In 1993, Democrats held an extraordinary 32–2 majority in the state senate; three decades later, Republicans held a 31–3 majority.
Truman and Letitia Chafin, interview with the authors, Williamson, W.V., April 3, 2023.
One episode in this period is known as the Matewan Massacre (or the Battle of Matewan), in which miners and their allies had a shootout with members of the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency, who had been sent to put them back in their place. The event was dramatized in the 1987 John Sayles film Matewan. The Mine Wars culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, the largest insurrection on American soil since the Civil War. Thousands of miners faced off against an army led by Logan County sheriff Don Chafin, who in his official capacity was essentially the coal companies’ enforcer, a task he carried out with enthusiastic brutality. The conflict ended only when President Warren Harding ordered the West Virginia National Guard to move in and restore order.
The most important pieces of legislation were the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 and the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
One key development was the spread of the Joy Loading Machine, which would gather coal, move it on a conveyor belt, and deposit it in a coal car, actions that previously had to be done by large numbers of men with shovels.
Raymond Chafin, interview with the authors, Williamson, W.V., April 7, 2023.
West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training, “2021 Production and Employment—Broken Down by County,” table, n.d.
This happened just twelve years after John Kerry won a comfortable victory there; only two of the fifty-five counties in the state voted more strongly for Kerry. In 2016, only three of the fifty-five voted more strongly for Trump than Mingo did.
Public Religion Research Institute, “Competing Visions of America: An Evolving Identity or a Culture Under Attack?”, PRRI, November 1, 2021, Question 7a. We thank PRRI’s Natalie Jackson and Sean Sands, who produced for us, upon request, the urban/suburban/rural splits from this poll that were not made available in the versions of results and cross tabs produced for the public.
Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation Poll of Rural and Small-town America, conducted April 13–May 1, 2017, Question 49.
Kim Parker et al., “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” Pew Research Center, May 22, 2018.
Eli Yokley, “The Culture War Has Democrats Facing Electoral Demise in Rural America. Can They Stop the Bleeding?” Morning Consult, February 22, 2022.
B. Kal Munis, “Us Over Here Versus Them Over There…Literally: Measuring Place Resentment in American Politics,” Political Behavior 44 (2022): 1057–78.
Kim Parker et al., “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” Pew Research Center, May 22, 2018; see Section 3 results.
Public Religion Research Institute, “Competing Visions of America: An Evolving Identity or a Culture Under Attack? Findings from the 2021 American Values Survey,” November 1, 2021, Question 34a.
Public Religion Research Institute, “Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption,” May 27, 2021.
Public Policy Polling, “Birthers Very Much a Rural Phenomenon,” August 11, 2009.
Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown, “The Growing Rural-Urban Political Divide and Democratic Vulnerability,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 699, No. 1 (January 2022): 130–42.
Parker et al., “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” see Section 2.
Public Religion Research Institute, “Survey: Two-Thirds of White Evangelicals, Most Republicans Sympathetic to Christian Nationalism,” February 8, 2023.
Maurice Chammah, “Does Your Sheriff Think He’s More Powerful Than the President?” The Marshall Project, October 18, 2022.
Matthew D. Nelsen and Christopher D. Petsko, “Race and White Rural Consciousness,” American Political Science Review 19, No. 4 (December 2021): 1205–18.
Robert A. Pape, “21 Million Americans Say Biden Is ‘Illegitimate’ and Trump Should Be Restored by Violence, Survey Finds,” The Conversation, September 23, 2021.
Public Religion Research, “Competing Visions of America,” Question 34d; cross tabs for place identity computed and provided to authors directly by PRRI’s Natalie Jackson.
Ben Kamisar, “Attitudes on Jan. 6 Capitol Attack Settle in Along Familiar Partisan Lines,” NBC News, August 24, 2021.
Calculated by authors, courtesy of data provided by Ballotpedia, “Election Results, 2020: Pivot Counties in the 2020 Presidential Election,” see ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Pivot_Counties_in_the_2020_presidential_election. The three counties with longer streaks are Clay, Minnesota; Blaine, Montana; and Clallam, Washington.
Details and quotes derived in this section are from separate interviews with Roy Holzer, Wilmington Town Hall, Wilmington, N.Y., March 22, 2023; and Shaun Gillilland, Willsboro Town Hall, Willsboro, N.Y., March 22, 2023.
Tim Henderson, “Shrinking Rural America Faces State Power Struggle,” Stateline, August 10, 2021.
Elizabeth A. Dobis et al., “Rural America at a Glance, 2021 Edition,” Economic Information Bulletin No. 230, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, November 2021.
Paul Mackun, Joshua Comenetz, and Lindsay Spell, “Around Four-Fifths of All U.S. Metro Areas Grew Between 2010 and 2020,” U.S. Census Bureau, August 12, 2021; and Economic Research Service, “Ag and Food Statistics: Charting the Essentials,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, February 2020.
Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation Poll of Rural and Small-town America, Question 40.
Patrick J. Carr and Maria Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (New York: Beacon Press, 2010).
Jessica D. Ulrich-Schad and Cynthia M. Duncan, “People and Places Left Behind: Work, Culture, and Politics in the Rural United States,” Conference Paper No. 64, ERPI 2018 International Conference on Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World, International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Netherlands, March 17–18, 2018, Table 2.
Gracy Olmstead, “How to Keep Young People from Fleeing Small Towns for Big Cities,” The Week, August 6, 2018.
Mila Besich, interview with the authors, Superior, Arizona, November 7, 2022.
Shawna Claw, interview with the authors, Chinle, Arizona, November 8, 2022.
Navajo Nation Council, “Navajo Nation Unofficial Election Results, 2022: General Election,” Tuesday, November 8, 2022.
Andrea Stewart, interview with the authors, Malone, N.Y., March 20, 2023.
Farmington population estimate based on decade population figure nearest to Manchin’s birth year. “West Virginia Governor Cool to School Consolidation,” Education Week, April 12, 2005.
Kristi Eaton, “Relocation Programs Continue to Grow in Numbers in Rural America,” Daily Yonder, January 18, 2023.
Chris Morris, “West Virginia Is Close to Giving $25,000 to Ex-Residents to Move Back,” Fortune, February 28, 2023.
Sarah Melotte, “Is Rural America Growing Again? Recent Data Suggests ‘Yes,’ ” Daily Yonder, February 2, 2023.
Sarah Melotte, “Rural Counties with the Most Population Loss Voted the Most Democratic in 2020,” Daily Yonder, September 20, 2022.
“The Megaphone of Main Street: The Small Business Rural/Urban Divide,” SCORE, February 16, 2023.
Olugbenga Ajilore and Caius Z. Willingham, “The Path to Rural Resilience in America,” Center for American Progress, September 21, 2020.
Eduardo Porter, “The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy,” New York Times, December 14, 2018.
Justin McCarthy, “U.S. Approval of Labor Unions at Highest Point Since 1965,” Gallup, August 30, 2022.
Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez, “After a Brief Pandemic Reprieve, Rural Workers Return to Life Without Paid Leave,” Kaiser Health News, January 18, 2023.
David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 233.
Economic Research Service, “Inflation-Adjusted Price Indices for Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans Show Long-Term Declines,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, April 23, 2019.
Ryan McCrimmon, “ ‘Here’s Your Check’: Trump’s Massive Payouts to Farmers Will Be Hard to Pull Back,” Politico, July 14, 2020.
Claire Kelloway and Sarah Miller, “Food and Power: Addressing Monopolization in America’s Food Systems,” Open Markets Institute, March 2019.
Union of Concerned Scientists, “Bigger Farms, Bigger Problems,” April 14, 2021.
Union of Concerned Scientists, “Bigger Farms, Bigger Problems”; Danbom, Born in the Country, 229. Danbom cites the current figure at 7 percent in his book, which was first published in 1995.
