefore the idea of free spending is very abhorrent to them, and the deficit, the views on the deficit, have often been an issue in political campaigns.

Now, there is, of course, one difference with this, and that is they don't mind spending on rural America. But they think that there is, of course, spending on other parts of the society that doesn't warrant it so much as spending on rural America.

Now, what's the other side of this? Their dependence on federal spending. Rural Americans are lower in income than people who live in big cities or suburbs, on average, so therefore they are more dependent on the federal government. Now, the first thing that comes to mind when you think about this is farm subsidies, and yes, farm subsidies are important, but they aren't as important as certain other issues; for example, Social Security. Also, rural Americans are more elderly, on average, than in the other areas of the country. And if any of you go out to any of these rural areas to cover them for campaign reasons or for some reason, you're going to find that you see a lot of old people, and that's because there aren't that many jobs, and the young people move away. So they are very dependent on the federal government for Social Security, for Medicare and for federal spending on rural hospitals.

And there has been an issue for a long time that the federal government wants to pay the rural hospitals -- particularly in the Medicare program and the other federal programs in which they perform surgeries, et cetera, for the people -- the federal government wants to pay the rural hospitals less because they maintain that the cost of care in rural areas is cheaper. But, of course, the rural hospitals say, “we need to be able to get the best doctors, we want to offer equal care,” and so this is often an issue in the elections.

And, in fact, when the Congress passed the bill last year that will pay for part of the prescription drugs for the elderly, there was a special provision in there that said that the payments to rural hospitals would be increased. And this is the reason why a lot of rural Democrats voted for that bill when the Democratic leadership in the Congress was saying this isn't a good enough bill, we want to defeat this, this was added in and the rural Democrats did support it. So it shows you the importance of this kind of an issue.

Now, of course, farm subsidies and the farm program in general is very important to rural America. And particularly for those of you who wonder why did President Bush sign a farm bill that seemed to violate this principle about where we should be going with foreign policy, politically you go right back to the point that President Bush does need to win in the rural areas, and his political advisors told him that if he did not support this bill he would have lots of trouble in this election year. And so farm subsidies and farm programs are also an issue.

Another issue is rural development. The poorest rural communities in the United States are very, very dependent on grants from the federal government to do things like build new sewer systems, new water systems, and it may amaze you to realize that there still are places in the United States that do not have indoor plumbing, particularly in Alaska. And in the latest agriculture appropriations bill, Senator Stevens, the Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and an Alaska Senator, has gotten $28 million to build water and sewer in rural Alaska because, as his office told me, there are places in Alaska where they have the Internet and they have satellite television, but they still don't have indoor plumbing. And so this shows you how it is. It's the federal government that steps in, because you couldn't possibly afford from the local tax base to put in these water and sewer systems. And one other issue that's very important is transportation money.

Now, why are these things an issue in the campaign? Well, in general, if you were to look at what is the biggest difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in the United States, the single unifying factor is that the Democrats have more of a belief in the use of government to improve society. The Republicans are very afraid of that. They don't like too much government. They think government can cause problems. But the Democrats are enthusiastic about the use of government, so therefore they are more likely to support all of these programs that bring money to rural America. So the voters often find themselves torn, depending on the one set of kind of social and fiscal views, and on the other side are their views on their own personal needs, and so that's why they tend to go back and forth.

Now, in this election we also have two other issues that are peculiar to this election, and one of them is the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which would bring in more sugar from Latin America, and therefore the sugar growers say that it would cause their program to cease to function properly. And the important thing that you need to know about the sugar program in this instance is that sugar is not subsidized in the same sense that other crops are, in which farmers get payments, government payments. With sugar there is a floor price and there is a restriction on imports, which keeps the price up, and by bringing in more sugar you would probably bring the price down. And so in certain areas, particularly in Minnesota and in Florida, this is a big issue. Senator Kerry has said that he would not support the Central American Free Trade Agreement as it is currently written, and President Bush is very much behind the Central American Free Trade Agreement. So this is a key difference.

