Poll: Romney crushing Obama in rural areas of swing states

The random cellphone and land line poll of 600 likely rural voters in nine battleground states Oct. 9-11 has Romney at 59 percent among the survey’s respondents. Obama’s support is now down to 37 percent among rural battleground voters, a plunge of 10 points from the actual rural vote in those states four years ago.

“What Republican candidates need to do is to rack up big margins in rural areas in order to offset smaller [Republican] margins in urban and suburban areas,” says Dan Judy of North Star Opinion Research, the Republican polling firm that participated in the survey…

The nine battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin have a collective rural population of 13.6 million, according to the Census Bureau.

“It’s a boon to Romney,” says pollster Anna Greenberg of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, the Democratic partner in the survey. “It will help him … because, of course, he will lose urban areas by a similar margin. And the suburban areas are still pretty competitive.”