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PORTSIDE CULTURE

COULD DEMOCRATS REGAIN THE RURAL VOTE?  
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Jarod Facundo
January 15, 2026
Dissent Magazine
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_ The end of the twentieth century left rural America shell-shocked,
and residents reacted accordingly. _

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_Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens
Democracy_Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. BrownPrinceton University
PressISBN: 9780691264387

 

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.

* rural voters
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* urban voters
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* elections
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* Party politics
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