The other issue peculiar to this year's election is disaster aid. And you may recall that we had the hurricanes in Florida, and the hurricanes in Florida resulted in the passage of a disaster bill to help Florida and other areas of the Southeast, but at the same time there were less visible problems in the Midwest, particularly with drought and frost. There were just a number of problems. And so while the disaster aid for Florida was going through Congress, the Democrats, led to a great degree by Senator Daschle from South Dakota, who is in his own tough election race, and also there were Midwestern Republicans involved in this, they got a disaster aid package added to the bill. However, the conservative Republicans in the House and the White House insisted that this be offset by having a spending cut in another part of the farm bill. So there are some Midwesterners who are upset about this because they're saying that Florida is getting the aid without having to lose any other spending while the Midwest had to endure a cut in a conservation program in order to get its disaster aid. But this has been a kind of political football going on for the last few months. But the bill has been passed now, and so we know what will happen. What we don't know is who is going to get the political credit for this.

Now, another big issue in rural America is gun control. The Democratic Party has traditionally now for many years been in favor of gun control and this is a reason why a lot of rural men, in particular, will not vote Democratic, because they are afraid of losing their hunting weapons. They're afraid that they might have to register them, that it would become difficult to buy them, that they might be taken away. And the National Rifle Association has endorsed President Bush, but Mr. Kerry and his people have been campaigning very heavily on this issue, saying we are not going to take away your hunting weapons.

Now, there is one kind of funny incident that has happened in this campaign. Most people would not think of Mr. Kerry, with his rather patrician eastern style, as a hunter, but he is, and he's a very good one. There was this great story in the New York Times earlier this year that they wanted to show that Kerry could hunt, and so they took him to someplace in Minnesota. And it must have been one of those places where they release the birds and you shoot them, and they released a bird, and Kerry shot it so fast the photographers didn't have their cameras out. And the photographers, of course, were very upset about this because they said, well, our editors are going to be so unhappy, you've got to do this again. And so they released another bird, and Kerry shot that one just as fast. And so, Kerry wants to make the point that he's a hunter, that he's not going to take away hunting weapons, and they have also established Sportsmen for Kerry groups around the country.

Kerry has also endorsed a piece of legislation that hasn't gone anywhere yet, but it's called Open Fields. And this is another way in which he is trying to show his commitment to hunters. And the issue here is that there is an increasing problem in the United States that lower income people are losing access to hunting lands. The farmers, in a way, are getting smart and they're saying, okay, our lives are tough, the cost of agricultural inputs like fertilizer, et cetera, are going up, and we've always been letting these people out on our land to hunt with no fees. All you have to do, usually the custom is you have to ask the land owner if it's okay to go onto the land. But now what the farmers have been doing is renting out their land to people who are going to pay them high fees for it, and in some cases these people who want to hunt will book the land a year in advance. Well, those people tend to be executives from New York and California, and so this means that, for example, in North Dakota, people are renting out their land to these executives. And that's my home state, and I was there a few weeks ago, and I was really amazed at the people who are getting out in the airport from all over the place, with their beautiful weapons in these beautiful cases. These are not the kinds of things that local people can afford.

And so the issue is, these people are coming in from New York and California to hunt, but maybe the local people in North Dakota, and also the people who might be working class men in Minnesota, the nearest populous state, are saying, "Wait a minute, we're losing our access to hunting ground." And so what Open Fields would do is that it would allow a special form of payments from the Agriculture Department to the farmers who leave their land open to anyone who wants to hunt. And this is something that Kerry has also endorsed. Now, I realize that your readers and viewers in foreign countries are not going to be very interested in this. It's a pretty small issue. But at the same time, it shows you how important and divisive this kind of an issue is.

So, anyway, now the other part about the gun issue is that the Democrats say that in states in the past where they have made a big effort to explain the candidate's position on hunting weapons, it has reduced the Republican vote. It has made rural men more comfortable with voting Democratic. So that is an important issue for them.

Now, on the other side, I have to tell you, though, that for most rural Americans they're far more culturally comfortable with President Bush. They look at this man who goes back to his ranch in Texas, who cuts brush on the ranch, who drives around in his pickup, and that is very different from John Kerry. So President Bush is way ahead in rural areas. The last poll that I have seen shows that he is 13 points ahead. There is going to be another poll in rural areas of the battleground states. But we will see. There will be another poll released this Saturday.

Now, there is one exception to this, and that is that Kerry is ahead of Bush in the rural areas of the Pacific Northwest; that is, Oregon and Washington. And there you have an interesting question. You know, does the vote of rural Americans really reflect the culture, the larger culture, because, of course, Oregon and Washington are generally quite liberal places; or is it specific, is it different from the cities?

But, still, you are most likely to see when the election time comes that President Bush has gotten a larger vote in the rural areas. But what really is the issue here is how high that percentage is.