Kirk Kardashian, “Many of Vermont’s Dairy Farms Have Shuttered, and the Forecast Is for Still Fewer—and Much Larger—Operations,” Seven Days, May 31, 2023.
Isabel Soisson, “Rural Advocates Want to Take on Monopoly Power and Help Family Farmers,” Dogwood, May 8, 2023.
As recently as 1997, Northampton ranked first in the state and thirteenth nationally in county-wide peanut production, but has since slipped to fifth overall in North Carolina. See files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/NP0516.pdf, p. 46, note 21, and www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/North_Carolina/Publications/County_Estimates/Peanut.pdf.
Bob Allsbrook, interview with the authors, Aunt Ruby’s Peanuts gift shop, Enfield, N.C., February 16, 2023.
Aditya Dasgupta and Elena Ruiz Ramirez, “Explaining Rural Conservatism: Political Consequences of Technological Change in the Great Plains,” Working Paper, SocArXiv, December 30, 2020.
Curt Meine quoted in Dan Kaufman, “Is It Time to Break Up Big Ag?” New Yorker, August 17, 2021.
Lina Khan, “Obama’s Game of Chicken,” Washington Monthly, November 9, 2012.
Katherine Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All Employees, Coal Mining, CES1021210001,” table, retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, August 31, 2023.
Hillary Clinton quoted in Lauren Carroll, “In Context: Hillary Clinton’s Comments About Coal Jobs,” Politifact, May 10, 2016.
“Trump Receives Warm Welcome in Coal Country,” video clip, Washington Post, May 6, 2016.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “All Employees, Coal Mining, CES1021210001.”
Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation Poll of Rural and Small-town America, Question 37.
Steven Beda, “The Divide Between Rural and Urban America, in 6 Charts,” The Conversation, March 20, 2017.
Al Cross quoted in Frank Morris, “How Dollar General Is Transforming Rural America,” NPR, December 11, 2017.
Chris McGreal, “Where Even Walmart Won’t Go: How Dollar General Took Over Rural America,” Guardian, August 13, 2018.
Aallyah Wright, “The Movement to Stop Dollar Stores from Suffocating Black Communities,” Capital B News, May 17, 2023.
CDC Newsroom, “CDC: More Obesity in U.S. Rural Counties than in Urban Counties,” press release, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, June 14, 2018.
Michael Corkery, “Dollar General Is Deemed a ‘Severe Violator’ by the Labor Dept.,” New York Times, March 28, 2023.
For an account of how the corporation overwhelms workers looking for nothing more than a little extra pay and humane treatment, see Greg Jaffe, “The Worker Revolt Comes to a Dollar General in Connecticut,” Washington Post, December 11, 2021.
Michael Corkery, “As Dollar Stores Proliferate, Some Communities Say No,” New York Times, March 1, 2023.
Michael Corkery, “Will a Dollar General Ruin a Rural Crossroads?” New York Times, June 2, 2023.
R. Rasker et al., “The Economic Importance of Air Travel in High-Amenity Rural Areas,” Journal of Rural Studies 25 (2009): 343–53.
Aubrey Byron, “Getting from Here to There in Rural America,” Strong Towns, November 1, 2018.
Tessa Conroy and Stephan Weiler, “Rural Americans Aren’t Included in Inflation Figures. For Them, the Cost of Living May Be Rising,” Daily Yonder, February 8, 2023.
Tom Peterson, “This Region Has the Fewest Electric Vehicles. Here’s Why,” Stateline, March 6, 2023.
Alan Morgan quoted in “The Power of Connection: Reversing Social Isolation in Rural America: Highlights and Key Findings of the 2018 Connectivity Summit on Rural Aging,” Portland, Me., August 7 and 8, 2018.
“SBJ Unpacks: Lake Placid’s $500 Million Makeover,” Sports Business Journal, January 11, 2023; Aaron Cerbone, “SLK Gets $8.5M from State for Terminal Upgrade,” Adirondack Daily Enterprise, September 19, 2022; “Governor Hochul Announces Completion of Saranac Lake Civic Center’s Nearly $7 Million Upgrade,” press release, Office of New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, January 5, 2023.
Gillilland interview, March 22, 2023.
Center for Business and Economic Research at Marshall University, The Economic and Fiscal Impact of the Hatfield-McCoy Trail System in West Virginia—2021, Final Report, prepared for Hatfield-McCoy Regional Recreation Authority, April 11, 2022.
Duncan Slade, “Less Money, Fewer Jobs: After Two Decades, WV’s ATV Trails Have Fallen Far Short of Initial Projections,” Mountain State Spotlight, August 24, 2021.
Larry DeBoer quoted in Brian Wallheimer, “Study: Rural-Urban Fiscal Divide Grows in Response to Decades of State Tax Overhauls,” “Agriculture News” press release, Purdue University, July 15, 2020; Larry DeBoer, Capacity-Cost Indexes for Indiana Local Governments 2002 and 2018, report, Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute, June 2020.
Ajilore and Willingham, “The Path to Rural Resilience in America.”
Headwaters Economics, “Fiscal Policy Is Failing Rural America: Understanding Barriers to Economic Development, Conservation, and Renewable Energy,” Headwaters Economics, October 2020.
Besich interview with the authors.
U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Rural Development” homepage, “Programs & Services” tab, subtab listing for “All Programs,” www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/all-programs.
Anthony F. Pipa and Natalie Geismar, “Reimagining Rural Policy: Organizing Federal Assistance to Maximize Rural Prosperity,” Brookings Institution, November 19, 2020.
Nick Hanauer, “Democrats Need to Fix Rural Economies—and Get the Credit for It,” American Prospect, March 24, 2022.
Economic Research Service, “Federal Tax Policies and Low-Income Rural Households,” ERS Report Summary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, May 2011.
Shreya Paul, Marisa Rafal, and Andrew J. Houtenville, “2021 Annual Disability Statistics Compendium: 2021,” Section 10: Rural, University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability, see Table 10.1; Terrence McCoy, “Did You Know in Rural America, Disability Benefit Rates Are Twice as High as in Urban Areas?,” Washington Post, July 22, 2017.
Data on federal spending from the USDA’s Economic Research Service can be found at www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/federal-funds.
Holly Taylor, “Courthouse Construction Set to Begin in Spring of 2022,” Roanoke-Chowan News Herald, December 21, 2021.
American Hospital Association, “AHA Report: Rural Hospital Closures Threaten Patient Access to Care,” AHA, September 8, 2022.
Dunc Williams, Jr., et al., “Rural Hospital Mergers Increased Between 2005 and 2016—What Did Those Hospitals Look Like?” Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, July 18, 2020, doi:10.1177/0046958020935666.
Liz Carey, “Experts: National Physician Shortage Will Hit Rural Areas Harder,” Daily Yonder, March 13, 2023.
Liz Carey, “Under Half of Rural Hospitals Offer Labor and Delivery Services, Putting Rural Moms at Risk, Report Says,” Daily Yonder, May 9, 2023.
H. Joanna Jiang et al., “Risk of Closure Among Independent and Multihospital-Affiliated Rural Hospitals,” JAMA Health Forum 3, No. 7 (July 1, 2022).
Cecilia Nowell, “How to Kill a Rural Hospital,” Nation, September 5–12, 2022.
Jeffrey H. Dorfman and Anne M. Mandich, “Senior Migration: Spatial Considerations of Amenity and Health Access Drivers,” Journal of Regional Science 56, No. 1 (2016): 99–136.
The exact figures for median distance increases for general inpatient (from 3.4 to 23.9 miles) and emergency facilities (from 3.3 to 24.2) are not identical, but both round to about seven to one. Government Accountability Office, “Affected Residents Had Reduced Access to Health Care Services,” Report GAO 21-93, GAO, December 2020.
Pooja Salhotra, “Texans Are Dying on State Highways Every Day—Especially in Rural ‘Dead Zones,’ ” Texas Tribune, December 21, 2022.
