1070061ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYRURAL-URBAN POLITICAL DIVIDE AND DEMOCRATIC VULNERABILITY

research-article2021

Throughout American history and as recently as the

early 1990s, each of the major political parties included
both rural and some urban constituencies, but since
then the nation has become deeply divided geographi-
cally. Rural areas have become increasingly dominated
by the Republican Party and urban places by the
Democratic Party. This growing rural-urban divide is
fostering polarization and democratic vulnerability. We
examine why this cleavage might endanger democracy,
highlighting various mechanisms: the combination of
The Growing long-standing political institutions that give extra lever-
age to sparsely populated places with a transformed
Rural-Urban party system in which one party dominates those
places; growing social divergence between rural and

Political Divide urban areas that fosters “us” versus “them” dynamics;
economic changes that make rural areas ripe for griev-
ance politics; and party leaders willing to cater to such
and Democratic resentments. We present empirical evidence that this
divide is threatening democracy and consider how it
Vulnerability might be mitigated.

rural-urban divide; democratic backsliding;

keywords: 
geographic polarization; political parties

By
Suzanne Mettler
T he United States’ fractious political polari-
zation increasingly endangers basic pillars
of democracy. This is evidenced by many
and Republicans’ continued denial of President Joe
Trevor Brown Biden’s victory, by the violent insurrection on
the U.S. Capitol and Republican officials’
unwillingness to investigate it, and by efforts by
many state legislatures to scale back voting

Suzanne Mettler is John L. Senior Professor of American

Institutions at Cornell University. She is the co-author
of Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American
Democracy (with Robert C. Lieberman; Macmillan
2020), and co-editor of Democratic Resilience: Can the
United States Withstand Rising Polarization? (with
Lieberman and Kenneth M. Roberts; Cambridge
University Press 2021).
Trevor Brown is a PhD student at Cornell University.
His research interests include political economy,
American political development, and public policy.
Correspondence: suzanne.mettler@cornell.edu

DOI: 10.1177/00027162211070061

130 ANNALS, AAPSS, 699, January 2022

RURAL-URBAN POLITICAL DIVIDE AND DEMOCRATIC VULNERABILITY 131

rights and politicize election administration. These developments beg the ques-
tion of how deep our civil strife goes and what it portends.
Throughout much of American history, the nation suffered sectional divisions
between North and South that restricted democratic development and led, on
various occasions, to severe backsliding (Mettler and Lieberman 2020). In the
1890s, for example, southern states disenfranchised millions of Black men and
established one-party rule, in which southern Democrats used their political
power to limit the political and economic rights of Black Americans for the next
60 years. The demise of those regional cleavages might make it appear that
American democracy is safe today. Yet another place-based division has intensified
in recent decades: a national rural-urban political cleavage (Gimpel et al. 2020;
Hopkins 2017, 193–212; McKee 2008; Scala and Johnson 2017). Increasingly this
divide appears to be a major source of polarization and democratic vulnerability.
Among individual Americans, the transformation of the United States’ place-
based politics features two striking national developments. First, according to our
analysis of data from the American National Election Studies (ANES; 2020), by
the late 1990s, rural dwellers across the country—who had long affiliated with
­different parties based on their region—converged in the Republican Party, as
shown in Figure 1.1 Many rural southerners moved away from the Democratic
Party quickly after the civil rights achievements of the 1960s, but after that rates
held quite steady from the mid-1970s through the next quarter century. From
2000 onward, however, rural Americans from both the North and South moved
in lockstep into greater allegiance with the Republican Party.
Second, rural and urban people across the country, who had long resembled
each other in their voting patterns, diverged politically, as shown in Figure 2.
Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century and as recently as the
1996 presidential election, urban and rural Americans voted in sync, but the dif-
ference between them has grown ever since. By 2020, roughly two-thirds of
people who lived in rural areas voted to reelect President Trump, while just one-
third of urbanites did.2 Given that only 14 percent of Americans live in areas
deemed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as rural, this growing fissure
might not seem problematic.3 However, because American political institutions
are organized geographically and give more power to sparsely populated areas,
this division, as we show, can not only generate political polarization but also
threaten democracy.
Republican candidates have pitched their rhetoric to rural dwellers in recent
years, depicting them as “real Americans,” and lambasting Democrats and the
media for their “cosmopolitan bias.” On the campaign trail in 2008, vice presiden-
tial candidate Sarah Palin announced that she and presidential candidate John
McCain “believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit,
and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here
with all of you hardworking, very patriotic . . . very . . . pro-America areas of this
great nation.” The strategy of “doubling down” in appeals to the rural and small-
town base helped to boost voter turnout in 2020; and while it was not enough to
get Trump reelected, it generated long Republican coattails nonetheless, enabling
the party to minimize Senate losses and to pick up seats in the House.
132 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Figure 1
Convergence of Rural Americans, North and South, Identifying as Republican