Now, to go down to the specifics of this campaign, no one is predicting that any of the plains or deep South states are going to go Democratic and no one is saying that the farm vote there is really important to the Democrats. However, the rural vote is important in, I guess I would say now, seven states: Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan.

Now, the way this works, and this is really the core message that I have to tell you today, is the rural vote is important in states that are only partly rural. The campaigns are not trying -- I mean, of course, there's some effort in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, a place like that, but we know those are going to go Republican. But in these other states, the ones that I just mentioned, the Democrats are going to probably get a big vote in the big cities, the Republicans are going to get a big vote in the suburbs, and the rural vote can make the difference. And what the Democratic consultants would tell you if they were here is they don't hope to get the majority, they just want to reduce the Republican majority; and if they can reduce it enough, then it's possible that Kerry could win these states. But in order to do that, they have to try to make the rural Americans comfortable with Kerry.

Now, I spent so much time explaining to you about what the Democrats are doing, and I just want to make clear, the reason for that, of course, is that Bush has a natural advantage. I really don't have to explain how Bush can win in rural America because he is so much more culturally connected, and I want to make sure that you understand that. That's why I have not talked about their technique. Of course, what the Bush campaign is saying is farm prices are pretty good and President Bush signed the farm bill, and but most of all, he is saying, “I'm with you culturally, I am like you.” That is what that is what President Bush is saying.

Now, there is one other issue that I have to talk about here, and that is the war in Iraq. Strangely enough, the war in Iraq could be an issue in how people vote in rural America. And you could say it's just the same thing as other people in making up their minds on the war in Iraq, but it is a little bit different. Rural Americans are very patriotic and they really want to support the troops, they want to support the President, and so that gives an edge to President Bush. However, there are a couple of issues that are very troublesome to rural America. First of all, the war is more visible in rural America than it is in urban areas. I've been saying earlier that, for the most part, this war has not affected the lives of the average American because we don't have a draft, we haven't been asked to pay higher taxes. Of course, people are worried about it and they see people dying in Iraq and they have hopes that this war will liberate Iraq and that Americans will be viewed as something other than just occupiers of the country.

But here's the way that this works in rural America. It's a more visible issue because, most likely, if you are a young person in rural America and you join the military, your little local paper will do a story about you. And also, people in rural America, I mean, in a small community they know who the soldiers are. You know, there aren't that many people and they see the parents in the grocery store, they see the parents at the gas station and they see them in church, and they say, "So how's your son doing? How's your daughter doing?"

Also, rural America is one of the two main sources of people for the volunteer army. If you really look at why people join the volunteer army, it's for economic opportunity, and there are two kinds of people that make up the volunteer army. One is young people from rural areas and small towns where there isn't a lot of economic opportunity, there aren't a lot of jobs, and they don't have a lot of money. And the second place is the large urban high schools where a lot of minorities go and where they're some of the best people in their classes. I mean, there they have a choice: are they going to go to college, are they going to go in the military? And so rural America is very important in that way. So people know when they've gone in the Army. If they're deployed to Iraq, there may be another story. And certainly, if they're killed, there's a story. So rural Americans are much more aware.

They're also aware in a second way, and that is that most of our military bases are in rural areas. And the Governor of Kansas has told me that the people in Kansas view the service people who work there and are based there as adopted Kansans. So what happens to them is very important as well. And if rural voters are disturbed about this, then that could also lead them to vote for Senator Kerry.

So those, I would say, are the main issues. Remember, President Bush is way ahead in rural America, so we're really talking about will the Democrats be able to succeed in selected places that could take Kerry over the edge in the Electoral College.

In terms of who they're trying to get to vote, both the Democrats and Republicans would agree, most white men in rural areas are going to vote Republican. But I had one Democratic consultant say to me, "We know the big farmers are going to vote Republican because the prices have been up, they care about trade issues, they're more likely to be Republicans. However, the people who are not big farmers and who are more concerned about these other issues, like Social Security, Medicare, water and sewer, those sorts of things, they may vote Democratic." And that's, of course, what the Democrats are trying to do. As I said, the Republicans start with the white men and the big farmers. The Democrats are trying to get the rural women. But more rural women are Republican than women in any other segment of the country. They are just more conservative and they are supportive of the President. So it's a harder job for the Democrats to get the women's vote.