Salako Abiodun, Fred Ullrich, and Keith J. Mueller, “Update: Independently Owned Pharmacy Closures in Rural America, 2003–2018,” Rural Policy Brief No. 2018-2, Iowa City: RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis at the University of Iowa.
Salako Abiodun, Fred Ullrich, and Keith J. Mueller, “Issues Confronting Rural Pharmacies after a Decade of Medicare Part D,” Rural Policy Brief No. 2017-3, Iowa City: RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis at the University of Iowa.
Markian Hawryluk, “The Last Drugstore: Rural America Is Losing Its Pharmacies,” Washington Post, November 10, 2021.
Hawryluk, “The Last Drugstore.”
Kimberly Donahue, “Williamson Memorial Hospital to Reopen with $2 Million in Federal Funding,” WCAZ News Channel 3, September 29, 2022.
Based on the authors’ conversations with the pharmacy manager of the Jackson, North Carolina, branch of the Futrell Pharmacy chain, August 5, 2022.
Based on in-person conversation with Robin Humphreys, community health liaison for Baylor Scott and White, Llano, Texas, November 4, 2022.
Citizens Advocates website, “About Us” tab, citizenadvocates.net/about-us/.
Carolyn Y. Johnson, “Poll Shows Obamacare Started Looking a Lot Better After the Election,” Washington Post, December 1, 2016.
Ezra Klein, “Racists Are Likelier to Oppose Health Reform When They Think About Obama,” Vox, May 23, 2014.
For instance, one study found that “nativism was an independent and significant predictor of opposition to health care reform and that this effect held for both Republicans as well as Democrats, although the relationship is stronger for Republicans” (Benjamin R. Knoll and Jordan Shewmaker, “ ‘Simply Un-American’: Nativism and Support for Health Care Reform,” Political Behavior 37 [2015]: 87–108); another found that “racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in the fall of 2009 than they had in cross-sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those re-interview surveys found healthcare policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton’s 1993 reform efforts” (Michael Tesler, “The Spillover of Racialization into Healthcare: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race,” American Journal of Political Science 56 [2012]: 690–704).
David Mushinski, Alexandra Bernasek, and Stephan Weiler, “Job Lock in Rural Versus Urban Labor Markets,” Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy 46, No. 2 (2015): 253–73.
Jennifer Cheeseman Day, “Rates of Uninsured Fall in Rural Counties, Remain Higher than Urban Counties,” U.S. Census Bureau, April 9, 2019; Gina Turrini et al., “Access to Affordable Care in Rural America: Current Trends and Key Challenges,” Office of Health Policy, Department of Health and Human Services, July 9, 2021.
Turrini, “Access to Affordable Care in Rural America,” see Table 1, p. 3.
“Transcript: Gov. Tate Reeves Delivers 2023 State of the State Address,” Mississippi Today, January 30, 2023.
Kayode Crown, “As Mississippi Hospitals Fail, Leaders Kill Medicaid Expansion Efforts Again,” Mississippi Free Press, February 2, 2023.
Liz Carey, “Nearly Half of All Rural Hospitals Are Operating in the Red,” Daily Yonder, March 8, 2023.
Shannon M. Monnat, “The Contributions of Socioeconomic and Opioid Supply Factors to U.S. Drug Mortality Rates: Urban-Rural and Within-Rural Differences,” Journal of Rural Studies 68 (2019): 319–35.
Sarah Jones, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Crisis,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 50 (Fall 2018): 78–84.
Lindsey Bever, “A Town of 3,200 Was Flooded with Nearly 21 Million Pain Pills as Addiction Crisis Worsened, Lawmakers Say,” Washington Post, January 31, 2018.
Center for American Progress, “Gun Violence in Rural America,” September 26, 2022.
Dan Frosch, Kris Maher, and Zusha Elinson, “Murder Rates Soar in Rural America,” Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2022.
Colin Woodard, “The Surprising Geography of Gun Violence,” Politico Magazine, April 23, 2023.
John Gramlich, “What the Data Says About Gun Deaths in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, February 3, 2022; T. H. Chan School of Public Health, “Lethality of Suicide Methods: Case Fatality Rates by Suicide Method, 8 U.S. States, 1989–1997,” Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
For instance, according to data in the CDC’s WONDER database, 89 percent of gun suicide victims in 2020 were White; the figure in 2019 was 91 percent.
Kim Parker et al., “The Demographics of Gun Ownership,” Pew Research Center, June 22, 2017.
Data taken from the Census Bureau’s state rankings based on rural population share, www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/12/life_off_the_highway.html; and Heather Saunders, “Do States with Easier Access to Guns Have More Suicide Deaths by Firearm?” Kaiser Family Foundation, July 18, 2022.
Turrini, “Access to Affordable Care in Rural America,” 7–8.
Shelby Harris and Sarah Melotte, “ ‘We Are Not Thought Of’—Lack of Maternal Care Threatens Health of Western N.C. Mothers,” Daily Yonder, January 17, 2023.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System,” CDC, n.d.; and Peter T. Merkt et al., “Urban-Rural Differences in Pregnancy-Related Deaths, United States, 2011–2016,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Vol. 225, Issue 2, August 2021.
Claire Suddath, “A Very Dangerous Place to Be Pregnant Is Getting Even Scarier,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 4, 2022.
Steven H. Woolf and Heidi Schoomaker, “Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates in the United States, 1959–2017,” Journal of the American Medical Association 322, No. 20 (2019): 1996–2016.
Gina Kolata and Sabrina Tavernise, “It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy,” New York Times, November 26, 2019; Joel Achenbach, “ ‘There’s Something Terribly Wrong’: Americans Are Dying Young at Alarming Rates,” Washington Post, November 26, 2019.
Philip Bump, “Trump Praised West Virginia for Keeping Coronavirus Out. That’s Not How This Works,” Washington Post, March 17, 2020.
Ryan Saelee, Ph.D., et al, “Disparities in COVID-19 Vaccination Coverage Between Urban and Rural Counties—United States, December 14, 2020 to January 31, 2022,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 71, No. 9 (March 4, 2022): 335–40.
Daniel Wood and Geoff Brumfiel, “Pro-Trump Counties Now Have Far Higher COVID Death Rates: Misinformation Is to Blame,” Morning Edition, NPR, December 5, 2021.
Michael Miller, “Third COVID-19 Wave Hit Rural America Especially Hard,” UC News, University of Cincinnati, February 10, 2022.
Bradley Jones, “The Changing Political Geography of COVID-19 over the Last Two Years,” Pew Research Center, March 3, 2022.
Monica Potts, “Why Being Anti-Science Is Now Part of Many Rural Americans’ Identity,” FiveThirtyEight, April 25, 2022.
Sarah Melotte, “Rural Covid-19 Deaths Drop for the Fourth Consecutive Week,” Daily Yonder, October 20, 2022.
Rankings courtesy of the New York Times coronavirus tracker site, effective on May 30, 2023, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html.
Michelle Samuels, “US Covid Deaths May Be Undercounted by 36 Percent,” Boston University School of Public Health.
Abigail Abrams and Alana Abramson, “How the Biden Administration Plans to Convince Skeptical Republicans to Get Vaccinated,” Time, April 21, 2021.
Kathleen J. Frydl, “The Oxy Electorate,” Medium, November 16, 2016.
Will Wilkinson, “The Density Divide: Urbanization, Polarization and Populist Backlash,” Niskanen Center, June 2019, p. 9, Figure 2.
Porter, “The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy.”
Jimmy Carter, “The First Campaign: An Excerpt from Jimmy Carter’s New Memoir, ‘A Full Life,’ ” Atlanta Magazine, August 13, 2015.
Jimmy Carter, Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Coming of Age (New York: Crown, 1992), xxiv.