SOURCE: ANES Cumulative File (2021).

Figure 2
Divergence of Rural and Urban Support for Republican Presidential Candidates

SOURCE: ANES Cumulative File (2021).

Yet the contemporary rural-urban divide runs much deeper than partisan affilia-
tion or vote choice, affecting democratic values. Rural dwellers tend to prize com-
munity spirit and civic involvement, embracing a Tocquevillian or communitarian
conception of democracy; and they have strong ties to the place where they live
(Wuthnow 2018). Yet recently, as evidenced by the 2020 ANES, they appear to be
less tied to liberal democratic values than urbanites. According to our analysis, they
were much more likely to favor restrictions on the press, for example, and to suggest
it would be helpful if the president could unilaterally work on the country’s
RURAL-URBAN POLITICAL DIVIDE AND DEMOCRATIC VULNERABILITY 133

problems without paying attention to the Congress or the courts. These indicators
point to a serious divide in the U.S. polity, one that threatens the health of democ-
racy but has received relatively little attention from students of American politics.4
Certainly political orientations often differ with individuals’ social groups or
place-based identities, and such variation is a normal and typically healthy part of
democratic politics. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for residents of rural and
urban areas in countries around the world to support different parties or politicians.
We argue, however, that when such differences are combined with partisan polari-
zation, the basic pillars of democracy can be endangered: free and fair elections and
their legitimacy; the rule of law; the legitimacy of the political opposition; and the
integrity of civil liberties, civil rights, and voting rights (Mettler and Lieberman
2020). Indeed, in the contemporary United States, the rural-urban divide stands as
a significant threat to democracy.
We begin with a brief overview of this growing political divide and note some
possible explanations for why it has intensified in recent decades. Then we discuss
why it may threaten democracy. The body of the article examines some ways in
which the rural-urban political divide makes democracy vulnerable. We conclude
with consideration of how the divide might be mitigated and democracy protected.

How the Rural-Urban Divide Is Shaping

American Politics
Throughout American history, each of the two major parties typically drew grass-
roots supporters and elected officials from both rural and urban places, and that
remained the case as recently as the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, however, the
partisan divide has increasingly separated more rural states from those with greater
urban populations. In the South, several predominantly rural states that until
recently elected Democrats to Congress and statehouses have shifted to favoring
Republicans; these include Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee,
and West Virginia (Maxwell and Shields 2019; Wright 2020). Several rural states in
the Midwest, most notably Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, have undergone similar
shifts. The only rural states that deviate from these patterns are those in New
England, where New Hampshire and Vermont have been shifting somewhat toward
electing Democrats. Meanwhile, more urban states have become increasingly domi-
nated by Democrats, as epitomized by California (Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi 2021).
This growing political cleavage has become even more apparent within states than
between them, as cities controlled by Democrats increasingly exist as islands amid
Republican-dominated rural areas. Predominantly urban Orange County, California,
for example, long a Republican stronghold, has been shifting to favor Democrats.
Meanwhile, the rural Adirondack “North Country” of New York, after supporting
Obama in 2008 and 2012, gave Trump a large margin in 2016 and 2020. That same
district, after electing Democrats to Congress since 1993, is now represented by
Republican Elise Stefanik, whose support for President Donald Trump’s claims that
he won the 2020 election landed her a spot in the House leadership, replacing Liz
Cheney, who criticized her party for refusing to accept the election results.
134 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