And there's one other element in this that I have not mentioned, and that is the minority vote in rural America. There is a substantial rural African American vote, but most of that is in the southern states and so therefore it doesn't play too much of a role because, even though they're likely to vote Democratic, there is also a fairly large rural Latino vote, and that's very important, for example, in New Mexico. And it hasn't been developed so much in other areas. I don't think that they have been courting them so much.

But there is one group that is really being courted in this election, and that is American Indians. Over the decades, American Indians have had a very low voter turnout, but they are becoming a substantial factor in elections, particularly the South Dakota Senate election and I would say the Oklahoma Senate election. The Democrats have made real inroads with them in recent years in getting them out to vote because, of course, they're low income and the federal government is very involved in the management of the reservations and in bringing money and services to rural Indian areas. So the Indian vote is very important. And, you know, if I had any story that I could do in the last week of the election, it would be to go around the country and do a story on the Indian vote because it's an important development in our politics and it's kind of under covered.

I'm going to move to a period of questions here, but I want to make one final point, and that is that there is also some importance of the treatment of rural areas in terms of how people outside the rural areas view the candidates. Americans love rural America. This is a matter of great frustration to the people who are advocates of free trade and agriculture and who hate farm subsidies and who think that they just go to rich people and all of that, but all the polls show this. And you might have a question of why is this true. Well, a few years ago I was trying to figure this out and I went to Europe and I interviewed a French sociologist about attitudes in Europe towards rural areas. And the man I interviewed, the sociologist, told me that he had examined the attitudes towards the rural areas of Scandinavia, Great Britain and France, and what he had discovered is: the Scandinavians don't love farmers, they love nature; the British don't love farmers, they love animals; and the French, though, love farmers because when they go to rural France on vacation they want that village life there, they want those cheeses, they want those hams, they want all those little restaurants, they want all of that. And that's why if you're looking at the politics of the European Union, you can see why the French are so supportive of continuing farm policies there.

Well, what does all this mean for the United States? The key factor here, I think, is that we had a Homestead Act which settled most of the lands of the Louisiana Purchase; millions and millions of European immigrants came and settled those lands and their descendents still have family memories of what those places were like and how hard the life was, and they have a sympathy with rural America. And that continues. And you can also see it often in the imagery that the candidates will use in their television advertising. It is a very positive thing to show a candidate in a rural area, to show him on a farm. You know, the people in the urban areas like this and it is a sign of kind of decency and goodness and all of that. So I think that this does matter to the urban voter, the suburban voter, as well as the rural voter. And I would be very happy if you could somehow keep these thoughts in mind as you do your final coverage.

Thank you.

MR. DENIG: Jerry, thank you very much. I would like to take your questions and ask, as usual, to please use the microphone, identify yourself and your news organization. Let's start with France on the right here, please.

QUESTION: Patrick Jarreau, Le Monde. Two questions. First, what about health care for rural America? Did you say that they were covered by those rural hospitals which are federally funded?

And second question. You mentioned hunting. You said that maybe it was not an issue. Actually, it is. Au contraire, as we would say.

MR. HAGSTROM: Yeah.

QUESTION: Indeed, one in Europe, and especially in France, that mainly because of environmental regulations. Is it also an issue here? Do environmental regulations limit the right of hunting?

MR. HAGSTROM: Well, let me take the health care issue first. Yes, and there's one issue on health care that I forgot about, which is rural Americans care very much about the cost of drugs, and so this issue about the re-importation of drugs from Canada and the fact that the prescription drug legislation that was passed last year forbids the federal government from using its purchasing power to force the drug companies to charge less for the drugs is an issue. But, you know, the main thing is that the Bush campaign says, we passed this legislation, help is on the way next year. It hasn't gone into effect yet.
And so the Bush campaign's points would be they pushed through this piece of legislation that is going to reduce the costs of drugs for the elderly; and secondly, that legislation included an increase in the payments to rural hospitals to make their lives easier. So that would be the Bush campaign position. The Democrats would be saying, yes, but Bush opposes re-importation of drugs from Canada, and Kerry supports that and also supports forcing the drug companies to charge less, using the powers of government to do that.

So that's, I would say, the health care issue. And, of course, tied into this health care issue is the fact that rural Americans have to go such great distances to get medical care and the fact that they want to maintain these local hospitals so that they don't have to drive 100 miles, so that they don't have to worry that somebody is going to die on the way to the hospital. Just to raise that point.