Emily Badger, “As American as Apple Pie? The Rural Vote’s Disproportionate Slice of Power,” New York Times, November 20, 2016.
United States Census Bureau, “2020 Population and Housing State Data,” August 12, 2021.
Matthew Yglesias, “American Democracy’s Senate Problem, Explained,” Vox, December 17, 2019.
Nate Silver, “The Senate’s Rural Skew Makes It Very Hard for Democrats to Win the Supreme Court,” FiveThirtyEight, September 20, 2020. Note that the FiveThirtyEight piece uses a different measure of rurality than ours.
Yglesias, “American Democracy’s Senate Problem, Explained.”
Calculated by authors using the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data and rankings for states based on urban/rural population shares: United States Census Bureau, “2010 Census Urban and Rural Classification and Urban Area Criteria,” and United States Census Bureau, “Life Off the Highway: A Snapshot of Rural America.”
Lee Drutman, “The Crisis of Senate Legitimacy,” chap. 14 in Sean Theriault, ed., Disruption: The Senate During the Trump Era (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
These figures are based on 2022 Census population estimates. Because citizens of the District of Columbia are deprived of representation in Congress, we did not include its population in these totals.
Adam Liptak, “Smaller States Find Outsize Clout Growing in Senate,” New York Times, March 11, 2013.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Give New York Its Fair Share of Homeland Money,” New York Times, August 22, 2004.
Richard Johnson and Lisa L. Miller, “The Conservative Policy Bias of U.S. Senate Malapportionment,” PS: Political Science and Politics 56, No. 1 (September 2022): 10–17.
The need for two amendments has been debated by constitutional legal scholars, but that debate is purely academic, given that neither the first nor the second amendment needed would ever receive the consent of the small states.
Amy Walter, “The Republican Electoral College Advantage,” The Cook Political Report, July 22, 2022.
Technically, Trump received 304 electors in the final official count, but only because some electors refused to vote for him. But the total in the states he won on Election Night was the same 306 as Biden’s was four years later in the states Biden carried.
Calculated by the authors using the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data and rankings for states based on urban/rural population shares and members of Congress elected in 2020: United States Census, “2010 Census Urban and Rural Classification and Urban Area Criteria.”
Trent England, “Rural Americans Would Be Serfs If We Abolished the Electoral College,” op-ed, USA Today, May 23, 2019.
Murtaza Hussain, “Secret Donors to Nonprofit Pushing Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Election Conspiracy Revealed,” The Intercept, August 7, 2021.
The Heritage Foundation’s ebook can be found at thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2020/Events/2020_08_0201_EssentialElectoralCollege_Ebook.pdf.
John Molinaro and Solveig Spjeldnes, “The Electoral College and the Rural-Urban Divide,” Aspen Institute blog post, February 1, 2021.
Jim Inhofe, “Only ‘Sore Losers’ Want to Abolish Electoral College,” The Daily Signal, April 26, 2021.
In his introduction to Securing Democracy: Why We Have an Electoral College (by Gary Gregg II of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute), a 2001 collection of essays meant to justify George W. Bush’s win in 2000, McConnell writes, “One analysis even showed that Bush won areas with a landmass of more than 2.4 million square miles, while Gore garnered winning margins with a landmass of just over 580,000. The men who created the Electoral College would have well understood this situation.”
Rebecca Salzer and Jocelyn Kiley, “Majority of Americans Continue to Favor Moving Away from Electoral College,” Pew Research Center, August 5, 2022.
Salzer and Kiley, “Majority of Americans Continue to Favor Moving Away from Electoral College.”
Jocelyn Kiley, “Majority of Americans Continue to Favor Moving Away from Electoral College,” Pew Research Center report, September 25, 2023.
Philip Bump, “A Remarkable GOP Admission: Undermining the Electoral College Threatens Our Best Path to the White House,” Washington Post, January 4, 2021; “Joint Statement Concerning January 6 Attempt to Overturn the Results of the Election,” press release issued by Rep. Thomas Massie, January 3, 2021.
Elena Mejia and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, “How Biden Could Appoint More Judges than Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, January 3, 2023.
Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).
“Obama to NYC Supporters: ‘Move to North Dakota,’ ” Reuters, May 14, 2014.
Nathaniel Rakich and Dhrumil Mehta, “Trump Is Only Popular in Rural Areas,” FiveThirtyEight, December 7, 2018.
“American Democracy’s Built-in Bias Towards Rural Republicans,” The Economist, July 12, 2018.
“American Democracy’s Built-in Bias Towards Rural Republicans.”
Geoffrey Skelley, “The Suburbs—All Kinds of Suburbs—Delivered the House to Democrats,” FiveThirtyEight, November 8, 2018.
Demetrios Pogkas et al., “How Democrats Broke the House Map Republicans Drew,” Bloomberg, November 10, 2018.
District summaries reported in “How the Suburbs Will Swing the Midterm Election,” by Richard Florida and David Montgomery, Bloomberg, October 5, 2018; original CityLab spreadsheet available online here: github.com/theatlantic/citylab-data/blob/master/citylab-congress/citylab_cdi.csv.
Mettler and Brown, “The Growing Rural-Urban Political Divide and Democratic Vulnerability,” 130–42.
Philip Bump and Lenny Bronner, “What the Urban-Rural Split in the 118th Congress Will Look Like,” Washington Post, September 29, 2022.
Sean Trende, “In Pennsylvania, the Gerrymander of the Decade?” Real Clear Politics, December 14, 2011.
Joseph Ax, “Alabama to Ask US Supreme Court to Keep Republican-drawn Electoral Map,” Reuters, September 5, 2023.
595 U.S. ___ (2022), 21A375 John H. Merrill, Alabama Secretary of State et al. v. Evan Milligan et al., initial decision issued by Justice Brett Kavanaugh to stay ruling on the case, February 7, 2022.
“Federal Court Strikes Down South Carolina Congressional District,” Democracy Docket, January 6, 2023.
Richard L. Hasen quoted in Michael Wines, “Maps in Four States Were Ruled Illegal Gerrymanders. They’re Being Used Anyway,” New York Times, August 8, 2022; Nicholas Fandos, “Democrats Lose Control of N.Y. Election Maps, as Top Court Rejects Appeal,” New York Times, April 27, 2022.
Domingo Garcia quoted in Michael Hardy, “The Reign of the 3%,” Texas Monthly, November 22, p. 117.
Michael Li, interview with the authors, October 27, 2022.
Kandie Smith, interview with the authors, Greenville, N.C., February 17, 2023.
Shelly Willingham, interview with the authors, Tarboro, N.C., February 17, 2023.
Some estimates peg a different inflection decade for the switch from a rural majority to a minority, but here we rely upon the Census Bureau’s use of 1920 as the inflection decade. See “Urban and Rural Areas,” History, United States Census.
Frances Lee quoted in Badger, “As American as Apple Pie?”
Jonathan A. Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 1–5.
Griff Palmer and Michael Cooper, “How Maps Helped Republicans Keep an Edge in the House,” New York Times, December 14, 2012.
Robin Vos and Scott Fitzgerald quoted in Bruce Thompson, “Vos and Fitzgerald Trash Urban Voters,” Urban Milwaukee, December 26, 2018.
Emily Badger, “Are Rural Voters the ‘Real’ Voters? Wisconsin Republicans Seem to Think So,” New York Times, December 6, 2018.
Ben Wikler, interview with the authors, January 18, 2023.
Jane Mayer, “State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy,” New Yorker, August 15, 2022.
David Pepper, Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines (Cincinnati: St. Helena Press, 2021), 173–82.
Gerald Gamm and Thad Kousser, “No Strength in Numbers: The Failure of Big-City Bills in American State Legislatures, 1880–2000,” American Political Science Review 107, No. 4 (2013): 663–78; Gerald Gamm and Thad Kousser, “The Last Shall Be Last: Ethnic, Racial, and Nativist Bias in Distributive Politics,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, January 30, 2023.
