This past week, Donald Trump secured his return to the White House with important gains in cities and suburbs. But as with his victory in 2016 and narrow defeat in 2020, nowhere was he more dominant than in rural counties. According to AP VoteCast, 62% of rural voters voted for Trump and 36% for Kamala Harris. One could be forgiven for thinking that such a result was inevitable. From where we stand today, the urban-rural divide appears almost like a primordial fault line in American political life, sorting voters by religion, education, and perhaps even ways of life. In fact, however, this configuration is a relatively recent development.
Prior to the 1990s, the partisan divide between urban and rural areas was modest, with rural voters favoring Republican candidates only slightly more than their urban counterparts. Likewise, the urban and rural electorate “tended to shift in tandem,” drifting left and right together with the broader movement of the nation. Rural voters overwhelmingly supported Richard Nixon in 1972 before effectively splitting their vote between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford in 1976. Ronald Reagan carried the rural vote by a healthy margin in 1980, but Republican strength plummeted over the course of the decade under the combined weight of rural industrial stagnation and farm crisis. This created an opening for Democrat Bill Clinton, who managed to win in 1992 in part by nearly matching the Republican rural vote share.
But something fundamentally new occurred in the mid-to-late 1990s. A yawning gap opened between urban and rural voters, with rural Americans voting in ever larger margins for the Republican Party and their metropolitan counterparts doing the same for Democrats. While political strategists and commentators tended to point to cultural interpretations for this divide—everything from Christian Nationalism to White Rural Rage—such explanations fail to account for the fact that this transformation occurred simultaneously across the entire nation, and indeed, in many other advanced industrial countries as well. As I will lay out in this post, the urban-rural divide was first and foremost a product of political economy.
Starting in the 1990s, the Democratic Party emerged as the champion of a new globalized, knowledge economy, whose centralizing tendencies concentrated the most sophisticated and profitable enterprises in metropolitan areas. As a result, the historic party of industrial workers morphed into the home of highly educated metropolitan professionals. Meanwhile, rural areas struggled to adapt to the global era, becoming a repository for slow growth sectors—manufacturing, retail, construction, agriculture, and gas and oil—that provided mostly low paying, unskilled jobs. The Republican Party capitalized on this decline, arguing that their economic agenda of low taxes, minimal government spending, and weak regulations was critical to the well-being of rural industries and their largely non-college educated employees.
By examining the emergence of the urban-rural divide in detail, we can see that the results of last week’s election were by no means inevitable. The Democratic Party’s collapse in the countryside was the predictable consequence of decisions to prioritize certain constituencies to the neglect of others. If the party is ever again to capture a sufficient governing majority to enact the social and economic agenda our country needs, it won’t be through eking out 2% higher turnout in the suburbs. It will be through transforming the Democratic Party into an organization that once again can compete in both urban and rural counties.
A New Economy
In the wake of the Reagan Revolution, many Democrats looked to improve the party’s fortunes by moving away from what they saw as the tired tenets of New Deal Liberalism. Attempting to win back white middle class voters, these self-proclaimed New Democrats looked to weaken the influence of traditional interest groups—labor unions, civil rights organizations, feminist activists, and environmental advocates. When one of their own, Bill Clinton, captured the White House in 1992, he championed the creation of a “New Economy” that targeted the growing suburban professional class.
In this modern globalized system, America would shed its industrial past for shiny new sectors such as tech, finance, insurance, entertainment, media, and real estate. The New Democrats embraced free trade, spearheading the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and overseeing the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Clinton Administration also formed an early alliance with Silicon Valley, with Vice President Al Gore—the “Geek Veep” —hosting regular meetings with tech entrepreneurs and ushering in the deregulation of the industry with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. To bolster its standing with the finance sector, the Clinton Administration coerced countries like Mexico and South Korea into investor friendly reforms, while overseeing banking deregulation with the repeal of Glass-Steagall. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Democratic Party was heavily influenced by its Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors, while labor unions and other groups saw their standing greatly diminished.
