Could Democrats Regain the Rural Vote?
Could Democrats Regain the Rural Vote?
The end of the twentieth century left rural America shell-shocked, and residents reacted accordingly.
Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy
by Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown
Princeton University Press, 2025, 328 pp.
On a recent drive from Washington, D.C., to western Michigan, I passed by a white semi-trailer in an open field, perpendicular to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Blue hand-painted text along the bottom of the trailer read, “USA, God, Prolife, Guns, Coal, Oil, No Socialism,” and above it all, painted in red, was “TRUMP.” I wonder whether Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown passed the same sign as they were writing Rural Versus Urban over the last five years. They traveled thousands of miles across America’s rural counties, analyzing and collecting data spanning roughly five decades and conducting interviews with local Democratic and Republican Party chairs and former elected officials, in order to get beyond the surface anger of improvised roadside billboards. To Mettler and Brown, rural resentment is a symptom of larger developments in the American political system rather than the cause of its latest divisions.
Many analysts date these political divisions to the demise of the New Deal consensus in the 1970s. Yet Mettler and Brown show that rural and urban counties tended to support the winning candidate at similar rates through the 1990s. “But from 2000 onward,” they write, “a stark divide emerged as rural white people increasingly supported the Republican candidate in each election.” In 1992, rural and urban voters nationwide supported George H.W. Bush at similar levels—39 and 37 percent, respectively. By 2024, 66 percent of voters in rural counties supported Donald Trump, compared to 46 percent in urban counties.
Mettler and Brown argue that framing contemporary politics as a conflict between coastal elites and the heartland, or red states versus blue states, overlooks how the rural-urban political divide “runs throughout the nation, fracturing nearly every state and permeating even down-ballot elections.” Republicans are now invincible in rural places across the United States, and local Democratic leaders in rural areas have been effectively abandoned by the national party. Innovative messaging tweaks and strategic policies alone won’t reestablish trust between the Democratic Party and rural voters who have been failed by a lack of democracy itself.
Mettler and Brown use the Office of Management and Budget’s definition of rural, which reflects both population density and “the extent to which rural areas are—or are not—incorporated into major cities, socially and economically.” By this measure, they estimate that in 2020, 14 percent of the population, or about 46 million people, lived in the country’s 1,958 rural counties. The remaining 285 million lived in the other 1,186 counties, which include not just the largest cities but also suburbs and less densely populated smaller cities.
The rural dwellers scattered across the country have disproportionate political influence. The eight states with more than a million rural residents represent 162 votes in the Electoral College. Four of them—North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan—are among the seven states that observers say can swing a presidential election. And those four states are emblematic of the voting patterns Mettler and Brown identify: in the 2024 presidential election, vote shares for Trump from rural and urban counties in Pennsylvania and Georgia surpassed the nationwide 20 percent spread. The effects run into down-ballot elections. Before 2008, rural voters tended to elect candidates to Congress who would “mitigate polarization,” forcing lawmakers to broker deals across party lines, Mettler and Brown write. Today those same parts of the country are instead represented by the “most conservative and uncompromising” electeds.
The negative consequences of a shrinking rural minority coming increasingly under one-party rule don’t stop there. For one, not everybody in rural America supports the views of its radical fringes, which gain the most from voters’ lack of a competitive alternative. Second, Republican dominance effectively renders 30 to 40 percent of rural people’s votes meaningless from the perspective of national elections. Third, it leads to assumptions that Americans living in urban and rural places are irreconcilably divided in their values and political positions.
Mettler and Brown describe how Republican leaders in southern Ohio welcomed the energy the Tea Party and, later, Trump supporters brought to their organizations. But some of those same leaders were pushed out by the “firebrand extremists” that emerged from those movements. Moderate Republicans stopped attending local meetings. Party leaders have since started “weeding [the Tea Partiers] out,” but to date are “still in the process of recovering.” Throughout these skirmishes rural GOP county chairs retained support from state-level party leaders to manage their right flank. Rural Democratic county chairs, by contrast, maintained no comparable level of communication with state-level or national party leadership. Similar conflicts have occurred in other parts of the state.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, the furthest right fringes have succeeded. Mettler and Brown suggest the right’s radicalization in the state is in part connected to how rural voters are literally outnumbered by voters in urban counties. Democratic and Republican rural county chairs alike agree that there are few economic opportunities other than government jobs for the young people who choose to stay. In turn, energized Republicans are urging commissioners to declare their counties “sanctuaries” from the enforcement of gun control laws they view as unconstitutional.
