What Drives Political Polarization - Jobs Gaps between Rural and Urban Places

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Levan Ramishvili

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Apr 24, 2023, 1:17:35 AM4/24/23

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What Drives Political Polarization

A new study suggests that the jobs gaps between rural and urban places is a key.

By William A. Galston

By most measures, the U.S. has become far more polarized than it was when I cast my first vote in 1968. And politically, the kind of polarization that matters most is geographical.

In the close 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, 20 states were decided by margins of less than 5 percentage points. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush faced off in another close election, only 12 states ended up this category. That number fell to 11 in 2016 and eight in 2020. During this period, few states became more competitive. Instead, most red states became redder, and blue states bluer, while many swing states shifted decisively toward one or the other party.

County lines are nearly as stable as state borders, and polarizing shifts within counties are similarly pronounced. As recently as 1992, 38% of voters lived in counties that gave winning margins of at least 20 points to Democrats or Republicans. By 2016 the share of these voters had risen to 60%, and this trend appears to have continued in 2020.

Against this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that the number of competitive congressional districts has declined sharply. In 1999, according to Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, 164 seats were within 5 points of the nearly even national partisan divide. That number has since been cut in half. The number of seats that remain competitive in every election—what Cook calls “hyper-swing seats”—has fallen during this period by 58%, from 107 to 45. In more than 80% of districts, the outcome is for all practical purposes determined in the dominant party’s primary election, typically low-turnout affairs dominated by the most committed voters.

One of the main drivers of geographical polarization is the widening gap between rural and urban America. In an illuminating new study, Cornell’s Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown show that as recently as three decades ago, rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections closely tracked each other. In 1996 Bob Dole’s share of the rural vote was only 3 points higher than his urban share, even though he was Republican from Kansas. In 2020 Donald Trump’s gap was 21 points. He received 64% of the rural vote and 43% of the urban vote.

It is tempting but wrong to view this divide as the consequence of the South’s political realignment. Yes, the urban-rural gap between the parties widened to 18 points in the South, but it expanded even more in the Midwest (22 points) and the West (20 points), with the Northeast not far behind at 15 points.

According to Ms. Mettler and Mr. Brown, two main forces drove this widening. First, the economic fortunes of urban and rural America have diverged sharply. Since the 1980s, manufacturing has been about twice as important for rural areas as for their urban counterparts. The decline of manufacturing jobs since 2000 has hit rural areas especially hard. Many small towns depended heavily on single manufacturing plants, whose closure sent many of them in a downward spiral that proved hard to reverse.

In 1970, the education gap between rural and urban areas was modest. Today, 35% of urban residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 21% for rural Americans. This helps explain why urban areas were more able to take advantage of the expanding information economy. An incredible 94% of the nation’s job growth since 2000 has occurred in urban counties, while almost half of their rural counterparts have suffered net job losses during the same period. Similarly, since the turn of the century, the population of urban counties has risen at more than twice the rate of rural counties, 41% of which have experienced population losses. When rural Americans say they feel left behind, this is part of what they mean.

The second large force driving the urban-rural political divide, the authors argue, is the growing nationalization of policy, which many rural Americans view as efforts by educated urban Americans to enforce their elite outlook on issues ranging from racial, ethnic and gender identity to the environment, education, gun ownership, immigration and religious liberty. As the urban influence has grown in the Democratic Party, rural Americans have rallied behind the Republican Party in resistance.

These scholars show that we need not choose between economics and culture to explain the widening political gap between rural and urban America. In recent decades, the U.S. has experienced what the authors call “sequential polarization,” with rural economic decline increasing rural Americans’ receptivity to the Republican message of cultural resistance.

If Ms. Mettler and Mr. Brown are correct—and theirs is the most balanced and persuasive account I’ve seen—our current polarization is the result of tectonic economic and cultural shifts that won’t be reversed quickly or easily.

