Not Just Bigotry, not Just Economics: Why Rural Voters Are Red – BCB #107
We’re going to need a better analysis than “flyover country.”
A decades-old divide
You’re probably familiar with the map. A sea of red spotted with blue blobs: New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Denver, Miami…. Across the country, the pattern is undeniable: rural Americans tend to vote Red, whereas urban ones lean Blue. (Suburban voters tend to be pretty evenly divided.) And this isn’t only metropolises—even small towns tend to vote much Bluer than surrounding areas.

This trend has persisted for decades, and the divide is getting wider.

It would be nice if there were a quick and easy explanation for the ideological leanings of about a fifth of the American population. The two most frequently offered are that rural voters are bigoted or that they are economically disadvantaged, depending on whether the speaker is sympathetic or not. But the rural-urban divide is more complicated than stereotypes.
When trying to incite blame, some have suggested that rural voters are more racist, xenophobic and homophobic than urban voters, the implication being that this makes them more inclined to vote for Red candidates. The recently published White Rural Rage endorsed this view, provoking a wave of op-eds arguing that this take is misguided. (We covered this fallout in a recent issue.)
It’s true that rural areas in the US are generally majority-white while urban areas are generally majority non-white—but about 25% of rural Americans are non-white and non-Hispanic, and this number has grown in recent years. A recent publication from the Harvard Cooperative Election Study states that the “growing rural-urban divide is driven primarily by white Americans, while rural people of color differ much less, if at all, from their urban counterparts in voting behavior and policy attitudes.” This sometimes leads to confusion when commentators clump white and non-white rural voters together when talking about this issue.
Others take a more sympathetic view of rural voters, saying the rural Red lean is tied to economics. They point out that businesses outside of big cities can barely stay afloat and small farms are struggling in the shadow of agricultural corporations—woes that rural voters believe Red representatives understand and prioritize, whereas Blue politicians ignore them. (Some argue that Blue policies actually do more for rural voters than Red policies, but many rural voters still feel disregarded by Blue.)
The politics of place
Both of these narratives about rural America — bigotry and economics — fall short. In their 2023 book, The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea—both government professors at Colby College—analyzed historical data and surveyed over 10,000 rural voters to complicate how we think about the rural-urban divide.
As author and activist Erica Etelson writes in a review of the book:
As someone fairly desperate to reverse Democrats’ losses in rural America, I badly wanted to hear that the problem was simple and remediable. Economic implosion? Remedy: Massive public and philanthropic investment in rural communities. Cultural marginalization? Respect rural lifeways and increase their representation in media and entertainment. Fox News radicalization? Revive local journalism.
These diagnoses and prescriptions are correct, according to Shea and Jacobs, but insufficient. They are mere strands, knotted together with a host of other causal agents, including resentment (sometimes but not usually of a racial variety), right-wing cultivation of a nationalized, conservative rural identity pitted against urban “others,” and place-based pride.
While racial resentment and economic factors play a role, Jacobs says there is a larger, more common thread among rural voters, both white and non-white:
[Rural Americans] are driven by a sense of place, community and often, a desire for recognition and respect. This … is the defining aspect of the rural-urban divide — a sense of shared fate among rural voters, what academics call a “politics of place,” that is expressed as a belief in self-reliance, rooted in local community and concerned that rural ways of living will soon be forced to disappear. In recent years, that rural political identity has morphed into resentment — a collective grievance against experts, bureaucrats, intellectuals and the political party that seeks to empower them, Democrats.
This leads to a feedback cycle of polarization and distrust, in the usual way. Etelson summarizes:
The rural-urban, red-blue divide has become a vicious cycle fueled by a small minority on each side: Urban liberal politicians, journalists, entertainers, and sometimes even government agencies, ridicule and decry the MAGA-deranged, unvaccinated hordes, sometimes even rejoicing when “those people” died of Covid.
Rural folks naturally defend themselves. Most of them quietly lick their wounds and vote Republican, but a minority—about ten percent by Jacob’s and Shea’s reckoning—get extremely riled up. Festooned in MAGA swag, they say and do inflammatory things that get them profiled on cherry-picked TV shows, which then provokes another round of sweeping denunciations of the nativists who are ruining the perfectly multicultural and science-abiding democracy that the righteous progressive elites worship.
And around and around it goes—in an ugly and unnecessary round of mutual contempt and hatred.
Where could bridge-building start?
There’s a long history of popular criticism of rural voters for their values and choices (What’s The Matter With Kansas? was published 20 years ago). We’re not dismissing these criticisms outright—place-based pride doesn’t mean that everything about a place is praiseworthy. But it also seems clear that urbanites are making the country’s problems worse through contempt and misunderstanding.
Ultimately, Etelson says,
Rural residents have strong feelings of attachment, pride and loyalty to their homes. When urbanites disparage their beloved communities as “flyover country” or “backward backwaters” inhabited by “stupid, racist trailer trash,” well, no big surprise, they get mad. Keenly attuned to condescension and scorn, their resentment deepens with every derogatory remark and stereotypical portrayal. And that resentment is grist for a partly true but incomplete story: Their community’s hardships are caused or made worse by urban liberals who don’t care about them, look down on them, and maybe even hate them.
The missing part of the story, of course, is that most Republican elites don’t care about them either. But at least they pretend to.
To bridge the divide, Etelson’s organization, the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, hosts trainings for “progressive” groups, candidates and parties to help them understand what they can do to effectively see and reach rural Americans:
The objective is to defuse hostility and contempt, find mutual understanding and common ground, and build multi-racial working and middle-class rural solidarity between rural, suburban, and urban dwellers.
The group has also published a report, “Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America?”, for which its team interviewed dozens of moderate and progressive candidates for U.S. House and Senate, gubernatorial and state senate seats who outperformed expectations in Republican-leaning rural districts and compiled their findings into a set of best practices for future campaign leaders. Among other findings, the report concluded that successful campaigns often involved staff with intimate knowledge of a local community. These campaigns also focused on issues of relevance to the district, rather than elaborate policy platforms, and avoided political jargon.
The group also leads a “community works” program that brings people together across party lines to do community projects in rural areas, including road and river clean-ups, home repair, food distribution, diaper drives, kids’ art classes and more.
On the other side of the argument, the White Rural Rage authors say Red politicians who do nothing for rural communities are the ones doing the real “insulting,” even more than Blue. They argue that Blue voters and politicians are not the problem, and rural voters and Red representatives need to start fixing things.
But as this ongoing debate over the rural-urban divide makes clear, problems are rarely caused by one thing alone, or sone side alone.
Quote of the Week
In many rural communities, wealth has been systematically extracted for decades with few lasting benefits for the people living there. This has given rise to rural people feeling taken for granted by urban liberals, and this sentiment engenders defensive rejection of policies and programs associated with liberalism. Whether it’s a public bank, solar-powered public buildings, or a unionization drive, these initiatives face an uphill battle when they’re tainted from the outset by negative preconceptions about the Left. Depolarization opens up a space in which progressive people are not seen as enemies, and progressive ideas are given a fair hearing.