Hillary Clinton continues to be scrutinized like a presidential candidate, despite not running for anything. The latest example is the bipartisan uproar over her comments last week in India. “If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that won two thirds of America’s gross domestic product,” she said, referring to a legitimate statistic. “So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

The remarks fed a resentment in rural communities against political elites. In an apology over the weekend on Facebook, Clinton explained that she had plans during the campaign that “would have focused on the real needs of hard-working yet struggling Americans in every part of the country,” including minimum wage increases, paid leave, and affordable college. She also pointed out that President Donald Trump “has done nothing positive to ease the pain of the people who most strongly supported him, from the loss of jobs in coal country to the opioid epidemic to the tax bill.”

Clinton is right about that; Trump’s policies have been indifferent to small-town America, when not actively harmful. But the Clinton flap speaks to a broader disconnect among Democrats, who simply do not represent that many rural voters. Consequently, their solutions often mean well but fail to speak to specific challenges these Americans face. Trump’s failure to fix, and propensity to exacerbate, longstanding problems in small towns provides an opportunity for Democrats, who are on the verge of blowing it.

Clinton’s boast that she won where the economy is vibrant partially explains why she lost: There are too few of these vibrant areas left to win national elections. Regional inequality resulted from Clinton-era globalization hollowing out factory towns in the 1990s and runaway firms seizing control of large sectors of the economy, swallowing Main Streets nationwide. With votes for president not spread equally across the country, a Democrat can win the popular vote convincingly and lose enough of the Midwest to tip the election to a Republican.

The antidote to that problem, beyond eliminating the anti-democratic Electoral College, requires broadening economic dynamism. Many of Trump’s policies do the opposite, centralizing power and fortunes with the wealthy and privileged. Conservatives representing rural areas know this. That’s why they start to sound like Senator Bernie Sanders when it comes to issues affecting their constituents.