For Republicans, winning in rural areas has proven crucial to the party’s politi-
cal success in the past three decades, enabling it to dominate many elections
despite its minority status among voters overall. Americans’ partisan loyalties
have remained quite constant nationwide over this period, with more people
identifying as Democrats than Republicans, but the latter have nonetheless
enjoyed victories in elections at all levels. In Congress, the GOP secured the
majority in the House for 20 out of the past 30 years, and in the Senate for 18. In
state capitols, furthermore, after decades of Democratic dominance, Republicans’
fortunes changed starting in 1994, and since 2011 they have controlled the major-
ity of both state legislatures and governorships.
These political changes bear large implications for public policy. In past
­decades, Democrats who represented heavily rural constituencies often helped
to provide the support necessary for key policy achievements at the national and
state levels. In the U.S. House, for example, their ranks included progressives
David Obey of northern Wisconsin and Tom Etheridge of North Carolina until
2010; and in the Senate, Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Mary Landrieu of
Louisiana, until 2004 and 2014, respectively. Since then, the areas they repre-
sented have become dominated by Republicans. The shift is particularly striking
in state governments: in the South, for example, the 1970s through the 1990s saw
the rise of vibrant two-party competition and, with it, policy developments that
helped low- and middle- income people, both Blacks and whites; but Republican
ascendance since then has undermined such achievements (Wright 2020). As
Democrats hail increasingly from urban areas and Republicans from rural areas,
it has undermined possibilities for building the broad regional coalitions neces-
sary to enact major policies in the U.S. political system.

Considering Sources of the Rural-Urban Political Divide

In other ongoing research, we are examining the sources of the contemporary
rural-urban divide. Our investigations to date suggest that a confluence of eco-
nomic, demographic, sociocultural, and organizational shifts have helped to widen
the political gap between rural and urban Americans (Brown and Mettler 2021;
Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi 2021). We highlight some of our findings here briefly.
While many urban areas have managed the economic transition from an indus-
trial economy to one anchored in services (Moretti 2012), rural areas have faced
greater challenges in supplying jobs to their populations: agribusiness has replaced
small family-owned farms, international trade has diminished manufacturing
employment, and technological development has reduced jobs in natural resource
extraction (Wuthnow 2018; Autor et al. 2020; Choi et al. 2021). According to one
independent analysis, a full 97 percent of all job growth between 2001 and 2016
occurred in urban areas (Florida and King 2019, 7), leaving many rural people
feeling “left behind.” We find that between 2008 and 2020, employment grew
nearly ten times as much in urban areas compared to rural areas; the latter were
plagued by higher poverty rates and lower economic growth rates as well (Brown
and Mettler 2021). In turn, areas experiencing high economic growth have
RURAL-URBAN POLITICAL DIVIDE AND DEMOCRATIC VULNERABILITY 135

