What's happened is the Republicans have been smart.

There's no question that [Donald] Trump got elected because of rural America. And our party still is in denial. They don't get it.

I don't know how you change that. There's hardly anybody left like me in the Democratic Party in Congress. These districts have been so gerrymandered that, in most of them, a Democrat can't win. Somebody like me trying to start off today, he'd never get endorsed. Because I'm too conservative.

Try to un-gerrymander these districts so that you're not packing all the Democrats into one district, so you've got districts that are competitive, so that you've got a shot at electing Democrats. But that's more a long-term proposition, if it can even be done.

A lot of it is backlash against all this political correctness that's going on.

[Rural people] have a different lifestyle, and they don't want to change it. They're happy with the way things are. It's causing the party political problems.

It was clear that [the number] just kept growing, and there were no [Hillary] Clinton signs. People were fed up.