At the same time, Democratic county chairs in rural Michigan are paddling upstream. “No one else wanted the job,” Sam Winant, a local party chair, told the authors. His partner, Janet, a former chair herself, added that party members have either “moved away or passed away.” A party chair from eastern North Carolina, a black woman in her forties, told the authors, “I had my Biden–Harris bumper sticker on my car, and somebody told me, ‘I should run your ass right off the road.’” Other local Democratic Party officials—many of whom fulfill these duties as volunteers—told the authors about their reluctance to display political signs or sign petitions, citing fears of social and professional ostracization.
The trajectory of this new regional partisanship has made voters view their fellow citizens “as political opponents, or even as members of hostile tribes or sects,” the authors write. Yet despite sharp partisan polarization, their views on cultural and policy matters are often not so different. White rural and urban voters generally support spending on education, infrastructure, healthcare, welfare, and policing at nearly the same levels. When it comes to culture war–coded issues such as gun control, abortion, environmental regulations, and immigration, a larger gap exists between the two groups than on spending issues, but the biggest divergence Mettler and Brown found was only twelve points, on support for same-sex marriage. At the very least, the data shows that differing views on policy and culture isn’t a sufficient explanation for the gap in rural and urban counties’ voting patterns.
None of this is to disregard the role of racism in shaping rural-urban relations. Black and Latino voters, urban and rural alike, still vote similarly, meaning they are not polarized by geography in the same way white voters are. And Mettler and Brown explicitly note that recent polarization “has unleashed more visible and virulent racism and nativism into mainstream American politics than had been present for several decades.” While “anti-Black resentment has long been related to voting for Republicans,” they write, “up through 2004, it had no particular or distinctive role in rural areas, and it was not driving the rural-urban divide.”
The divergence on race over the past twenty years, Mettler and Brown argue, was facilitated by the rural economic deterioration experienced at the tail end of the twentieth century, which fueled resentment toward anything perceived as urban. Many harbored pro–small government, anti-welfare attitudes even as levels of social transfers and government jobs in rural areas increased. Mettler and Brown describe how many people they met felt a sense of shame for relying on social benefits like food stamps.
At the same time, “rural dwellers increasingly perceived Democrats as an overbearing elite” who pushed policies without consulting rural residents. They also felt that the Democratic Party favored policies catering to black Americans, “who appeared to be progressing at their expense.”
When the rural economy effectively collapsed in the 1990s, many blamed inevitable market forces, but Mettler and Brown focus on the policy choices that left rural America behind, including the decline of strong antitrust enforcement and the liberalization of trade. Rural industries that originated in the first half of the twentieth century had long been in decline by the 1990s, and many small farmers had already sold out to international conglomerates. Economic collapse was averted by some newer forms of manufacturing, often located in rural places to avoid unionization or regulation—but only for a short while. The North American Free Trade Agreement and increasingly competitive global pressure led those new manufacturers that were supposed to replace the dying industries to shut down their domestic operations.
Rural lawmakers were not typically victims of this process; some voted for the deregulatory agenda that would destroy the political economy that sustained their homes. These lawmakers came from both parties, and it was Republicans who ultimately helped bring the most high-profile vote of this era, on NAFTA, over the finish line. However, with a Democratic president in charge, and the rise of a new political-economic system that would come to be known as the knowledge economy, there was no easy way for rural Democrats to respond to their constituents. The end of the twentieth century left rural America shell-shocked, and residents reacted accordingly. A former Democratic congresswoman who represented a largely rural district in Illinois told Mettler and Brown that her district was previously home to the headquarters of John Deere and large plants for Caterpillar and Chrysler, alongside other smaller manufacturers. Her constituents blamed NAFTA for destroying the local economy.
Urban areas suffered from deindustrialization and deregulation too. But “even as they confronted high levels of poverty and inequality,” Mettler and Brown argue, the expanding service sector and knowledge economy—rooted in technology, business services, and finance—softened the blow. While these developments were seemingly shepherded by the Democratic Party, Mettler and Brown also underscore the role played by the GOP. More important today than who was responsible is how these developments severed the “long-standing ties” between rural and urban America. The Democratic Party’s presence in many rural counties it once represented was a ghost of itself by 2008. This created the perfect conditions for Republicans to forge a new political identity, later identified with the right-wing populism of Trump.