recently been more likely to support Democratic candidates, and those with low
economic growth, Republican candidates (Muro et al. 2020; Muro and Liu 2016).
Most rural areas tend to feature populations composing primarily non-
Hispanic whites, in contrast to the greater racial and ethnic diversity of urban
areas. Census data reveal that as of 2020, non-Hispanic whites make up 76 per-
cent of the rural population, compared to 59 percent in urban areas. To put this
in context, given the small size of the rural population nationally, still far more
non-Hispanic whites today live in urban areas than rural areas (82 percent com-
pared to 18 percent). Roughly one out of four rural residents is a person of color,
furthermore, and some counties feature a majority of minority residents. Since
1990, the Hispanic population has increased dramatically in rural areas, by 44.6
percent; counties in the Midwest and the South have seen the greatest influx
(Lichter 2012, 4). As economic conditions have worsened in rural areas, growing
diversity locally and nationally has sparked contestation over who belongs
(Lichter 2012; Wuthnow 2018, 141–85).
These differences between rural and urban areas raise the question of the role
racism may play in the divide. Rural non-Hispanic whites exhibit significantly
higher racial resentment scores overall than those living in urban areas, but the
difference is not large: about 8 percentage points on a 0 to 100 point scale.5 We
find that such attitudes are associated with voting for Republicans in both urban
and rural areas and that they do not distinctly influence rural or urban non-
Hispanic whites (Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi 2021).6 In short, while racism is one
component of the rural-urban divide, it is by no means reducible to it.
People’s participation in politics, including elections, is influenced by the pres-
ence of organizations in their communities and, of course, their own affiliations
with them. In the contemporary polity, evangelical churches are known to play a
particularly important role in promoting political involvement among Republicans.
We find that they are twice as prevalent in rural areas than urban areas, with
sixteen per ten thousand residents compared to just eight. By contrast, labor
unions are associated with getting out the vote for Democrats, and the typical
urban county has three labor unions per ten thousand residents, compared to just
one in rural areas (Brown and Mettler 2021).
In addition, rural people often seem to possess a distinct way of looking at the
world that flows from their shared experiences. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow
(2018) draws on extensive in-depth interviews with rural dwellers to show that
they view the communities in which they live as special, as their home, and they
have a sense of obligation to them. Political scientist Katherine Cramer finds, in
her research in Wisconsin, that rural people have a placed-base sense of identity,
of “rural consciousness,” through which they make sense of politics. In short, the
rural-urban divide appears to emanate from several sources.

Why a Problem for Democracy?

Why might this particular cleavage, the rural-urban divide, endanger democracy?
To preface this discussion, we resist explanations that suggest that rural areas are
136 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

intrinsically hostile to democracy, as well as those that suggest that urban areas are
necessarily receptive to it. The agrarian populist movement, for example, prolifer-
ated through the rural areas of the Midwest and South in the decades following
the Civil War, and it embraced democratic organizing practices and sought pro-
gressive policy reforms (Sanders 1999). Conversely, cities have fostered hostility
between groups (e.g., Sugrue 1996; Trounstine 2018) as often as they have pro-
moted multicultural democracy (e.g., Ogorzalek 2018). We argue that the contem-
porary rural-urban divide is indeed endangering American democracy, and that it
is doing so through a combination of mechanisms: the combination of long-­
standing political institutions that give extra leverage to sparsely populated places
and a transformed party system in which one party dominates those places;
­growing social divergence between rural and urban areas that fosters an “us versus
them” dynamic; economic changes that make rural areas ripe for grievance
­politics; and party leaders willing to cater to such resentments.
American political institutions have always given extra power to those who live
in sparsely populated areas. Rural dwellers have traditionally gained extra politi-
cal leverage through the structure of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College.
Elections of the U.S. House and state legislatures, with single-member districts
and winner-take-all elections, also advantage the rural party if partisans are sorted
geographically between rural and urban areas.
This bias and its political significance, however, have increased recently. When
the rural-urban split aligns with party divisions, it advantages the party that domi-
nates the less-populated areas, which gains outsized political power. As the urban
population has grown in relative terms, moreover, it accentuates the rural bias of
the institutional arrangements. The combination of these factors today permits
Republicans to “punch above their weight,” for example by winning two recent
presidential elections despite losing the popular vote (2000 and 2016) and often
gaining a higher percentage of both state and federal legislative seats than their
votes cast in recent elections (Rodden 2019, 165–96). These institutional features
can advantage a minority party and harm the responsiveness of the political sys-
tem to the majority of citizens, undercutting the quality of democracy. These
features are rooted in the U.S. Constitution, however, and the exploitation of
them does not directly undermine democratic stability, although it may make the
system more polarized, which in turn can hasten its vulnerability.
Danger to the pillars of democracy may occur, however, when cross-cutting
political cleavages deteriorate. Scholars of comparative politics have long argued
that democracy is most stable when, as Seymour Martin Lipset put it, “social
strata, groups and individuals have a number of cross-cutting politically relevant
affiliations” (1959, 97). When individuals are “pulled among conflicting forces,”
they are most likely to want to reduce “the intensity of political conflict” and to
protect the rights of political minorities. By contrast, when individuals or groups
with the same political disposition are more isolated from those with different
views, they tend to be more intolerant of other viewpoints and more willing to
back political extremists (1959, 95–96). The United States has long featured two
broad “catch-all” parties that each included diverse social groups from different
areas of the nation, helping to diffuse social and political conflict. Today, however,
RURAL-URBAN POLITICAL DIVIDE AND DEMOCRATIC VULNERABILITY 137