Patrick Flavin and Gregory Shufeldt, “Explaining State Preemption of Local Laws: Political, Institutional, and Demographic Factors,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 50, No. 2 (Spring 2020): 280–309.
Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward, Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends on It (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022), 22–23.
Michael Li and Chris Leaverton, “Gerrymandering Competitive Districts to Near Extinction,” Brennan Center for Justice, August 11, 2022.
Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, “Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?” American Journal of Political Science 53, No. 3 (2009): 666–80.
David Leonhardt, “ ‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy,” New York Times, September 17, 2022.
Thomas F. Schaller, “Md. Secessionists: Have You Considered West Virginia?” Baltimore Sun, September 18, 2013; Mike Baker and Hilary Swift, “Oregon’s Rural-Urban Divide Sparks Talk of Secession,” New York Times, March 18, 2023; Colby Galliher and Edison Forman, “County Secession: Local Efforts to Redraw Political Borders,” Brookings Institution, January 10, 2023.
Philip Bump, “The Ongoing Political Effort to Separate America’s Cities from America,” Washington Post, August 2, 2022.
Elaine Godfrey, “ ‘Stop the Steal’ Is a Metaphor,” interview of Theda Skocpol, Atlantic, August 12, 2022.
Morning Consult poll, January 15–16, 2022, Table MCWA 14_4, p. 96. The rural percentage was computed by combining results for the exhaustive “rural under 45” and “rural 45+” subsets (350 / 1076 = 32.5 percent).
Melanie Lawson, “Texas Senate Votes to Allow Gov. Abbott to Overturn Harris County Elections,” KTRK (ABC News 13, Houston), May 4, 2023.
Will Wilkinson, “The Density Divide: Urbanization, Polarization and Populist Backlash,” report, Niskanen Center, June 2019, p. 77.
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, August 13, 1785. It may be found at founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-08-02-0333.
Mark Leibovich, “Palin Visits a ‘Pro-America’ Kind of Town,” New York Times, October 17, 2008.
Or, as one pair of researchers put it, “Rural America is sometimes viewed as a kind of safety deposit box that stores America’s fundamental values.” Daniel T. Lichter and David L. Brown, “Rural America in an Urban Society: Changing Spatial and Social Boundaries,” Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011): 565–92.
See Mark Shucksmith, “Re-imagining the Rural: from Rural Idyll to Good Countryside,” Journal of Rural Studies 59 (April 2018).
David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
James C. Davis et al., “Rural America at a Glance,” USDA Economic Research Service, November 2022.
This ad can be seen at youtu.be/2Kft22BHIak.
Andrew Wendler and Austin Irwin, “Ford’s F-Series Pickup Truck History, from the Model TT to Today,” Car and Driver, September 24, 2022.
The 1920 Census reported that the farm population was nearly 32 million, or 30 percent of the population of 105 million.
Brett Berk, “You Don’t Need a Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume,” The Drive, March 15, 2019.
Mark Metzler Sawin, interview with the authors, October 19, 2022.
Though it sounds like a joke, the supposed power of testicle tanning to restore one’s manhood is indeed a topic of discussion in a documentary Carlson created in 2022 called The End of Men, on Fox Nation.
Greg Sargent, “As Vile as It Gets: J.D. Vance Goes Full ‘Great Replacement Theory,’ ” Washington Post, April 6, 2022.
J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 57.
Vance quoted in Jim Hoft, “Ohio Senate Candidate J. D. Vance Talks Biden’s Ministry of Truth, J6 Prisoners, Ukraine War Cries, Mitch McConnell, and Trump’s Endorsement with Gateway Pundit,” GatewayPundit, April 29, 2022.
Vance writes, “She’d begun taking prescription narcotics not long after we moved to Preble County. I believe the problem started with a legitimate prescription, but soon enough, Mom was stealing from her patients and getting so high that turning an emergency room into a skating rink seemed like a good idea. Papaw’s death turned a semi-functioning addict into a woman unable to follow the basic norms of adult behavior” (Hillbilly Elegy, 113).
Ryan Lizza and Rachael Bade, “POLITICO Playbook: The Book J. D. Vance Doesn’t Want You to Read,” Politico, May 5, 2022.
For proof of who really deserves blame for the opioid crisis, look no further than who was forced by the courts to pay settlement monies to West Virginia, the state that suffered more than any other from the opioid crisis. In May 2023, the sum of those settlements surpassed a whopping $1 billion. In addition to money from Purdue’s bankruptcy settlement, those who have to pony up include pharmaceutical companies Allergan, Janssen, Johnson and Johnson, and Teva; opioid distributors Cardinal Health, AmeriSourceBergen, and McKesson; plus major pharmacy retailers Walmart, Kroger, CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid. In other words, the drugs that unleashed incalculable misery and death upon rural America were made, distributed, and sold by U.S. companies operating within our nation’s borders. Somebody should alert Vance—who won his Senate seat in 2022 on the strength of big margins in Ohio’s rural White counties—that not a single Mexican entity or immigrant made the list.
McKay Coppins, “What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate,” The Atlantic, September 13, 2023.
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Picador, 2005).
Parker et al., “What Unites and Divides Urban, Rural, and Suburban Communities.”
Lydia Saad, “Country Living Enjoys Renewed Appeal in U.S.,” Gallup, January 5, 2021.
Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Rachel Minkin, “Americans Are Less Likely than Before COVID-19 to Want to Live in Cities, More Likely to Prefer Suburbs,” Pew Research Center, December 16, 2021.
Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016), 135.
There are moments when Hollywood has turned a more empathetic gaze on the country. For instance, at the 1985 Academy Awards, Sally Field won the Best Actress trophy for her role in Places in the Heart, the story of a woman bravely struggling to hold on to her farm and her family in the face of hard times. Among those whom Field beat out were Jessica Lange, nominated for her role in Country, the story of a woman bravely struggling to hold on to her farm and her family in the face of hard times; and Sissy Spacek, nominated for her role in The River, in which she plays a woman bravely struggling to hold on to her farm and her family in the face of hard times.
You can see these tropes in movies like Doc Hollywood and TV shows such as Northern Exposure.
There is, however, an irony in how small towns are portrayed in these movies. As Dylan Reid noted in the Canadian urbanist magazine Spacing, they’re almost urban. “The towns portrayed in these Christmas movies possess the walkability, active public spaces, and low motor vehicle presence that urbanists strive for. They have thriving, walkable main streets full of independent retail shops tightly packed together. Every building faces on to the street, and everyone strolls along the sidewalks and interacts with each other in person.” In the small towns of these movies, there isn’t a dollar store or a fast-food joint—staples of the real rural America—in sight. (Dylan Reid, “The Secret Small-Town Urbanism of TV Christmas Movies,” Spacing, December 17, 2019.)
Anthony Nadler, “Political Identity and the Therapeutic Work of U.S. Conservative Media,” International Journal of Communication 16 (2022): 2622.
Annie Gowan, “Censorship Battles’ New Frontier: Your Public Library,” Washington Post, April 17, 2022.
Interview with the authors, November 3, 2022.
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, “A Rural Texas County Just Blinked on Library Closures. Pressure Worked,” Washington Post, April 14, 2023. The commission decided that day not to shutter the libraries; when we finished this book, the lawsuit was ongoing.
PEN America, “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools,” September 19, 2022.
American Library Association, “American Library Association Reports Record Number of Demands to Censor Library Books and Materials in 2022,” news release, March 22, 2023.
Teresa Moss, “Fund Cut Passes for Craighead County Libraries,” Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, November 9, 2022.
Brooke Leigh Howard, “Tennessee Library Director Quits After Furor over LGBT+ Books,” Daily Beast, October 28, 2022.
Molly Bolan, “A Library Struck by Controversy that Began Over a Book It Didn’t Own,” Route Fifty, September 1, 2022.
