After the vote in Indiana and North Carolina, Democrats are favoring Obama, but the party remains split between rural and urban communities.

Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama are attracting support from those who live separately and vote separately.

For the third straight year, a study of Hispanic representation in Washington state's politics finds Latinos are underrepresented. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports, "In towns such as Toppenish, Wapato and Walla Walla, Latinos have considerably less influence in local politics and policy-making although in some places Latinos outnumber whites. The study, "The State of the State for Washington Latinos," was carried out by researchers at Whitman University.

Latinos now account for 10% of the state's population, but only 2% of Washington's state legislators are Hispanic.

Latino Washingtonians are especially concentrated in the central part of the state, an agricultural region. Looking at local and countywide leadership there, the research team found "a 'pressing need' for changes in the way school boards are elected in Toppenish and Wapato, where at-large voting results in under-representation of Latinos." Students in Pasco, Washington, have challenged the lack of bilingual ballots as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The presidential candidates talk about tractors and farms and the importance of rural life — they just aren't spending much time in these places.

At the Patchwork Nation site over at the Christian Science Monitor, Jim Gimpel has been counting the number of stops the candidates have been making in the various kinds of American communities. From February through the third week in April, Gimpel reports, none of the three remaining candidates has set foot in what he calls "Tractor Country." For comparison, 34 percent of Barack Obama's campaign stops have been in the "Monied 'Burbs." (It was 25 percent for Hillary Clinton and 27 percent for John McCain.)

Gimpel wrote: "Seldom do we stop to consider just how marginalized these rural and small-town voters have become in contemporary campaign politics. They don’t cast many votes (our estimate is 3 percent), they don’t have much money to contribute, and appearances in these locations must not generate many rating points. For major campaigns, apparently, this means those places just aren’t worth much – certainly not after Iowa, anyway."

A Democrat barely missed winning a U.S. House seat from northeast Mississippi Tuesday. (Voting above.) The seat was held by Republican Roger Wicker, who first won in 1994 but left the House to fill the Senate office left by Trent Lott. The largely rural district is centered around Tupelo.

The district has voted overwhelmingly for Republican presidential candidates recently, but Democrat Travis Childers came within 410 votes of winning the seat outright. Childers, a longtime chancery clerk, won 49.4 percent of the vote. He will face Republican Greg Davis, mayor of Southhaven, in a runoff May 13.

The race was polarized between Davis' home in the suburbs of Memphis and the rest of the district. The two candidates were "practically twins" on social issues, according to the Tupelo newspaper, but Davis favored a withdrawal of troops from Iraq and opposed some of the Bush tax cuts.