the parties—particularly the Republican Party—do more to reinforce rather than

diffuse cleavages.7
Contemporary scholars offer social and psychological analyses that echo
Lipset’s concerns about how isolation of social groups can foster extremism, and
they point to recent dynamics that may be exacerbating such tendencies in
American society. Lilliana Mason argues that as people sort themselves out politi-
cally and socially as if they are two separate tribes, without overlapping affilia-
tions, they tend to acquire more negative and stereotypical views of each other
(Mason 2018). As resentment intensifies, society and politics become divided
between hostile camps of “us” versus “them” (McCoy and Somer 2019). If one
side perceives its identity to be endangered, members may seek to protect it at
all costs, even if that involves undermining pillars of democracy. Similarly, those
who perceive their own status or privilege to be at risk due to the inclusion of citi-
zens of another racial or ethnic group may be willing to override democracy to
retain existing hierarchies. A significant portion of the white population today
perceives itself to be under threat; its racial and ethnic antagonism, in turn,
undermines support for democratic norms (Jardina 2019; Bartels 2020). This
conflict over who belongs as a member of the political community now overlaps
with the partisan divide: the Democratic Party has grown more racially and ethni-
cally diverse in tandem with American society, while the Republican Party—with
its increasingly rural core—has remained disproportionately white (Mettler and
Lieberman 2020). Geographic distance may heighten these tendencies, such that
the rural-urban political divide fosters spiraling dangers to democracy.
Political-economic analysis sheds light on why rural Americans recently have
been supportive of political leaders who cater to grievances. Wuthnow (2018)
finds that rural people feel that their communities are endangered and “left
behind” by the massive economic changes that have taken place in recent
­decades, including deindustrialization and jobs lost to trade and technological
change (Moretti 2012). Cramer (2016) argues that rural dwellers resent urban
political elites because they view them as creating policies with little understand-
ing of how they will affect rural areas; and they perceive urban and suburban
dwellers—particularly those employed in the public sector—to be less hard
working than themselves and pampered by paying less in taxes and reaping more
in government resources. Both find that many rural people harbor a sense of
moral outrage and anger toward political leaders for their fate. Our analysis
reveals that these scholars’ ethnographic findings are supported by recent survey
research on a national scale. According to our analysis of 2020 ANES, for exam-
ple, a majority of people living in rural areas say they do not have enough influ-
ence over government and receive less from government than they deserve
relative to urban people—all despite their structural political advantages men-
tioned above and their disproportionate reliance on federal social transfers
(Brown and Mettler 2021). Political leaders from Scott Walker to Donald Trump
have stoked grievances and resentments and encouraged their supporters to put
democratic principles at risk in the quest to gain and maintain power.
Certainly the rise of any political cleavage bears the potential to exacerbate
polarization. If it fosters an “us versus them” dynamic, people on either side may
138 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Figure 3
Sedition and Nonsedition House Members by Rurality of
Their District and Party

grow increasingly resentful of each other, and some may be inclined to override
basic democratic principles and turn to violence. Political divisions tend to be fluid
and malleable, moreover, and grievances and resentment may be channeled toward
democratic ends, rather than authoritarian politics. Isolation and homogeneity,
which tend to be more concentrated in rural areas than urban areas, have the
potential to present particular threats to democracy, but only under particular cir-
cumstances (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992, 269–81). Urban dwell-
ers are by no means immune to cultivating dangerous resentments, yet the greater
diversity and density in metropolitan places—not least in the contemporary United
States—may make some residents more inclined to exercise tolerance, respect for
differences, and adherence to democratic procedures, or at least prompt their
political leaders to embrace such values out of political necessity (Ogorzalek 2018).