Now, on hunting, I'm not sure what you mean by environmental regulations. I have never heard about environmental regulations reducing access to hunting. But, you know, hunting regulations are mostly a matter of state law, not federal law, and there are restrictions on how much you can hunt based on the population of the animals and there are issues about how expensive the hunting licenses are. There's one federal issue that gets into this, and that is that under the farm bill, since 1985, farmers have been paid to keep certain lands out of production; they're considered marginal farmlands. And the fact that they have gotten these payments has increased the population of wildlife because those areas that are not farmed are good breeding places for ducks and other birds and also animals.

QUESTION: Daphne Fan, ETTV from Taiwan. You mentioned a little bit about the foreign policy. I wonder if you can be more specific talking about the relationship between U.S. foreign policy, especially the agriculture and trade policy toward Asia, and the relationship between the interest in rural America and the votes in those battleground states.

MR. HAGSTROM: Okay. First of all, I would tell you that I don't think the trade policy is a big issue in rural America except on the issue of sugar. Now, there are trade issues that rural Americans, particularly farmers, are concerned about with Asia, mostly about whether or not China is going to be a stable market for American agricultural products. The way that I think that most rural Americans view China is, of course, that it's a fantastic market in size, but they have been very disturbed by the decision-making process in the Chinese Government, the fact that sometimes the Chinese say that they are going to take a product and then later they might say, oh, no, we're not sure whether that's good or not, maybe there's something wrong with it. There's a great fear that China may use, you know, sanitation rules to keep products out if they decide that they don't want them at that particular time. So that is an issue, but I would not consider it a particularly high-level issue. It's more of an issue of foreign policy than it is of politics. Nobody is going to decide their vote on that, I don't think. Nobody is going to decide their vote on any agricultural issue related to Asia.

QUESTION: I'm Silvija Luks from Croatian Radio-television. I have just two short questions.

First, somebody told me, and I'm just trying to ask you whether you have any knowledge that the International Safari Organization -- we have been talking about hunting -- which is very powerful and related to the production of weapons and so on, and the vice presidents of that international society organization is George Bush the father and James Baker -- called their members to vote Republicans. Could you confirm that or deny?

And the second question for me, which is very important because there is 2 millions of Croats living in the United States, Americans of Croatian origin. Do you have any knowledge how they would vote? They live mostly on West Coast and East Coast, not so much in rural America. I would appreciate very much.

MR. HAGSTROM: Well, on your first point, it's certainly possible that the Bush campaign -- or that former President Bush might have called the members of the Safari Organization and asked them to vote Republican. I don't know anything about that.
But I would tell you, from the way you have described the organization, I don't think it would be terribly big and I wouldn't be surprised if most of those people wouldn't already vote Republican. I mean, if you're rich enough that you're going to go on a safari in Mongolia or wherever, the likelihood is that you're a white male Republican. Now, that wouldn't totally be true, you know. The Kerry's, after all, are Democrats and they're very wealthy, so I just throw out that idea. I don't think that that would turn the election.

On the Croatian American vote, I have to admit that that's one group I've never studied. I don't know what percentage of Croatian immigrants have citizenship, which you have to have to vote. I think we need a new expert on Croatian Americans. You have to go out and find it. Are you going to go out to one of these districts and report on these people?

QUESTION: Well, I will try to ask. I mean, I was interested, but I will try to ask Mr. Ed Damich, who is a federal judge of Croatian origin. So, but --

MR. HAGSTROM: I happen to know Ed Damich.

QUESTION: -- Croatians are going to -- there is 2 million of Croatians of American citizenship. Thank you.

MR. HAGSTROM: I happen to know Ed Damich, but I didn't know he was Croatian, so I will now turn all calls on this point to him. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Lisa Thomas from Kyodo News. Can you tell us how important the issue of terrorism and national security play a role for rural vote in the election?

MR. HAGSTROM: Well, you know, I think like all Americans, rural Americans are concerned about the issue of terrorism in general. They do have one particular issue, and that is what we call biosecurity, the concern that somehow a terrorist could do something to the food supply. But they view it in a couple of different ways. Of course, the first one is that if a terrorist were to affect the food supply, it would affect the food for ordinary Americans. But, of course, rural Americans, farmers, ranchers, agribusiness processing people, view this is a business issue, the fear that people would stop eating something. But the second issue would be whether it would somehow affect a product that we export and therefore the market would dry up for some kind of a food product.

QUESTION: I'm wondering, as long as you determine who your President is by the Electoral College, the vast majority of rural voters don't even have to be courted because, as you said, their vote has already been decided and their issues don't need to be touched upon. Do you think the Electoral College has a large influence in why candidates have downplayed the rural vote, ignored it?