Levan Ramishvili

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Apr 24, 2023, 1:22:49 AM4/24/23

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The Growing Rural-Urban Political Divide and Democratic Vulnerability

Abstract

Throughout American history and as recently as the early 1990s, each of the major political parties included both rural and some urban constituencies, but since then the nation has become deeply divided geographically. Rural areas have become increasingly dominated by the Republican Party and urban places by the Democratic Party. This growing rural-urban divide is fostering polarization and democratic vulnerability. We examine why this cleavage might endanger democracy, highlighting various mechanisms: the combination of long-standing political institutions that give extra leverage to sparsely populated places with a transformed party system in which one party dominates those places; growing social divergence between rural and urban areas that fosters “us” versus “them” dynamics; economic changes that make rural areas ripe for grievance politics; and party leaders willing to cater to such resentments. We present empirical evidence that this divide is threatening democracy and consider how it might be mitigated.

The United States’ fractious political polarization increasingly endangers basic pillars of democracy. This is evidenced by many Republicans’ continued denial of President Joe Biden’s victory, by the violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol and Republican officials’ unwillingness to investigate it, and by efforts by many state legislatures to scale back voting rights and politicize election administration. These developments beg the question of how deep our civil strife goes and what it portends.

Throughout much of American history, the nation suffered sectional divisions between North and South that restricted democratic development and led, on various occasions, to severe backsliding (Mettler and Lieberman 2020). In the 1890s, for example, southern states disenfranchised millions of Black men and established one-party rule, in which southern Democrats used their political power to limit the political and economic rights of Black Americans for the next 60 years.

The demise of those regional cleavages might make it appear that American democracy is safe today. Yet another place-based division has intensified in recent decades: a national rural-urban political cleavage (Gimpel et al. 2020; Hopkins 2017, 193–212; McKee 2008; Scala and Johnson 2017). Increasingly this divide appears to be a major source of polarization and democratic vulnerability.

Among individual Americans, the transformation of the United States’ place-based politics features two striking national developments. First, according to our analysis of data from the American National Election Studies (ANES; 2020), by the late 1990s, rural dwellers across the country—who had long affiliated with different parties based on their region—converged in the Republican Party, as shown in Figure 1.1 Many rural southerners moved away from the Democratic Party quickly after the civil rights achievements of the 1960s, but after that rates held quite steady from the mid-1970s through the next quarter century. From 2000 onward, however, rural Americans from both the North and South moved in lockstep into greater allegiance with the Republican Party.

Figure 1 Convergence of Rural Americans, North and South, Identifying as Republican

SOURCE: ANES Cumulative File (2021).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Second, rural and urban people across the country, who had long resembled each other in their voting patterns, diverged politically, as shown in Figure 2. Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century and as recently as the 1996 presidential election, urban and rural Americans voted in sync, but the difference between them has grown ever since. By 2020, roughly two-thirds of people who lived in rural areas voted to reelect President Trump, while just one-third of urbanites did.2 Given that only 14 percent of Americans live in areas deemed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as rural, this growing fissure might not seem problematic.3 However, because American political institutions are organized geographically and give more power to sparsely populated areas, this division, as we show, can not only generate political polarization but also threaten democracy.

Figure 2 Divergence of Rural and Urban Support for Republican Presidential Candidates

SOURCE: ANES Cumulative File (2021).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Republican candidates have pitched their rhetoric to rural dwellers in recent years, depicting them as “real Americans,” and lambasting Democrats and the media for their “cosmopolitan bias.” On the campaign trail in 2008, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin announced that she and presidential candidate John McCain “believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic . . . very . . . pro-America areas of this great nation.” The strategy of “doubling down” in appeals to the rural and small-town base helped to boost voter turnout in 2020; and while it was not enough to get Trump reelected, it generated long Republican coattails nonetheless, enabling the party to minimize Senate losses and to pick up seats in the House.

