Former labor secretary Tom Perez went to Hayward, a community of 2,300 people in northern Wisconsin, for a listening session as part of his campaign to become Democratic national chairman. “One of the reasons we lost in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania is we’re not speaking to rural voters,” Perez told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, naming three states that were key to election of President Trump.
Rural voters preferred Trump by a nearly 2-to-1 margin nationwide over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to exit polling. Hayward is the county seat of Sawyer County, which gave a narrow victory margin to President Obama in 2012 but went for Trump by more than 1,600 votes last November.
Perez and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison are regarded as the frontrunners to chair the DNC. Ellison is backed by three of the six Wisconsin delegates to the DNC; the other three are neutral. “The Democratic Party needs to make house calls,” Perez said in a Journal Sentinel interview, but rural voters “feel quite neglected.” Over the past eight years, Republicans displaced Democrats in control of most statewide offices and the Legislature.