Danielle Paquette, “A Mich. Library Refused to Remove an LGBTQ Book. The Town Defunded It,” Washington Post, August 24, 2022.
Kathy Zappitello, interview with the authors, November 30, 2022.
“Newspapers Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, June 29, 2021.
Penny Abernathy, “The State of Local News: The 2022 Report,” Northwestern/Medill Local News Initiative, June 29, 2022.
Nancy Gibbs, “Newspapers Are Disappearing Where Democracy Needs Them Most,” Washington Post, December 27, 2022.
Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless, “The Decline of Local News and Its Effects: New Evidence from Longitudinal Data,” Journal of Politics 80, No. 1 (January 2018).
Paul Fanlund, “Diving Deep into Wisconsin’s ‘Media Ecology,’ ”Capital Times, June 15, 2018.
Scott Ellison, “God and Man at a Southern Appalachian Community College: Cognitive Dissonance and the Cultural Logics of Conservative News Talk Radio Programming,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 36, No. 2 (2014): 90–108.
Tim Sullivan, “No Longer the Fringe: Small-Town Voters Fear for America,” Associated Press, November 30, 2022.
Tina Sfondeles, “High-rise in a ‘Hellhole’? Republican Bailey Living on North Michigan Avenue to ‘Immerse’ Himself in the City He Keeps Dissing,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 13, 2022.
Presidential debate, September 26, 2016.
Tyler Monroe and Rob Savillo, “Fox’s Coverage of Violent Crime Dropped After the Midterms,” Media Matters for America, November 17, 2022.
All Things Considered, October 20, 2022.
Dan Frosch, Kris Maher, and Zusha Elinson, “Rural America Reels from Violent Crime. ‘People Lost Their Ever-Lovin’ Minds,’ ” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2022. This was one of the few stories about the rural crime wave that appeared in mainstream news outlets.
“We Fact-checked the Oklahoma Governor’s Debate Between Kevin Stitt and Joy Hofmeister,” The Frontier, October 21, 2022.
Blake Masters quoted in Matt Stieb, “Blake Masters Has a Lot of Thoughts About Black People,” New York Magazine, August 30, 2022.
The Ingraham Angle, Fox News, April 1, 2022.
Mayhill Fowler, “Obama Exclusive (Audio): On V.P. and Foreign Policy, Courting the Working Class, and Hard-Pressed Pennsylvanians,” Huffington Post, April 19, 2008.
Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).
For more on this, see Will Wilkinson, “The Density Divide and the Southernification of Rural America,” Model Citizen, Substack.com, August 30, 2021; for a discussion of the flag’s presence in Vermont, one of the bluest and northernmost states, see Emily Corwin, “Why Do Some Vermonters Display the Confederate Flag?” Vermont Public Radio, July 17, 2020.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 700–701.
Amanda Emery, “Man Mows 58,000-Square-Foot ‘TRUMP’ Sign into Lawn to Show Support,” MLive.com, September 28, 2016.
Doug Koehn quoted in Marc Ramirez, “Rancher Plows Mile-Long Tribute to Donald Trump on His Colorado Land,” Dallas Morning News, February 5, 2017.
A series of reforms both parties instituted after the 1968 election transformed the nominating process, taking it out of the smoke-filled back rooms and into the hands of voters. This elevated the importance of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, providing the winners essential momentum that translated into news coverage, contributions, and future victories.
Sam Frizell, “Hillary Clinton Calls for Greater Investment in Rural America,” Time, August 26, 2015.
Dee Davis quoted in Helena Bottemiller Evich, “Revenge of the Rural Voter,” Politico, November 13, 2016.
With All Due Respect, aired August 26, 2015, on Bloomberg TV.
Rove advised Crossroads GPS, the Koch-funded organization, to invest eight hundred thousand dollars in Stefanik’s campaign. Kenneth P. Vogel, “Karl Rove and the Modern Money Machine,” Politico Magazine, July/August 2014.
Griff Witte, “A Moderate Congresswoman Went All-in for Trump. Her Constituents Think They Know Why,” Washington Post, December 13, 2019.
Ryan Bort, “High-Ranking Republican Pushes ‘Great Replacement’ Rhetoric Two Days After White Supremacist Mass Shooting,” Rolling Stone, May 16, 2022.
Karen Edwards, interview with the authors, Harrietstown Town Hall, Saranac Lake, March 21, 2023.
Bernadette Hogan and Jesse O’Neill, “Trump Says Rep. Elise Stefanik Could Be President in 2028 at Palm Beach Fundraiser,” New York Post, January 12, 2022.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” The Atlantic, October 2017.
We tallied these results based on the census’s “Urban-Rural Continuum Codes,” which are revised every ten years. Because the 2023 revision was released too late to be included in our analysis, we used the 2013 codes.
The ad, which was created by the Democratic PAC Priorities USA, can be seen at youtu.be/oLo0Jwj03JU.
Charles Mahtesian, “Rural Turnout Plummets in 2012,” Politico, November 30, 2012.
Charles Mahtesian, “How the Felon Won,” Politico, May 9, 2012.
The only exceptions were Beaver County, Oklahoma, where Trump got 1,993 votes in 2016 and 1,968 votes in 2020; and Martin County, Kentucky, where he got 3,503 votes in 2016 and 3,496 votes in 2020.
Don Albrecht, “Rural/Urban Differences: Persistence or Decline,” Rural Sociology 87, No. 4 (May 2022): 1137–54.
On one of the many occasions in which he extolled his own intelligence, Trump said in response to a question about which foreign policy advisers he relied on, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things” (Morning Joe, aired March 16, 2016, on MSNBC).
One characteristic passage: In his 2015 speech honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, Obama said, “What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”
Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
“ ‘This Deal Will Make Me Look Terrible’: Full Transcripts of Trump’s Calls with Mexico and Australia,” Washington Post, August 3, 2017.
Diana Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” PNAS 115, No. 19 (2018): 4330–39.
Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Zack Crowley, “Symbolic Versus Material Concerns of Rural Consciousness in the United States,” Political Geography 96 (June 2022).
Shannon M. Monnat and David L. Brown, “More than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Journal of Rural Studies 55 (October 2017): 227–36.
Ann Oberhauser, Dan Krier, and Abdi Kusow, “Political Moderation and Polarization in the Heartland: Economics, Rurality, and Social Identity in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Sociological Quarterly 60, No. 4 (2019): 1–21.
Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski, and John V. Kane, “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support,” American Political Science Review 115, No. 4 (2021): 1–9.
John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 71.
According to polls conducted by Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, 39 percent of White Obama voters in 2012 disagreed with the statement “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class,” and 28 percent agreed with the statement “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough. If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.” Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, Identity Crisis, 166.
See Lucy Madison, “Romney on Immigration: I’m for ‘Self-deportation,’ ” CBS News, January 24, 2012.
Trump quoted in Salvador Hernandez, “Trump Escalates Attack on American-Born Judge: ‘He’s a Mexican,’ ” BuzzFeed, June 3, 2016.
Jeremy Diamond, “Trump on Protester: ‘Maybe He Should Have Been Roughed Up,’ ” CNN, November 23, 2015.
Sam Reisman, “Trump Tells Crowd to ‘Knock the Crap Out’ of Protesters, Offers to Pay Legal Fees,” Mediaite, February 1, 2016.
Nicholas Valentino and Fabian Guy Neuner, “The Changing Norms of Racial Political Rhetoric and the End of Racial Priming,” Journal of Politics 80, No. 3 (November 2016): 757–71.
Helena Bottemiller Evich, “Revenge of the Rural Voter,” Politico, November 13, 2016.
Kristin Lunz Trujillo, “Rural Identity as a Contributing Factor to Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.,” Political Behavior 44 (2022).
Trump rally in Charleston, West Virginia, August 21, 2018.