Yet the contemporary rural-urban divide runs much deeper than partisan affiliation or vote choice, affecting democratic values. Rural dwellers tend to prize community spirit and civic involvement, embracing a Tocquevillian or communitarian conception of democracy; and they have strong ties to the place where they live (Wuthnow 2018). Yet recently, as evidenced by the 2020 ANES, they appear to be less tied to liberal democratic values than urbanites. According to our analysis, they were much more likely to favor restrictions on the press, for example, and to suggest it would be helpful if the president could unilaterally work on the country’s problems without paying attention to the Congress or the courts. These indicators point to a serious divide in the U.S. polity, one that threatens the health of democracy but has received relatively little attention from students of American politics.4

Certainly political orientations often differ with individuals’ social groups or place-based identities, and such variation is a normal and typically healthy part of democratic politics. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for residents of rural and urban areas in countries around the world to support different parties or politicians. We argue, however, that when such differences are combined with partisan polarization, the basic pillars of democracy can be endangered: free and fair elections and their legitimacy; the rule of law; the legitimacy of the political opposition; and the integrity of civil liberties, civil rights, and voting rights (Mettler and Lieberman 2020). Indeed, in the contemporary United States, the rural-urban divide stands as a significant threat to democracy.

We begin with a brief overview of this growing political divide and note some possible explanations for why it has intensified in recent decades. Then we discuss why it may threaten democracy. The body of the article examines some ways in which the rural-urban political divide makes democracy vulnerable. We conclude with consideration of how the divide might be mitigated and democracy protected.

How the Rural-Urban Divide Is Shaping American Politics

Throughout American history, each of the two major parties typically drew grassroots supporters and elected officials from both rural and urban places, and that remained the case as recently as the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, however, the partisan divide has increasingly separated more rural states from those with greater urban populations. In the South, several predominantly rural states that until recently elected Democrats to Congress and statehouses have shifted to favoring Republicans; these include Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and West Virginia (Maxwell and Shields 2019; Wright 2020). Several rural states in the Midwest, most notably Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, have undergone similar shifts. The only rural states that deviate from these patterns are those in New England, where New Hampshire and Vermont have been shifting somewhat toward electing Democrats. Meanwhile, more urban states have become increasingly dominated by Democrats, as epitomized by California (Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi 2021).

This growing political cleavage has become even more apparent within states than between them, as cities controlled by Democrats increasingly exist as islands amid Republican-dominated rural areas. Predominantly urban Orange County, California, for example, long a Republican stronghold, has been shifting to favor Democrats. Meanwhile, the rural Adirondack “North Country” of New York, after supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012, gave Trump a large margin in 2016 and 2020. That same district, after electing Democrats to Congress since 1993, is now represented by Republican Elise Stefanik, whose support for President Donald Trump’s claims that he won the 2020 election landed her a spot in the House leadership, replacing Liz Cheney, who criticized her party for refusing to accept the election results.

For Republicans, winning in rural areas has proven crucial to the party’s political success in the past three decades, enabling it to dominate many elections despite its minority status among voters overall. Americans’ partisan loyalties have remained quite constant nationwide over this period, with more people identifying as Democrats than Republicans, but the latter have nonetheless enjoyed victories in elections at all levels. In Congress, the GOP secured the majority in the House for 20 out of the past 30 years, and in the Senate for 18. In state capitols, furthermore, after decades of Democratic dominance, Republicans’ fortunes changed starting in 1994, and since 2011 they have controlled the majority of both state legislatures and governorships.

These political changes bear large implications for public policy. In past decades, Democrats who represented heavily rural constituencies often helped to provide the support necessary for key policy achievements at the national and state levels. In the U.S. House, for example, their ranks included progressives David Obey of northern Wisconsin and Tom Etheridge of North Carolina until 2010; and in the Senate, Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, until 2004 and 2014, respectively. Since then, the areas they represented have become dominated by Republicans. The shift is particularly striking in state governments: in the South, for example, the 1970s through the 1990s saw the rise of vibrant two-party competition and, with it, policy developments that helped low- and middle- income people, both Blacks and whites; but Republican ascendance since then has undermined such achievements (Wright 2020). As Democrats hail increasingly from urban areas and Republicans from rural areas, it has undermined possibilities for building the broad regional coalitions necessary to enact major policies in the U.S. political system.

Considering Sources of the Rural-Urban Political Divide

In other ongoing research, we are examining the sources of the contemporary rural-urban divide. Our investigations to date suggest that a confluence of economic, demographic, sociocultural, and organizational shifts have helped to widen the political gap between rural and urban Americans (Brown and Mettler 2021; Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi 2021). We highlight some of our findings here briefly.

