If you live in rural America these days, you might keep your eyes open for an increasingly rare sight: that of a Democrat. So awful, so toxic is the brand of the party of Joe Biden that its adherents would just as soon you didn’t know it.

Football’s New Orleans Saints had a similar problem back in the 1980s, when they were consistently a loser, a laughingstock, the NFL’s worst team. Back then, diehard fans used to break out the brown paper bags, cut out a pair of eye holes, and head to the Superdome to cheer on their hapless squad, all while sparing themselves the embarrassment of being seen doing something so sorry as supporting the Saints. But while that behavior was all in good fun, the refusal of many Democrats today to even identify themselves as such is no laughing matter — at least not for them. For the rest of us, though, it’s something of a hoot.

Politics and political popularity tend to run in cycles, but rural Democrats will tell you that it’s never been so bad. As the Associated Press reports:

The party’s brand is so toxic in the small towns 100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh that some liberals have removed bumper stickers and yard signs and refuse to acknowledge publicly their party affiliation. These Democrats are used to being outnumbered by the local Republican majority, but as their numbers continue to dwindle, those who remain are feeling increasingly isolated and unwelcome in their own communities.

“The hatred for Democrats is just unbelievable,” said Tim Holohan, an accountant based in rural McKean County who recently encouraged his daughter to get rid of a pro-Joe Biden bumper sticker. “I feel like we’re on the run.”

The climate across rural Pennsylvania is symptomatic of a larger political problem threatening the Democratic Party heading into the November elections. Beyond losing votes in virtually every election since 2008, Democrats have been effectively ostracized from the overwhelmingly white parts of rural America, leaving party leaders with few options to reverse a cultural trend that is redefining the political landscape.

Ya hate to see it.

How bad is it for Democrats outside the big cities and suburbs? Consider this: In 2008, Barack Obama won 875 counties nationwide when he beat Arizona Republican Senator John McCain for the presidency. But just 12 years later, when Joe Biden “won” the White House against incumbent President Donald Trump, he did so while winning just 527 counties. As the AP notes, “The vast majority of those losses — 260 of the 348 counties — took place in rural counties.”

The carnage was worst across largely white areas of the Midwest: “21 rural counties in Michigan flipped from Obama in 2008 to Trump in 2020; Democrats lost 28 rural counties in Minnesota, 32 in Wisconsin and a whopping 45 in Iowa.”

That’s a colossal collapse of support, and it rightly makes one wonder how on earth Biden could’ve made up for such a shrinkage. The AP claims, incuriously, that Biden simply overcame those losses by growing his support in the more populous Democrat-dominated urban areas. But how? The guy mostly stayed in his basement, and even when he did venture out, he couldn’t draw flies to a campaign event.

As we’ve noted before, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg poured nearly a half-billion dollars into the urban areas of swing states to churn out unprecedented numbers of votes. But while Democrats and their wealthy Big Tech supporters may have bought themselves the presidency in 2020, they did so by selling their souls to the least popular, least capable, least competent standard-bearer we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

And now they’re reaping the whirlwind.

“We’re letting Republicans use the language of the far left to define the Democratic Party, and we can’t do that,” says Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat who was bounced out of her Senate seat a few years back. “The trend lines in rural America are very, very bad. Now, the brand is so toxic that people who are Democrats, the ones left, aren’t fighting for the party.”

We can’t say we blame them. The Democrat Party is an embarrassment these days, bereft of good leadership and good ideas. Folks in rural areas must be asking themselves: What’s there to fight for?