MR. HAGSTROM: First of all, I want to make clear, when I say the rural vote has been ignored, I mean that the rural vote has been ignored by the media. It is not ignored in this election by the campaigns.

Now, the Electoral College is a very interesting point here. Many people have been surprised why, after Vice President Gore got 500,000 more votes in the last election and then didn't become the President, why haven't we had a movement against this.

Well, the fact is that if you look at all those states like North and South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, all those states, is that you will never get the state legislature to vote for a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. Their view is that they're out there with their small populations and their big geographic areas, and all of their problems of lower income and trying to maintain a decent, middle-class American standard of living, and they're going to take all the power they can get. So they're not going to give up their role in the presidential election.

Now, you raised an interesting point here about taking them for granted, and I can only throw out this idea because, of course, I haven't added it up. When you look at the populations of those rural states that are so small, I do not know whether most rural Americans actually live in those red states compared with how many rural Americans there are in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Florida. And not just those. But the battleground states are so much more populous in general and also they have a higher population density. You go out to Wyoming and North Dakota and you don't even have one person per square mile in some of those places. But it isn't ignored and I think how much it really matters depends on that population. It would be very interesting to see if you could add that up. I think you probably could through some statistics at the Agriculture Department.

QUESTION: Real quick, then, on the fact that the media has ignored these rural states, the story here is who's going to win the election, and for the media to add that up, they need to look at battleground states and probably not the other rural states, so --

MR. HAGSTROM: I would agree with that, yes.

QUESTION: So how much blame should we put on the media in America for not looking at, say, Nebraska or the Dakotas or Wyoming, if the story doesn't lie there?

MR. HAGSTROM: Well, I'm not saying they should look at Nebraska or Wyoming. I'm saying that they should look more at rural Ohio, rural Florida, rural Pennsylvania, look at the rural areas that matter.

MR. DENIG: We'll take the gentleman from Japan. I think that will be our last question.

QUESTION: Sawaki from Tokyo Shimbun. I'd like to ask a question about personality versus policy. Some people say whether you're a likeable character or aloof is a very important issue, but, of course, others say ultimately voters decide their votes on candidates' policies. So which of these is decisive, more decisive factor? And when you compare the rural voters with city or suburban voters, do you see any difference there?

MR. HAGSTROM: First of all, on the issue of personality versus policy, I think it is a big issue. But I would refine that to one other point, and that is I think that Americans make their final decision on how to vote on the issue of character.

Now, what does character mean? I think it basically means whether the voter trusts the candidate. And the pollsters that I talk to say the American people are extremely rational on this point, and that is, you can put out all the position papers on every subject in the world, and we do now on these websites, I mean, you can find out where they stand on everything, and yet the voters realize that in the end there is going to be compromise. That position that the candidate puts out on any subject is never going to be exactly like that. And so what the voters want to know is: Is this guy basically with me? Would I trust him to compromise? And so that's what it comes down to. It's the central issue at the end of the election.

And now, when you're talking about Bush and Kerry, I think that, as I said, culturally, I think that President Bush identifies or that rural Americans identify with President Bush much more easily than Mr. Kerry, but I did think that in the first debate, in particular, that that somewhat switched because Mr. Kerry performed better. I mean, you know, you can identify with President Bush, but if you look at his first debate performance, you might think, well, I don't know. Maybe you identify with him but you don't know whether he can take the positions very well. So they can go back and forth there. But certainly on cultural identification, I still think Mr. Bush has the upper hand, particularly with rural Americans. By the way, I'm sure you have heard what some people in New York and LA or San Francisco think about President Bush. So if you're looking for a difference between, regions of the country, yes, definitely rural Americans are different from people who live in Manhattan or live in Dupont Circle or live in Seattle and San Francisco.

MR. DENIG: Okay, thank you very much, Jerry. We really appreciate it, and thank you.

MR. HAGSTROM: Thank you. I have an article here that I did on this. I'm going to leave it with Margaret. Maybe she can make copies for you. And one other thing. The Center for Rural Strategies will release a poll on Saturday, and you can just look on the website www.ruralstrategies.org and that will tell you how things are going in the rural areas of the battleground states.

MR. DENIG: Let me also just remind all of you that we have another elections briefing at 2 o'clock today. We have the top election officials from the states of Maryland and Virginia, and they'll talk about the whole host of issues that we've been reading about in the American press.

Thank you.