How the Divide Is Harming Democracy

Increasingly, rural areas stand out as the stronghold of the contemporary
Republican Party, and this became evident in efforts to overturn the 2020 presi-
dential election. When Congress reconvened in the evening after the January 6,
2021, insurrection at the Capitol, 139 Republican House members—dubbed by
pundits as the “Sedition Caucus”—sided with Trump in his claims that the elec-
tion was fraudulent, defying state and federal election officials from both parties
who stood by the results and dozens of court decisions. These representatives—
who each rejected the Electoral College votes from at least one of the two con-
tested states, Arizona and Pennsylvania (Binder 2021)—hailed from districts
RURAL-URBAN POLITICAL DIVIDE AND DEMOCRATIC VULNERABILITY 139

where Trump won by particularly large margins. Analyzing the congressional

districts of Sedition Caucus members in terms of rurality, we find that they rep-
resent disproportionately the nation’s most rural places.8
We grouped House members by the rurality of their district, separating them
into four groups from the most urban to the most rural, based on the percentages
of their constituents living in places defined by the Census as rural. We also indi-
cated their party affiliation and separated Republicans who voted to certify the
election results from the Sedition Caucus members. As Figure 3 shows, Democrats
are elected particularly from urban areas, with fully 44 percent of them represent-
ing the most densely populated districts; this group includes Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Only 7 percent of the
Democrats represent the most rural districts; their ranks include House Majority
Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina and some who won in swing districts in
2018, such as Representative Antonio Delgado of New York.
The rural composition of the Sedition Caucus resembles a mirror image of the
urban-centered Democratic Caucus. Nearly 50 percent of its members represent
the least populated districts in the country, with members such as Jim Jordan of
Ohio and Stefanik from the Adirondacks region of New York. Just under 4 per-
cent come from cities.
The Republicans who defied the president and accepted the election results, by
contrast, represent more densely populated places on average than their seditionist
colleagues, although their districts still tend to be more rural than those won by
Democrats. They include Representative Adam Kinziger of Illinois and John Katko
of Central New York, both of whom have been vocal in their denunciations of
Trump’s behavior in inciting the riot and voted for impeachment in January 2021.
The Sedition Caucus does not consist of representatives from just one region
of the nation. While seventy-nine come from the sixteen states of the South, the
remaining sixty members, 43 percent, were elected in states across other regions.
In fact, forty-eight members were elected in states that cast their electoral votes
for Joe Biden. Some represent states that routinely elect Democrats at the top of
the ticket, including seven from California and four from New York. This indi-
cates that the rural-urban divide looms in numerous states throughout the nation,
such that people living in rural areas find themselves to be deeply at odds with
urbanites in their own state.
Beyond members of Congress, Republican state officials from relatively more
rural states also backed efforts to overturn the election results. In December, the
(relatively urban) state of Texas filed a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to dis-
card millions of votes in key battleground states that had made voting by mail
easier due to COVID-19-related concerns. Just one day after the suit was filed,
Republican attorneys general from seventeen states threw their weight behind
the lawsuit. Of those who supported the suit, the overwhelming majority came
from states with relatively high shares of rural populations, such as West Virginia,
Mississippi, and Montana. While we recognize that the number of observations
here is small, we nevertheless suspect the rural-urban divide has helped to foster
a politics within the Republican Party that threatens key tenets of American
democracy, such as respect for legitimate electoral outcomes.
140 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Bridging the Rural-Urban Divide

