Is Trump Fever breaking? Politico on Friday announced that the Harris-Walz campaign has hired my friend Matt Hildreth of progressive Rural Organizing dot org as the campaign’s National Rural Outreach Director. Hildreth’s group announced it formally in a tweet shortly thereafter. Politico: Hiring Hildreth, whose grassroots organization is already knocking doors for Harris and Democratic candidates across the country this fall, signals the campaign is looking to seriously expand a resource-intensive ground game to reach rural voters who could swing the election. The Harris-Walz team doesn’t expect the ticket to flip many rural counties. But some of Harris’ top advisers have argued that simply losing by slightly fewer percentage points in these areas could help carry her and down-ballot Democrats to victory. In recent memos, the campaign has argued “the key to decreasing margins in rural areas is to show up and compete everywhere — which is exactly what we’re doing across the country.” Exactly right. That’s how Democrat Heath Shuler ousted eight-term, NC-11 Republican Rep. Charles Taylor in 2006. It’s easier and more economically efficient for statewide Democratic candidates to perform voter outreach where they can find “their” voters in bulk (in the cities). The flaw in that strategy is in states (and districts) where red-county voters outnumber and outvote Democrat-leaning voters in urban, blue islands. Under the right conditions, it is possible for Democrats to eke out U.S. Senate wins in Georgia where half the voting population lives in Atlanta metro. But a third or so of Georgia’s…