The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America

Based on a hundred years of data compiled by the authors and three large, recent voter surveys, Jacobs and Shea attempt to better understand the decisions of rural voters. For most of American history, no party had a monopoly on the rural vote—except in the Jim Crow South, where the Democrats dominated. The authors find that that started to change in 1980, as rural areas all over the country began to lean toward Republicans. Those who live in such areas tend to be white and older, less educated, and poorer than the national average, and many of them harbor strong feelings of resentment against elites. But the authors find that their political choices are not primarily motivated by race, age, religion, or ideological conservatism. Jacobs and Shea insist that the principal cause of the urban-rural divide is a more positive, although somewhat nebulous, “place-based, group identity” held by rural voters. It is this “collective sense of shared destiny” based on where they live that has been blown into the “myth” propagated by Republican politicians that rural residents constitute “the real America.” The urban-rural divide has become so stark that it threatens American democracy by erasing political competition based on issues, leaving only room for personality and demagoguery. To reverse the trend, Democrats will have to “show up” and compete for rural votes that are, in the authors’ view, winnable.