Cities emerged as economic juggernauts in this new global order, and the Democratic Party incorporated the urban professional class arising from the knowledge economy. Historically, highly educated, well-paid individuals had cast ballots for Republicans. In the 1990s and 2000s, however, the Democratic Party gained an ever-larger share of the highly educated professional electorate, with its greatest advances made in metropolitan areas. The party has in turn advanced the interests of the metropolitan knowledge economy. As Jonathan A. Rodden notes in Why Cities Fail, Democrats “worked with technology firms on issues related to immigration and on visas for technology workers; they pushed to strengthen patent protections for pharmaceutical, financial, and information technology companies; and to gain copyright protections for entertainment studios, and intellectual property protections for internet and software firms.”
Rural areas, meanwhile, proceeded down a different path. In the second half of the twentieth century, employment in traditional extractive industries collapsed. Agricultural jobs plummeted because of mechanization and scientific advancements, with corresponding declines witnessed in mining and forestry. Meanwhile, nonmetropolitan areas experienced a major manufacturing boom in the 1960s and 70s, as urban industrial firms fled to the countryside in search of cheap labor, low taxes, weak unions, and more “business friendly” environments. Industrial growth spurred the expansion of the rural service sector, as retail establishments like Wal-Mart spread throughout the heartland. These economic trends culminated in the Rural Renaissance of the 1970s, where jobs and population not only grew faster in nonmetropolitan areas, but more people moved from the city to the countryside than the other way around. While rural economic growth flagged in the 1980s, the countryside had nonetheless undergone a wholesale transformation, and by the end of the twentieth century, a new diversified rural economy had taken shape—a mix of manufacturing, extraction, construction, and retail.
This mix did not, however, include significant contributions from finance, insurance, real estate, information, entertainment, and professional services. High tech industries were largely absent from the countryside. And while this imbalance did not immediately upend the rural economy, the same forces that gave rise to the New Economy wreaked havoc on rural America.
Free trade agreements, such as NAFTA, hit many rural areas hard, undercutting the countryside’s appeal as a low wage, unregulated safe haven. Rural areas were particularly impacted by globalization, according to one study, because they specialized in “in peripheral manufacturing sectors—such as routine manufacturing (e.g. textiles, apparel, furniture, metal working, rubber, plastics) and value added manufacturing (e.g. food, wood, leather) that face global competition…and can more easily be moved…off shore.” Many of these manufacturers were already showing “negative earnings growth in the late 1990s.” The admittance of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, which granted the Middle Kingdom permanent normal trading relations, had an even more devastating impact on rural manufacturing. The China Shock caused many firms to relocate production abroad, while increased competition drove others out of business. Those that survived turned to automation to lower production costs. Global capital mobility and increased productivity produced a downward spiral in rural industrial employment. Between 2000 and 2010, nonmetropolitan areas lost a staggering 35% of total manufacturing employment.
The Great Recession inflicted further harm upon the rural economy. Indeed, in many ways, rural America never recovered from the Great Recession. Manufacturing, construction, and retail languished in the countryside for well over a decade. Small-town banks disappeared en masse, gobbled up in a massive wave of financial consolidation, which robbed communities of locally oriented development capital. Even many low paying service sector jobs disappeared, as rural areas suffered from a “retail apocalypse” caused by the increasing hegemony of Amazon and e-commerce. While metropolitan areas had surpassed their prerecession job totals as early as 2013, there were still fewer jobs in nonmetropolitan areas in 2019 than there had been in 2007.
Due to the fallout from the Great Recession, rural areas witnessed significant outmigration, with the nonmetropolitan population declining overall in the 2010s. The young and educated were by far the most likely to migrate, leaving behind a population made up disproportionately of retirees and those without college degrees. This has only exacerbated urban-rural economic disparity, as firms are now less likely to relocate to nonmetropolitan areas lacking in working-age, college educated people. Indeed, between 2001 and 2016, urban areas “captured the lion’s share” of new employment, “accounting for a whopping 97% of total job growth” while “rural areas accounted for less than 3 percent.” Not only did rural areas fall behind, but they had few prospects of acquiring New Economy enterprises, lacking the necessary preconditions for knowledge economy industries: proximity to research universities, broadband internet, high end amenities.
Surviving Slow Growth
As the American economy bifurcated into a dynamic rapidly growing metropolitan sphere and a stagnant, slow growth rural domain, the contemporary urban-rural political divide began to take hold. While the Democratic Party was busy remaking itself as the champion of the metropolitan “New Economy,” drawing in highly educated knowledge industry professionals in the process, the Republican Party won over rural voters by gearing its economic agenda to the slow growth, low wage sectors that now dominated the countryside. George W. Bush, under whose presidency rural and urban voters began to drift apart, promoted an economic agenda based on tax cuts, decreases in government spending, oil and natural gas extraction, and widespread business deregulation.
Many rural voters viewed these policies as necessary for the survival of slow growth, low wage industries existing on tight profit margins. As the political scientist Katherine Cramer has shown, with their communities withering, rural Americans became convinced that they simply could not shoulder higher taxes, which they believed were unfairly transferred to metropolitan areas to pay for urban services and government jobs. Rural voters resented government regulations, especially environmental restrictions that stifled job growth and “unfunded mandates” that required impoverished communities to make improvements they simply could not afford.
Despite common canards about the working class voting against its interests, the Republican ascendancy in twenty-first century rural America has been spearheaded by the petite bourgeoisie, not the proletariat. This represented a shift from historical patterns. In the years after World War II, small-town business leaders cultivated a self-described “middle-of-the road” politics. Situating themselves ideologically between New Deal liberalism and modern conservatism, local boosters leaned Republican but were flexible enough to support Democrats for state and national office when they felt it served their economic interests. In recent years, however, non-metropolitan elites have drifted rightward. While the urban affluent has become increasingly Democrat, high earners in rural and small-town areas have grown only more stalwart Republican.
Prosperous but often lacking college degrees, local elites have eschewed redistributive policies, viewing higher taxes, increased spending, and government regulations as lethal to their modest enterprises. In an economy dominated by slow growth and low wage sectors, raising taxes to pay for better education and amenities has seemed frivolous when the community has little hope of attracting high end enterprises or holding on to its youth. Although personally affluent, small-town petty capitalists feel ever threatened by the downward trend in their communities. Studies have shown that voters with relatively high incomes living in declining areas have been some of the most committed Republicans. Though our picture of the rural ruling class remains quite murky, the core coalition comprises the beneficiaries of low wage, slow growth economy—small manufacturers, construction contractors, retail middle managers, natural gas reps, agribusiness operators—along with the chamber of commerce types who depend upon these sectors for their livelihood—restaurant owners, dentists, bankers, insurance agents, realtors.
Trump Country
The rise of Donald Trump has crystallized the urban-rural divide. The Republican stranglehold on the rural electorate loosened significantly in 2008 with the collapse of economy under George W. Bush. Barack Obama significantly improved Democratic margins in rural areas, helping him win states like Iowa and Indiana. Indeed, one wonders if the Democratic Party could have built upon these gains had measures been taken to improve the rural economy. Their failure to do so meant that, as discussed above, nonmetropolitan areas suffered significantly in the aftermath of the Great Recession. This ultimately helped to pave the way for Trump’s immense popularity in the countryside.
In each of his presidential campaigns, Donald Trump has garnered outlandish electoral majorities in rural areas by combining the countryside’s traditional dislike of high taxes and economic regulations with a blistering critique of globalization and free trade. Trump’s promises to revive American manufacturing with tariffs and tougher trade deals found a receptive audience with rural voters who had suffered from two decades of rapid deindustrialization. Trump managed to broaden the Republican appeal in rural areas, winning over many blue-collar and working-class voters in addition to the GOP’s core support among the small-town petite bourgeoisie. Trump achieved this cross-class appeal by taking jabs at Wall Street and other economic elites, while insisting that he would maintain Social Security and other government programs that many rural Americans relied upon.
Trump’s appeal among the rural voters no doubt owes a significant amount to his nativist anti-immigrant appeals and patriarchal cultural conservatism. Indeed, these antagonisms have flourished amidst rural economic decline, as anti-urban animus has expressed itself in a “those people” hostilities towards racially diverse and culturally progressive metropolitan spaces. Ultimately, though, the Trump era has represented the culmination of a decades long split in the economic fortunes and partisan behaviors of rural and urban Americans. As has happened in countries throughout the industrialized world, the forces of globalization have simultaneously resulted in the growth of a highly educated urban professional class and the erosion of economic stability of rural areas. If the Democrats are to begin to reverse their dismal fortunes in these the communities, they need to take seriously the impact of these forces, and to offer voters in these regions more than a vision of managed decline.