While many urban areas have managed the economic transition from an industrial economy to one anchored in services (Moretti 2012), rural areas have faced greater challenges in supplying jobs to their populations: agribusiness has replaced small family-owned farms, international trade has diminished manufacturing employment, and technological development has reduced jobs in natural resource extraction (Wuthnow 2018; Autor et al. 2020; Choi et al. 2021). According to one independent analysis, a full 97 percent of all job growth between 2001 and 2016 occurred in urban areas (Florida and King 2019, 7), leaving many rural people feeling “left behind.” We find that between 2008 and 2020, employment grew nearly ten times as much in urban areas compared to rural areas; the latter were plagued by higher poverty rates and lower economic growth rates as well (Brown and Mettler 2021). In turn, areas experiencing high economic growth have recently been more likely to support Democratic candidates, and those with low economic growth, Republican candidates (Muro et al. 2020; Muro and Liu 2016).

Most rural areas tend to feature populations composing primarily non-Hispanic whites, in contrast to the greater racial and ethnic diversity of urban areas. Census data reveal that as of 2020, non-Hispanic whites make up 76 percent of the rural population, compared to 59 percent in urban areas. To put this in context, given the small size of the rural population nationally, still far more non-Hispanic whites today live in urban areas than rural areas (82 percent compared to 18 percent). Roughly one out of four rural residents is a person of color, furthermore, and some counties feature a majority of minority residents. Since 1990, the Hispanic population has increased dramatically in rural areas, by 44.6 % counties in the Midwest and the South have seen the greatest influx (Lichter 2012, 4). As economic conditions have worsened in rural areas, growing diversity locally and nationally has sparked contestation over who belongs (Lichter 2012; Wuthnow 2018, 141–85).

These differences between rural and urban areas raise the question of the role racism may play in the divide. Rural non-Hispanic whites exhibit significantly higher racial resentment scores overall than those living in urban areas, but the difference is not large: about 8 percentage points on a 0 to 100 point scale.5 We find that such attitudes are associated with voting for Republicans in both urban and rural areas and that they do not distinctly influence rural or urban non-Hispanic whites (Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi 2021).6 In short, while racism is one component of the rural-urban divide, it is by no means reducible to it.

People’s participation in politics, including elections, is influenced by the presence of organizations in their communities and, of course, their own affiliations with them. In the contemporary polity, evangelical churches are known to play a particularly important role in promoting political involvement among Republicans. We find that they are twice as prevalent in rural areas than urban areas, with sixteen per ten thousand residents compared to just eight. By contrast, labor unions are associated with getting out the vote for Democrats, and the typical urban county has three labor unions per ten thousand residents, compared to just one in rural areas (Brown and Mettler 2021).

In addition, rural people often seem to possess a distinct way of looking at the world that flows from their shared experiences. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow (2018) draws on extensive in-depth interviews with rural dwellers to show that they view the communities in which they live as special, as their home, and they have a sense of obligation to them. Political scientist Katherine Cramer finds, in her research in Wisconsin, that rural people have a placed-base sense of identity, of “rural consciousness,” through which they make sense of politics. In short, the rural-urban divide appears to emanate from several sources.

Why a Problem for Democracy?

Why might this particular cleavage, the rural-urban divide, endanger democracy? To preface this discussion, we resist explanations that suggest that rural areas are intrinsically hostile to democracy, as well as those that suggest that urban areas are necessarily receptive to it. The agrarian populist movement, for example, proliferated through the rural areas of the Midwest and South in the decades following the Civil War, and it embraced democratic organizing practices and sought progressive policy reforms (Sanders 1999). Conversely, cities have fostered hostility between groups (e.g., Sugrue 1996; Trounstine 2018) as often as they have promoted multicultural democracy (e.g., Ogorzalek 2018). We argue that the contemporary rural-urban divide is indeed endangering American democracy, and that it is doing so through a combination of mechanisms: the combination of long-standing political institutions that give extra leverage to sparsely populated places and a transformed party system in which one party dominates those places; growing social divergence between rural and urban areas that fosters an “us versus them” dynamic; economic changes that make rural areas ripe for grievance politics; and party leaders willing to cater to such resentments.

American political institutions have always given extra power to those who live in sparsely populated areas. Rural dwellers have traditionally gained extra political leverage through the structure of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. Elections of the U.S. House and state legislatures, with single-member districts and winner-take-all elections, also advantage the rural party if partisans are sorted geographically between rural and urban areas. This bias and its political significance, however, have increased recently. When the rural-urban split aligns with party divisions, it advantages the party that dominates the less-populated areas, which gains outsized political power. As the urban population has grown in relative terms, moreover, it accentuates the rural bias of the institutional arrangements. The combination of these factors today permits Republicans to “punch above their weight,” for example by winning two recent presidential elections despite losing the popular vote (2000 and 2016) and often gaining a higher percentage of both state and federal legislative seats than their votes cast in recent elections (Rodden 2019, 165–96). These institutional features can advantage a minority party and harm the responsiveness of the political system to the majority of citizens, undercutting the quality of democracy. These features are rooted in the U.S. Constitution, however, and the exploitation of them does not directly undermine democratic stability, although it may make the system more polarized, which in turn can hasten its vulnerability.

Danger to the pillars of democracy may occur, however, when cross-cutting political cleavages deteriorate. Scholars of comparative politics have long argued that democracy is most stable when, as Seymour Martin Lipset put it, “social strata, groups and individuals have a number of cross-cutting politically relevant affiliations” (1959, 97). When individuals are “pulled among conflicting forces,” they are most likely to want to reduce “the intensity of political conflict” and to protect the rights of political minorities. By contrast, when individuals or groups with the same political disposition are more isolated from those with different views, they tend to be more intolerant of other viewpoints and more willing to back political extremists (1959, 95–96). The United States has long featured two broad “catch-all” parties that each included diverse social groups from different areas of the nation, helping to diffuse social and political conflict. Today, however, the parties—particularly the Republican Party—do more to reinforce rather than diffuse cleavages.7

Contemporary scholars offer social and psychological analyses that echo Lipset’s concerns about how isolation of social groups can foster extremism, and they point to recent dynamics that may be exacerbating such tendencies in American society. Lilliana Mason argues that as people sort themselves out politically and socially as if they are two separate tribes, without overlapping affiliations, they tend to acquire more negative and stereotypical views of each other (Mason 2018). As resentment intensifies, society and politics become divided between hostile camps of “us” versus “them” (McCoy and Somer 2019). If one side perceives its identity to be endangered, members may seek to protect it at all costs, even if that involves undermining pillars of democracy. Similarly, those who perceive their own status or privilege to be at risk due to the inclusion of citizens of another racial or ethnic group may be willing to override democracy to retain existing hierarchies. A significant portion of the white population today perceives itself to be under threat; its racial and ethnic antagonism, in turn, undermines support for democratic norms (Jardina 2019; Bartels 2020). This conflict over who belongs as a member of the political community now overlaps with the partisan divide: the Democratic Party has grown more racially and ethnically diverse in tandem with American society, while the Republican Party—with its increasingly rural core—has remained disproportionately white (Mettler and Lieberman 2020). Geographic distance may heighten these tendencies, such that the rural-urban political divide fosters spiraling dangers to democracy.

Political-economic analysis sheds light on why rural Americans recently have been supportive of political leaders who cater to grievances. Wuthnow (2018) finds that rural people feel that their communities are endangered and “left behind” by the massive economic changes that have taken place in recent decades, including deindustrialization and jobs lost to trade and technological change (Moretti 2012). Cramer (2016) argues that rural dwellers resent urban political elites because they view them as creating policies with little understanding of how they will affect rural areas; and they perceive urban and suburban dwellers—particularly those employed in the public sector—to be less hard working than themselves and pampered by paying less in taxes and reaping more in government resources. Both find that many rural people harbor a sense of moral outrage and anger toward political leaders for their fate. Our analysis reveals that these scholars’ ethnographic findings are supported by recent survey research on a national scale. According to our analysis of 2020 ANES, for example, a majority of people living in rural areas say they do not have enough influence over government and receive less from government than they deserve relative to urban people—all despite their structural political advantages mentioned above and their disproportionate reliance on federal social transfers (Brown and Mettler 2021). Political leaders from Scott Walker to Donald Trump have stoked grievances and resentments and encouraged their supporters to put democratic principles at risk in the quest to gain and maintain power.

