No, Elites. Rural Voters Aren’t a Threat to Democracy.

But increasing polarization between rural and urban America is a worrisome trend.

Ever since candidate Donald Trump swept 66 percent of the rural vote in 2016, bewildered urban and suburban Democrats have wondered aloud: “Why do they vote against their own interests?” But the question they should be asking is: “What are rural voters’ interests and what can we do to help address them?”

After all, as recently as 2008, Barack Obama won 45 percent of the rural vote. A lot of rural folks used to vote for Democrats. What drove so many into the GOP’s corner?

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Colby College professors of government Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea set out to answer that question in, The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. Drawing from historical data as well as their own survey of 10,000 rural voters, Jacobs and Shea provide a complex analysis of rural attitudes, culture, and voting behavior.

Emphasis on complex. Rural-urban polarization and virtual one-party Republican rule in most rural districts are what I’d call “wicked problems.” Wicked problems are persistent, deeply rooted, multi-faceted problems with no singular cause and no off-the-shelf solution. They resemble intricate knots that are extremely difficult to untangle. Climate change is a wicked problem, as are poverty and homelessness. So too, it seems, is the GOP’s hold over vast swaths of the countryside.

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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.

When it comes to pinning down the primary drivers of rural-urban polarization, the role of economic precarity is the most difficult to decipher. According to the authors, it’s not clear that rural America is, on the whole, significantly worse off than urban America. Suffice it to say that inequality and poverty are rampant across geographies.

But rural people feel more economic anxiety than their urban and suburban counterparts. Why?

This is where the related concepts of shared fate and place-based identity take on significance. Rural and small town communities are less class-segregated than cities and suburbs, with trailers and fancy homes in close proximity. Wealthier residents may be able to weather downturns (of which there are many, especially in factory towns devastated by the effects of NAFTA), but they’re painfully aware of their neighbors’ plight. What’s more, rural communities are united in defensiveness against those whom they perceive to be denigrating and undermining their way of life. Their collective group identity has many dimensions, but the grievance that stems from being continually disrespected by others is foundational.

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.

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Even a thriving rural community’s economic prosperity doesn’t inoculate it against a defensive rural identity that binds people together against their detractors. The authors explain that unflattering media portrayals are “a major source of rural grievance—a simmering anger that has politicized their distinctive identity and put them in the service of exploitative politicians willing to wage war on behalf of the real America.” This incredibly important insight invokes what is perhaps liberals’ most pervasive unforced error—the very bad habit of positing themselves as morally, culturally, economically, and intellectually superior to the “deplorables.”

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.

Country folk have a long memory for insult, but they don’t need one; the jabs keep coming. For example, newspaper coverage of rural America, the authors show, is scant and skewed toward negative stories such as Trump’s election, Covid, and January 6 (despite rural residents’ underrepresentation among the insurrectionists). As the authors note:

If a community of people continually shake their heads at how they are portrayed, if they feel they are constantly reduced to a caricature, it would make sense that resentment would build—and that a shared fate ethos would gain steam.

Hell hath no fury like a voter scorned.

In politics, perception is reality. If rural people feel disdained, then it behooves those courting their vote to telegraph empathy and respect instead.

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The latest categorical condemnation of rural America comes in the form of a book entitled, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. This misleading and supremely unhelpful book enjoyed a mercifully brief moment in the limelight before savvier reviewers, rural progressive leaders, and scholars, including Shea and Jacobs, demolished its factual and analytical foundation.

If there’s an existential threat to democracy, it’s not white rural voters, it’s rural-urban and red-blue polarization. It’s a small minority on each side inciting fear and loathing of some subset of the other. The “Antifa” bogeyman is to the right what “raging white rubes” represent to the left—an intentionally overblown caricature of the other team’s most objectionable characters. Meanwhile, the divide deepens, alienation festers into hatred, and undemocratic measures become rationalized as the necessary means of taming such dangerous elements.

If there’s a loose strand in the wicked knot presented by Jacobs and Shea, it’s that rural voters’ opinions on most issues are only a little, if that, to the right of mainstream public opinion. This presents an opening for local Democratic parties and candidates running in overwhelmingly Republican districts:

• Show up with a respectful attitude;

• Listen to rural voters’ concerns and grievances;

• Build trusting relationships across lines of difference by working together on civic improvement projects (such as the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative’s “Community Works” program); and

• Present “place-specific,” bottom-up solutions that most American voters would find palatable.

What are some of these smart solutions? Clean energy projects on abandoned coalfields; materials reuse corridors; free trade school; and investment in local food processing facilities so that small producers can compete against Big Ag. There’s no shortage of good ideas, just a political divide that keeps them from getting the attention they deserve.

Erica Etelson is the Communications Director for the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and co-writes the “Rethinking Rural” column for The Nation. She is the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide.