What Makes Rural Voters Tick?

Several recent books have tried to decode the Democrats’ dilemma by looking at what makes rural and white working-class voters tick. Some have been good; others not so good. With White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, authors Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman use stale stereotypes and tired tropes to paint rural whites, as Schaller said on MSNBC, as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” The book was widely panned this past spring by a number of critics.

A counterbalance to Schaller and Waldman comes from two political science professors at Colby College in Maine, the nation’s second most rural state. In The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea have produced a valuable contribution to understanding why the widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious political fault line of our times.

What makes Jacobs and Shea’s work special is their exhaustive research. Over the past four years, they have created of one of the largest historical data sets on voting patterns in the United States, combining census reports and community and economic data dating back to 1824. Moreover, they conducted three of their own polls with the Rural Voter Survey project, which encompassed interviews with more than 10,000 rural voters and 4,000 non-rural voters. The conclusions that Jacobs and Shea draw about rural voters come from data, not anecdotes.

The authors write that “rural Americans are different because they see themselves as different,” and that “increasingly, ruralness matters more and more each election year.” With their new measure of “county ruralness,” combined with their collection on presidential voting data, readers get the first in-depth national measure of partisanship in rural America since the early 19th century.

The authors argue that while place is still important, “place is no longer local or regional.” Instead, rural voters have become nationalized as rural America has become drawn under a unified identity. They show how the “cultivation of this rural identity was part of a deliberate strategy on the part of elected officials within the Republican Party” from 1980 to the present, as the GOP went about manufacturing the myth of rural folks as the “real America.” While this was playing out, Democrats “struggled to react to the GOP’s growing dominance in rural communities throughout the country, as traditional regional or state loyalties succumbed to this new, national message about rural America.”

Jacobs and Shea walk through how the rural voter emerged during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in connection with Republican concerns about big government as well as racial, cultural and economic grievances. A range of factors contributed to this, from the expansion of universities and the baby boom of the 1960s, to the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s that accelerated “the Great Agricultural Transition” (a term coined by sociologists Linda Loabo and Katherine Meyer) as family farms struggled to survive amid increasing farm consolidation and foreclosures.

The exodus of Americans from farming “fundamentally altered rural life,” Jacobs and Shea write, as uneven economic development “exacerbated inequality in rural communities between those who barely survived and those who created farming industrial empires.” Between 1960 and 1980, rural areas lost nearly a quarter of their overall population, as the decline of small-scale farming forced families to take off-farm jobs, kids moved away to attend college, and rural America grew older and less educated.

By associating ruralness with “small town values” and a life of “thrift and hard work,” Reagan found a powerful way to exploit the political precarity of farmers and rural communities. Jacobs and Shea argue that by presenting rural communities as under attack by an out-of-control bureaucratic government, Reagan’s conservative philosophy offered a message that combined cultural war grievances—reactions to feminism, racial equality and immigration—with a sense of powerlessness, distrust of the federal government and a nostalgic return to American “roots” and simpler times.  

Bolstered by a newly organized conservative evangelical movement, and with much of rural culture under attack in the media and by Hollywood, Democrats were painted as out of touch with rural denizens, their policies hostile to the rural way of life.

The book has chapters that make for compelling reading. It explores pervasive notions about rural people: whether or not rural Americans are in fact “down and out,” clingers to their guns and religion, “irredeemably racist” and “radicalized by Fox [News].” The picture that emerges is more nuanced and complex than the sensationalized articles reported by pundits from large cities who parachute into “flyover country” and interview “rural rabble-rousers” who make for colorful copy but are not representative of their communities.

For example, the authors take issue with Thomas Frank’s thesis in What’s The Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America that rural people vote against their own economic interests. According to Jacobs and Shea, “Economic deprivation does very little to explain the lock that the Republican Party has in these communities. They are not voting against their interests, if you understand that their interests are very different from what others may think, especially those who do not live in rural communities.” In contrast, the authors note that “rural voters have developed a sense of shared, place-based destiny” and that “feelings of resentment and anxiety are an extension of rural grievance.”

Jacobs and Shea point out that income inequality (where poverty and economic precarity are much more integrated into rural places than large cities or suburbs) amplifies feelings of rural decline, which Republican politicians have exploited into an “us” versus “them” narrative, especially since the 2016 election of Donald Trump. This anxiety, they write, which is highest in the rustic precincts, has allowed politicians to turn “rural America’s economic vulnerability into a deeply felt grievance toward government, urban elites, intellectuals, and, in a word, Democrats.”