Certainly the rise of any political cleavage bears the potential to exacerbate polarization. If it fosters an “us versus them” dynamic, people on either side may grow increasingly resentful of each other, and some may be inclined to override basic democratic principles and turn to violence. Political divisions tend to be fluid and malleable, moreover, and grievances and resentment may be channeled toward democratic ends, rather than authoritarian politics. Isolation and homogeneity, which tend to be more concentrated in rural areas than urban areas, have the potential to present particular threats to democracy, but only under particular circumstances (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992, 269–81). Urban dwellers are by no means immune to cultivating dangerous resentments, yet the greater diversity and density in metropolitan places—not least in the contemporary United States—may make some residents more inclined to exercise tolerance, respect for differences, and adherence to democratic procedures, or at least prompt their political leaders to embrace such values out of political necessity (Ogorzalek 2018).

How the Divide Is Harming Democracy

Increasingly, rural areas stand out as the stronghold of the contemporary Republican Party, and this became evident in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. When Congress reconvened in the evening after the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, 139 Republican House members—dubbed by pundits as the “Sedition Caucus”—sided with Trump in his claims that the election was fraudulent, defying state and federal election officials from both parties who stood by the results and dozens of court decisions. These representatives—who each rejected the Electoral College votes from at least one of the two contested states, Arizona and Pennsylvania (Binder 2021)—hailed from districts where Trump won by particularly large margins. Analyzing the congressional districts of Sedition Caucus members in terms of rurality, we find that they represent disproportionately the nation’s most rural places.8

We grouped House members by the rurality of their district, separating them into four groups from the most urban to the most rural, based on the percentages of their constituents living in places defined by the Census as rural. We also indicated their party affiliation and separated Republicans who voted to certify the election results from the Sedition Caucus members. As Figure 3 shows, Democrats are elected particularly from urban areas, with fully 44 percent of them representing the most densely populated districts; this group includes Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Only 7 percent of the Democrats represent the most rural districts; their ranks include House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina and some who won in swing districts in 2018, such as Representative Antonio Delgado of New York.

Figure 3 Sedition and Nonsedition House Members by Rurality of Their District and PartyOPEN IN VIEWER

The rural composition of the Sedition Caucus resembles a mirror image of the urban-centered Democratic Caucus. Nearly 50 percent of its members represent the least populated districts in the country, with members such as Jim Jordan of Ohio and Stefanik from the Adirondacks region of New York. Just under 4 percent come from cities.

The Republicans who defied the president and accepted the election results, by contrast, represent more densely populated places on average than their seditionist colleagues, although their districts still tend to be more rural than those won by Democrats. They include Representative Adam Kinziger of Illinois and John Katko of Central New York, both of whom have been vocal in their denunciations of Trump’s behavior in inciting the riot and voted for impeachment in January 2021.

The Sedition Caucus does not consist of representatives from just one region of the nation. While seventy-nine come from the sixteen states of the South, the remaining sixty members, 43 percent, were elected in states across other regions. In fact, forty-eight members were elected in states that cast their electoral votes for Joe Biden. Some represent states that routinely elect Democrats at the top of the ticket, including seven from California and four from New York. This indicates that the rural-urban divide looms in numerous states throughout the nation, such that people living in rural areas find themselves to be deeply at odds with urbanites in their own state.

Beyond members of Congress, Republican state officials from relatively more rural states also backed efforts to overturn the election results. In December, the (relatively urban) state of Texas filed a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to discard millions of votes in key battleground states that had made voting by mail easier due to COVID-19-related concerns. Just one day after the suit was filed, Republican attorneys general from seventeen states threw their weight behind the lawsuit. Of those who supported the suit, the overwhelming majority came from states with relatively high shares of rural populations, such as West Virginia, Mississippi, and Montana. While we recognize that the number of observations here is small, we nevertheless suspect the rural-urban divide has helped to foster a politics within the Republican Party that threatens key tenets of American democracy, such as respect for legitimate electoral outcomes.