Absent a wholesale reworking of the American political system, the only real solution available to Democrats is to rebuild their presence in rural America, even if it feels like a humiliation ritual. Mettler and Brown don’t pretend that Democrats investing in rural organizing for a cycle or two will turn back the clock. But showing rural voters there is an alternative is worthwhile. Moreover, “simply by ‘losing by less,’ rural voters can make a difference far beyond their localities,” they write, referring to how rural Democratic voters in Georgia helped elect Raphael Warnock to the Senate, diminishing Republican margins in deep red areas. And the authors insist that this means funneling more resources across the nation, not just into key swing states—the strategy encouraged by the Electoral College. (They also throw a bone to the Republicans, who they argue “would do well to adopt the same approach in urban districts; even when the odds appear tough, citizens deserve a meaningful choice on the ballot.”)
The choice to invest in rural politics is hindered by the lack of incentives to campaign for fewer votes that are harder to get than those in urban areas. However, Mettler and Brown identify a short period when Howard Dean served as chairman of the National Democratic Committee after the 2004 presidential election. He took it upon himself to prove that “any voter in any state can be a Democrat,” as long as someone is there to listen. As chairman, Dean created a nationwide organizing program that deployed at least three to four organizers in every state. Rather than prepare only for the next presidential election, these organizers focused on improving the performance of Democrats in red states and flipped state-level offices held by Republicans in blue states. Dean’s work proved itself. In the 2006 midterms Democrats triumphed, taking control of both chambers of Congress and more state legislatures than they had held since 1994, and flipping six governorships.
After the midterms, political consultants like James Carville and Stan Greenberg insisted to the media that Democrats could have performed better without Dean’s strategy. Carville even suggested Dean be removed as chairman, but he was beaten out by the state party chairs who supported Dean. His strategy may have been scattershot, but Mettler and Brown cite scholarship analyzing thirty-nine districts where Dean organizers worked for more than a year before the midterms. In those places, Democrats saw their vote share double. The authors cautiously note that the eventual success of Barack Obama stemmed in part from the organized party he inherited from Dean.
It is a bit deflating to arrive at a solution—sustained organizing efforts and ensuring that the Democratic Party runs candidates in rural races—that sounds like conventional wisdom. But this advice is also an intervention in the current fight taking place inside the Democratic Party, which can be broadly split into two camps: a populist, anti-monopoly movement allied with the democratic socialist left, claiming the mantle of the New Deal; and a broad swath of progressive neoliberals, focused on achieving affordability through deregulatory policies, who feel the Biden administration went too far left.
Neither approach can go far without the sustained organizing Mettler and Brown support. And it seems clear that the populists are likely to have a greater competitive edge in persuading rural Americans to vote blue; the neoliberals still seem to see the Clinton era as a success, even though its governance destroyed the rural political economy and later fueled the very resentment that now defines the rural-urban divide.
In short, the Democratic Party’s failure was not that it took an unpopular stance at the wrong time, but that vast swaths of the country lost their trust in the party. Regaining it will be difficult. When the party has garnered genuine grassroots support, its leaders have chosen to consolidate their control rather than invest resources toward organizing. The result is that rural voters and their concerns have been tossed aside from the national conversation.
As the cost of living becomes the foremost concern for nearly all voters, and the second Trump administration sheds support over continued feelings of uncertainty about the economy, Democrats are tasked with figuring out how to respond, and despite their disagreements they seem to be forging a loose consensus agenda centered on affordability. Such an agenda has a strong chance of flipping seats they lost in 2024. Voters may punish Trump over the economy in the same way they did Biden.
But it is perhaps even more important to engage with rural voters in so-called unwinnable districts. Even as it makes inroads with the urban vote, the Republican Party doesn’t want the rural-urban political divide undone. It is looking to build on the antidemocratic features of the American political system to maintain its hold on power. The rural-urban divide, as Mettler and Brown put it, is “fueling polarization, deepening political dysfunction, and threatening democracy itself.” That might present the Democratic Party with the opportunity to finally win over rural voters with an alternative. They’d better hope it’s not too late.
Jarod Facundo is a writer and researcher living in Washington, D.C.