The stark political division between elected officials representing rural and urban
areas belies their considerable shared interests in stronger economic growth and
a wider distribution of its benefits, across regions and income groups. When it
comes to the public opinion of residents, rural and urban people vary quite dra-
matically on some issues, such as gun rights and immigration; but on other issues,
such as those related to health care, public education, and Social Security, they
vary little (Francia and Baumgartner 2005–2006.) As polarized politicians focus
on distinguishing themselves from each other, it undermines opportunities for
collective action that could benefit low- and middle-income Americans who live
in both areas, mitigating economic and racial inequality. In addition, urban and
rural lawmakers could improve their chances of policy achievements if they could
build coalitions with one another.
The American political system has proven most effective when political lead-
ers have managed to build large political coalitions that span vast parts of the
nation. Political leaders today should pursue policies that unite regions of the
country, offering opportunities for economic development, collective action, and
opportunity across rural and urban divides. The Biden administration’s expansive
infrastructure plans, enacted last fall with bipartisan support, offer such promise,
as do efforts to invest in community colleges. Democrats should not abandon
efforts to compete in rural areas, furthermore, given that close to one-third of
rural dwellers continue to identify with their party overall; and the rate is higher
in many parts of the country, including those where majorities have supported it
as recently as a few election cycles ago.9 Proposals to strengthen organized
labor and workplace democracy could also reinvigorate progressive organizing in
rural areas. As we show in analysis elsewhere, despite their scarcity, unions can
act as a powerful force for encouraging rural people to vote for Democrats
(Brown and Mettler 2021). Broader efforts to reinvigorate civil society, particu-
larly in ways that bring diverse groups of people together to share and negotiate
power across various social cleavages, as proposed by Hahrie Han and Jae Yeon
Kim in this issue, seem especially promising. Republicans, meanwhile, will need
to broaden their appeals and policy agenda if they hope to maintain the support
of some groups of Latinos that shifted to support them in recent elections.
Most Americans were horrified by the scenes that unfolded at the Capitol on
January 6, 2021. That event may be a precursor of similar such events, unless we
can find ways to bridge the rural-urban divide.

Notes
1. Regional data for 2020 ANES respondents is not yet available.
2. For most previous years, the ANES included geo-coded data on respondents’ location. In 2020,
however, they simply asked respondents if they lived in a “rural area,” “small town,” or “city.” For the
purposes of this analysis, we considered “rural areas” rural and “city,” as urban, while dropping respond-
ents who answered “small town,” given its ambiguity. In analysis not presented here, we found similar
results using geo-coded data from the Cooperative Election Study (formerly CCES).
RURAL-URBAN POLITICAL DIVIDE AND DEMOCRATIC VULNERABILITY 141

3. The U.S. Census Bureau, which uses a slightly different definition of rural, places the percentage
closer to 20.
4. According to our analysis of the 2020 ANES, 16 percent of rural people answered that it was “not
important at all” to allow news organizations to criticize political leaders, while just 8 percent of urban
people did. Sixty-four percent of urban respondents said it was “very” or “extremely” important for news
organizations to be able criticize political leaders, relative to just 46 percent of rural people. About one
quarter of rural and 14 percent of urban people favored restricting the press’s access to government deci-
sion making, while 58 percent of urban people and 45 percent of rural dwellers opposed such action.
Forty-two percent of rural people answered that it would be either helpful or okay if the president did not
have to worry about the courts or Congress in acting to solve the nation’s problems, compared to just 33
percent of urban respondents.
5. While racial resentment scores are usually place on a 0 to 1 scale, here we transform them for ease
of interpretation.
6. Specifically, when we interact rurality with racial resentment in multilevel multivariate regression
with ­individual-level vote choice as the outcome, we do not find that racial resentment operates differently
among rural voters relative to urban ones, at least at statistically significant levels.
7. We are thankful to Ken Roberts for underscoring these points.
8. While our analysis suggests that representatives from more rural districts were more likely to vote
against certifying the election, it is worth noting that it appears those arrested for the January 6th storm
on the Capitol were not disproportionately from rural areas (see e.g., Slepyan, Marema, and Carlson 2022).
9. Here we are drawing on the 2020 ANES and CCES (Cooperative Election Study), years 2008–2020.

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