In their final chapter, “Bridges Across the Rural-Urban Divide,” the authors state that their intention is not to “detail a prescription for the ailments” of the Democrats, other than to point out that they need to show up and compete.

Despite outperforming John Kerry’s 2004 numbers with rural voters in 2008, Barack Obama was not fully committed to voter outreach in rural areas. The electoral carnage from the 2010 midterms to the end of his second term was catastrophic for rural Democrats, as well as for candidates up and down the ballot. It will take more than just showing up, however, for Democrats to change the red tide. It will require a robust investment of financial resources to build lasting rural electoral infrastructure on the part of Democratic campaign committees, state parties, super PACs and 501(c)(4) organizations. As Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said at the August 20 gathering of the Democratic Rural Council meeting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, “You win in rural America when you decide you want to win in rural America.”

The factors and mindsets behind what she calls “place-based partisanship” are the subject of How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics by Stephanie Ternullo. I found this book disappointing for several reasons. The author looks at three Midwestern small cities that are blue collar and mostly white to assess how local contexts have increased or decreased their rightward electoral shift.

The first problem is that Ternullo gives each city a made up moniker instead of using their real names. This does not serve the cause of helping the reader better understand and appreciate the political geography of the chosen locations of study. There was no need to do this. In her acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Arlie Russell Hochschild is right up front about the fact that the area she spent five years leading up to the 2016 election is Lake Charles and the communities of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. Katherine Cramer’s excellent book The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker does not hide the names of the rural Wisconsin places she visited.

So, using what Ternullo calls “diagnostic frames” to chart the “narratives of community identity,” off we go to “Motorville,” “Lutherton” and “Gravesend.” Motorville is somewhere in Wisconsin and due to its strong labor legacy and the presence of unions, is one of just 4% of U.S. counties that have reliably voted for Democratic presidents since the days of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Motorville, folks see politics as between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” To redress inequities they push for more support from the federal and state governments.

By contrast, Lutherton, in Indiana, went Republican back in the 1980s as manufacturing left, organized labor died out and the evangelical movement began to power the candidacies of Ronald Reagan and the GOPers who came after the Gipper. Settled by German Lutherans, Lutherton has a church on practically every corner, and folks first size you up by asking what church you attend. Unemployment is not a problem, but many of the jobs in the service sector go unfilled. They also don’t pay that well. In Lutherton, problems such as hunger and food insecurity, homelessness and the ravages of the opioid epidemic are handled by church group volunteers and nonprofits. No need for government to get involved, thank you very much.

Then there is Gravesend, the Minnesota municipality that is divided between the two political parties. Gravesend has never fully recovered from the fire and closure of the Rivervalley Foundries, which was the town’s largest employer. There are some loyal Democrats here but a good chunk of voters have swung to Republicans in the age of Trump.

Ternullo conducted dozens of interviews in the field and online (during the Covid-19 pandemic) in the run up to the 2020 election. But the book reads like the qualitative research findings from a series of focus groups. I found it tedious as she plowed and harrowed over familiar ground. Surprisingly, none of the good burghers of Lutherton get asked how—if they hold Christian and family values so near and dear—they can square their morality with their support for Trump, whose womanizing, misogyny, racial animus, endless lying and cheating violates the Golden Rule. I would have enjoyed hearing why these Hoosiers don’t consider themselves hypocrites.

The conclusion of the book, “The Future of Heartland Politics,” is somewhat of a letdown. If the reader is expecting some recommendations for how this critical region of the country—which includes both battleground states and states that are trending away from Democrats—can be made more competitive for Democrats, or if Republicans will at some point break the night sweats that have kept them in thrall to Trump, they will be disappointed. Ternullo takes the academic way out, suggesting that “future research should examine the extent to which other elements of social context shape partisan attachments; for example do social networks shape partisan ties, do partisan ties shape social networks, or both?”

I wish Ternullo had given readers some insight into how Democrats can better capture the allegiances of rural voters based on her field research besides the now dog-eared mantra of “show up and listen.”

Matt L. Barron

Matt L. Barron is a political consultant and rural strategist based in Chesterfield, Massachusetts where he runs MLB Research Associates.