Bridging the Rural-Urban Divide

The stark political division between elected officials representing rural and urban areas belies their considerable shared interests in stronger economic growth and a wider distribution of its benefits, across regions and income groups. When it comes to the public opinion of residents, rural and urban people vary quite dramatically on some issues, such as gun rights and immigration; but on other issues, such as those related to health care, public education, and Social Security, they vary little (Francia and Baumgartner 2005–2006.) As polarized politicians focus on distinguishing themselves from each other, it undermines opportunities for collective action that could benefit low- and middle-income Americans who live in both areas, mitigating economic and racial inequality. In addition, urban and rural lawmakers could improve their chances of policy achievements if they could build coalitions with one another.

The American political system has proven most effective when political leaders have managed to build large political coalitions that span vast parts of the nation. Political leaders today should pursue policies that unite regions of the country, offering opportunities for economic development, collective action, and opportunity across rural and urban divides. The Biden administration’s expansive infrastructure plans, enacted last fall with bipartisan support, offer such promise, as do efforts to invest in community colleges. Democrats should not abandon efforts to compete in rural areas, furthermore, given that close to one-third of rural dwellers continue to identify with their party overall; and the rate is higher in many parts of the country, including those where majorities have supported it as recently as a few election cycles ago.9 Proposals to strengthen organized labor and workplace democracy could also reinvigorate progressive organizing in rural areas. As we show in analysis elsewhere, despite their scarcity, unions can act as a powerful force for encouraging rural people to vote for Democrats (Brown and Mettler 2021). Broader efforts to reinvigorate civil society, particularly in ways that bring diverse groups of people together to share and negotiate power across various social cleavages, as proposed by Hahrie Han and Jae Yeon Kim in this issue, seem especially promising. Republicans, meanwhile, will need to broaden their appeals and policy agenda if they hope to maintain the support of some groups of Latinos that shifted to support them in recent elections.

Most Americans were horrified by the scenes that unfolded at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That event may be a precursor of similar such events, unless we can find ways to bridge the rural-urban divide.

Footnotes

Regional data for 2020 ANES respondents is not yet available.

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For most previous years, the ANES included geo-coded data on respondents’ location. In 2020, however, they simply asked respondents if they lived in a “rural area,” “small town,” or “city.” For the purposes of this analysis, we considered “rural areas” rural and “city,” as urban, while dropping respondents who answered “small town,” given its ambiguity. In analysis not presented here, we found similar results using geo-coded data from the Cooperative Election Study (formerly CCES).

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The U.S. Census Bureau, which uses a slightly different definition of rural, places the percentage closer to 20.

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According to our analysis of the 2020 ANES, 16 percent of rural people answered that it was “not important at all” to allow news organizations to criticize political leaders, while just 8 percent of urban people did. Sixty-four percent of urban respondents said it was “very” or “extremely” important for news organizations to be able criticize political leaders, relative to just 46 percent of rural people. About one quarter of rural and 14 percent of urban people favored restricting the press’s access to government decision making, while 58 percent of urban people and 45 percent of rural dwellers opposed such action. Forty-two percent of rural people answered that it would be either helpful or okay if the president did not have to worry about the courts or Congress in acting to solve the nation’s problems, compared to just 33 percent of urban respondents.

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While racial resentment scores are usually place on a 0 to 1 scale, here we transform them for ease of interpretation.

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Specifically, when we interact rurality with racial resentment in multilevel multivariate regression with individual-level vote choice as the outcome, we do not find that racial resentment operates differently among rural voters relative to urban ones, at least at statistically significant levels.

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We are thankful to Ken Roberts for underscoring these points.

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While our analysis suggests that representatives from more rural districts were more likely to vote against certifying the election, it is worth noting that it appears those arrested for the January 6th storm on the Capitol were not disproportionately from rural areas (see e.g., Slepyan, Marema, and Carlson 2022).

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Here we are drawing on the 2020 ANES and CCES (Cooperative Election Study), years 2008–2020.

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References

American National Election Studies. 2020. Time series study. Available from https://electionstudies.org/data-center/2020-time-series-study/.