Republicans a ‘rural party and a southern party’

Appearing on the MSNBC show “Hardball” with Chris Matthews, former Virginia congressman Tom Davis laid out a pretty stark assessment of the Republican movement.

Politics has been defined by culture over the last few cycles, and we’ve become a rural party and a Southern party. We’ve been losing inner suburbs and the like. A lot of this was the policies of the Bush administration.

Davis points out, rather bleakly, that conservatives are winning the counties with the lowest education and economic achievement, while Democrats are winning in the high-achiever counties.

As we move to cultural politics, that’s been the shift. It’s a terrible move. It’s also rural vs. urban in the Northeast and the Midwest and everywhere else.

Davis concludes that hard-right activists such as Rush Limbaugh “want a private club with an admissions test. They don’t want a party which is by definition a coalition.”

Here in New York state, this begs the question: How long can the GOP position itself as the ‘Party of Upstate” and the “not-NYC” party?

Is that a working formula for future majorities in the Assembly or Senate? Or for winning statewide races?