Matt Grossman and Daniel Thaler, “Mass-Elite Divides in Aversion to Social Change and Support for Donald Trump,” American Politics Research 46, No. 5 (September 2018): 753–84.
Anonymous Hillary Clinton supporter quoted in Emily Van Duyn, “Hidden Democracy: Political Dissent in Rural America,” Journal of Communication 68 (2018): 965–87.
Kandie Smith, interview with the authors, Greenville, N.C., February 17, 2023.
Geneva Riddick-Faulkner, interview with the authors, Jackson, N.C., February 17, 2023.
Time Staff, “President Trump at U.S. Coast Guard Commencement: ‘Adversity Makes You Stronger,’ ” Time, May 17, 2017.
Trump’s November 15, 2022, quote in Maggie Haberman @maggieNYT, “I’m a victim, I will tell you, I’m a victim,” Trump says, Twitter, November 16, 2022.
Miles T. Armaly and Adam M. Enders, “ ‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics,” Political Behavior 44 (2022): 1583–609.
Niraj Chokshi, “The 100-Plus Times Donald Trump Assured Us that America Is a Laughingstock,” Washington Post, January 27, 2016.
See Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996).
Matthew R. Lee and Graham Ousey, “Reconsidering the Culture and Violence Connection: Strategies of Action in the Rural South,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 26, No. 5 (May 2010): 899–929.
Donald Trump and Bill Zanker, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (New York: Harper Business, 2011), 197–98.
“Whereas Trump’s sensitivity to slights in college-educated Democratic communities is regarded as a sign of a thin skin and possibly a disordered mind, that same sensitivity is regarded as normal—even admirable—in the Democratic communities we studied,” they wrote. Stephanie Muravchik and Jon A. Shields, Trump’s Democrats (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2020), 8.
Though teen parenthood has steadily fallen in the United States for years, the gap between rural and urban teens has remained steady. See Brady E. Hamilton, Ph.D.; Lauren M. Rossen, Ph.D.; and Amy M. Branum, Ph.D., “Teen Birth Rates for Urban and Rural Areas in the United States, 2007–2015,” NCHS Data Brief, No. 264, National Center for Biotechnology Information, November 2016, 1–8.
Maggie Astor, “Colorado County Clerk Indicted in Voting Security Breach Investigation,” New York Times, March 9, 2022.
Emma Brown and Amy Gardner, “Georgia County Under Scrutiny After Claim of Post-Election Breach,” Washington Post, May 13, 2022.
Sam Metz, “Election Conspiracies Grip Nevada Community, Sowing Distrust,” Associated Press, July 29, 2022.
Richard Hasen, interview with the authors via email, October 31, 2022.
Speech in Delaware, Ohio, April 23, 2022.
Speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, National Harbor, Md., March 4, 2023.
Quotes spliced together from FBI recordings, as reported in Mike Levine, “Becoming a Domestic Terrorist: How 3 Self-Styled ‘Patriots’ Were Led to Lethal Plot,” ABC News, November 1, 2021; Frank Morris, “Mosque Bombing Plot Rattles Immigrants in Kansas’ ‘Meat Triangle,’ ” NPR, March 20, 2018; and Jessica Pressler and Benjamin Rasmussen, “The Plot to Bomb Garden City, Kansas,” New York Magazine, December 2017.
“Patrick Eugene Stein,” bio, Extremist Leaders, Counter Extremism Project, n.d.
“Sovereign citizen movement entry,” Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.
The Informant: Fear and Faith in the Heartland, ABC News documentary series, hosted by George Stephanopoulos (Hulu, 2021).
Robert O’Harrow, Jr., Andrew Ba Tran, and Derek Hawkins, “The Rise of Domestic Extremism in America,” Washington Post, April 12, 2021.
Betsy Woodruff Swan, “DHS Draft Document: White Supremacists Are Greatest Terror Threat,” Politico, September 4, 2020; Matt Zapotosky, “Wray Says FBI Has Recorded About 100 Domestic Terrorism Arrests in Fiscal 2019 and Many Investigations Involve White Supremacy,” Washington Post, July 23, 2019.
18 USC Chapter 113B: TERRORISM, uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/part1/chapter113B&edition=prelim.
Jose A. DelReal and Scott Clement, “Rural Divide,” Washington Post, June 17, 2017; “Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation Rural and Small-Town America Poll,” conducted April 13–May 1, 2017.
B. Kal Munis, “Us Over Here Versus Them Over There…Literally: Measuring Place Resentment in American Politics,” Political Behavior 44, No. 3 (2022): 1057–78.
B. Kal Munis and Nicholas Jacobs, “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide,” Political Research Quarterly 76, No. 3 (2022): 1102–18.
Kal Munis and Nicholas Jacobs, “Why Resentful Rural Americans Vote Republican,” Washington Post, October 20, 2022.
Mark Murray, “Trump, Clinton Voters Divided Over a Changing America,” NBC News, www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/trump-clinton-voters-divided-over-changing-america-n798926.
Parker et al., “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” Section 5, p. 62 (“only 46 percent”) and Section 2, p. 30 (“white Americans benefit”).
“Fear of Muslims in American Society Chapman University Survey of American Fears,” poll, Chapman University, released October 16, 2018.
Parker et al., “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities.”
Trevor Brown, Suzanne Mettler, and Samantha Puzzi, “When Rural and Urban Become ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’: How a Growing Divide Is Reshaping American Politics,” The Forum 19, No. 3 (2021): 365–93.
“LGBTQ Youth in Small Towns and Rural Areas,” Research Brief, The Trevor Project, November 2021.
Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi, “When Rural and Urban Become ‘Us’ versus ‘Them,’ ” Figure 2.
Lisa R. Pruitt, “What Republicans Know (and Democrats Don’t) About the White Working Class,” Politico, June 26, 2022.
Robert Wuthnow quoted in Sean Illing, “A Princeton Sociologist Spent 8 Years Asking Rural Americans Why They’re So Pissed Off,” Vox, June 30, 2018.
Katherine Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 85.
Katherine Cramer, interview with the authors, January 10, 2023.
Matthew D. Nelsen and Christopher D. Petsko, “Race and White Rural Consciousness,” American Political Science Review 19, No. 4 (December 2021): 1205–18.
Rural Objective PAC Battleground Poll conducted by YouGov Blue, April 29–May 13, 2021.
Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation Rural and Small-Town America poll.
Parker et al., “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities.”
Llano County Tea Party meeting, VFW Post 370, Llano, Texas, November 3, 2022.
Public Religion Research Institute, “Competing Visions of America.”
Katherine Fennelly and Christopher Federico, “Rural Residence as a Determinant of Attitudes Toward U.S. Immigration Policy,” International Migration 46 (2008): 151–90, see Table 1.
Boris Podobnik, Marko Jusup, and H. Eugene Stanley, “Predicting the Rise of Right-wing Populism in Response to Unbalanced Immigration,” Physics and Society, December 4, 2016.
Taylor Orth, “From Millionaires to Muslims, Small Subgroups of the Population Seem Much Larger to Many Americans,” YouGov.com, March 15, 2022; and “Perils of Perception: A 40-Country Study,” poll and slide deck, Game Changers/Ipsos, 2016.
Ashley Jardina, White Identity Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 273.
Although the share of non-White members of Congress is rising, only 26 percent of U.S. House members and 11 percent of senators of the 117th Congress elected in 2020 were non-White: Katherine Schaeffer, “The Changing Face of Congress in 8 Charts,” Pew Research Center, February 7, 2023; in state legislatures, not a single state in 2021 had a share of minority state legislators higher than the statewide minority population percentage: Renuka Rayasam et al., “Why State Legislatures Are Still Very White—and Very Male,” Politico, February 23, 2021.
Dana Wilkie, “How DE&I Evolved in the C-Suite,” Society for Human Resource Management, n.d.
Jardina, White Identity Politics, 273–74.
Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation Rural and Small-town America poll, Question 2.
Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation Rural and Small-town America poll, Question 70.
Dante Chinni, “What Your Travel May Say About Your Politics,” NBC News, September 7, 2015; Richard Florida, “America’s Great Passport Divide,” Atlantic, March 15, 2011.
Ian Mackey quoted in “Gay Missouri Lawmaker Confronts Colleague: ‘Gentlemen, I Am Not Afraid of You Anymore,’ ” CNN, April 15, 2022; Hickory County statistics drawn from U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 “Quick Facts” website.
Will Wilkinson, “The Density Divide: Urbanization, Polarization and Populist Backlash,” report, Niskanen Center, June 2019.
Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2020).
Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski, and John V. Kane, “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support,” American Political Science Review 115, No. 4 (November 2021): 1508–16.
Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020), 218.
Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions,” New York Times, December 7, 2016; Keith L. Alexander and Susan Svrluga, “ ‘I Am Sure He Is Sorry for Any Heartaches He Has Caused,’ Mother of Alleged ‘Pizzagate’ Gunman Says,” Washington Post, December 13, 2016; Michael E. Miller, “Pizzagate’s Violent Legacy,” Washington Post, February 16, 2021.
Department of Justice, “North Carolina Man Sentenced to Four-Year Prison Term for Armed Assault at Northwest Washington Pizza Restaurant,” press release, United States Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia, June 22, 2017.
Adam Enders et al., “Are Republicans and Conservatives More Likely to Believe Conspiracy Theories?” Political Behavior (2022), 1–24.
Karen M. Douglas et al., “Understanding Conspiracy Theories,” Advances in Political Psychology 40 (2019): 3–35; Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Greg Miller, “The Enduring Allure of Conspiracies,” Knowable Magazine, January 14, 2021; Joseph E. Uscinski et al., “The Psychological and Political Correlates of Conspiracy Theory Beliefs,” Scientific Reports 12, No. 21672 (2022).
Public Religion Research Institute, “Understanding QAnon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption.”
Public Religion Research Institute, “Understanding Qanon’s Connection to American Politics, Religion, and Media Consumption.”
Ipsos, “More than 1 in 3 Americans Believe a ‘Deep State’ Is Working to Undermine Trump,” poll, Ipsos, December 30, 2020. Summary quote excerpted from Christopher T. Conner and Nicholas MacMurray, “The Perfect Storm: A Subcultural Analysis of the QAnon Movement,” Critical Sociology 48, No. 6 (2022): 1049–71.
Robert Jones quoted in Giovanni Russonello, “QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests,” New York Times, May 27, 2021.
Trujillo, “Rural Identity as a Contributing Factor to Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.”
Public Religion Research Institute, “Competing Visions of America,” Question 34a. The breakout was 26 percent “completely” and 21 percent “mostly.”
Josh Dawsey, “A Second Firm Hired by Trump Campaign Found No Evidence of Election Fraud,” Washington Post, April 27, 2023.
Alexandra Hutzler, “Experts Say Trump, Election Deniers Eroding Trust in Democracy. Can It Be Restored?” ABC News, October 7, 2022.
Katie Harbath et al., “New Survey Data on Who Americans Look to for Election Information,” Bipartisan Policy Center, November 2, 2022.
Institute of Politics (IOP), National Online Study No. 220265, University of Chicago, May 19–23, 2022, Table 15-2, Banner 2, p. 86 of cross tabs provided by IOP directly to authors, PDF available upon request. See also IOP’s public release, “Our Precarious Democracy: Extreme Polarization and Alienation in Our Politics,” n.d. (hereafter cited as: IOP National Online Study No. 220265).
District geography statistics calculated by authors using the roll call list of the 139 House Republicans and CityLab’s district ratings. The other 36 House GOP districts broke down as follows: 20 “sparsely suburban”; 13 “densely suburban”; 2 “urban-suburban”; and 1 “purely urban.” github.com/theatlantic/citylab-data/blob/master/citylab-congress/citylab_cdi.csv.
Steve Eder, David D. Kirkpatrick, and Mike McIntire, “They Legitimized the Myth of a Stolen Election—and Reaped the Rewards,” New York Times, October 3, 2022.
Amy Gardner, “A Majority of GOP Nominees—299 in All—Deny the 2020 Election Results,” Washington Post, October 6, 2022.
Theda Skocpol quoted in Godfrey, “ ‘Stop the Steal’ Is a Metaphor.”
Philip Klinkner, “The Causes and Consequences of ‘Birtherism,’ ” paper presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Sheraton Hotel, Seattle, Wash., April 17–19, 2014.
Ben Smith and Byron Tau, “Birtherism: Where It All Began,” Politico, April 22, 2011.
Results from USA Today/Gallup poll, 2011 cited in Michael Tesler, “Birtherism Was Why So Many Republicans Liked Trump in the First Place,” Washington Post, September 19, 2016.
Public Policy Polling, “Birthers Very Much a Rural Phenomenon,” blog, PPP, August 11, 2009.
Cross tabs were provided to us upon request by Tom Jensen at PPP. For readability purposes and because the two-state results were so similar, we collapsed and averaged the results in North Carolina and Virginia for the “urban” and “suburban” subgroups and again for the “rural” and “small town” subgroups. The exact results for North Carolina were urban, 65 percent; suburban, 67 percent; rural, 44 percent; and small town, 46 percent. For Virginia, they were urban, 65 percent; suburban, 67 percent; rural, 44 percent; and small town, 46 percent.
Bettina Rottweiler and Paul Gill, “Conspiracy Beliefs and Violent Extremist Intentions: The Contingent Effects of Self-Efficacy, Self-Control and Law-Related Morality,” Terrorism and Political Violence 34, No. 7 (2020): 1485–504.
Mettler and Brown, “The Growing Rural-Urban Political Divide and Democratic Vulnerability,” 130–42.
Michael Brice-Saddler, “While Bemoaning Mueller Probe, Trump Falsely Says the Constitution Gives Him ‘The Right to Do Whatever I Want,’ ” Washington Post, July 23, 2019.
Marist Poll, conducted on behalf of NPR/PBS Newshour, June 22–29, 2021.
“Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth,” Brennan Center for Justice, January 31, 2017.
2021 Marist Poll.
Albert Somit and Steven Peterson, Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy: The Biological Bases of Authoritarianism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2020), quotes from pp. 251 and 256, respectively.
Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 280.
Sarah Longwell, “Elevating Pro-Democracy Republicans,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 66 (Fall 2022): 51–57.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Poll, December 2015, conducted by and cited in Matthew MacWilliams, “The One Weird Trait that Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter,” Politico, January 17, 2016.
Chip Berlet and Spencer Sunshine, “Rural Rage: The Roots of Right-Wing Populism in the United States,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 46, No. 3 (2019): 480–513.
Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, Taking Back America for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Gregory A. Smith, Michael Rotolo, and Patricia Tevington, “45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation,’ ” Pew Research Center, October 27, 2022.
Samuel L. Perry and Andrew Whitehead, “Why White Christian Nationalism Isn’t Going Away,” Time, November 13, 2022.
Quoted in Eric C. Miller, “Trump’s Unholy Alliances: An Interview with Sarah Posner,” Religion & Politics, July 29, 2020.
Whitehead and Perry, Taking America Back for God, see chap. 1 and esp. Table 1.1.
Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 4–8, emphasis added.
Samuel Perry @profsamperry, tweet, Twitter, 3:57 p.m., November 30, 2022.
“Survey: Two-Thirds of White Evangelicals, Most Republicans Sympathetic to Christian Nationalism,” PRRI press release, February 8, 2023.
Bruce Stokes, “What It Takes to Truly Be ‘One of Us,’ ” Pew Research Center, February 1, 2017.
Smith, Rotolo, and Tevington, “45% of Americans Say U.S. Should Be a ‘Christian Nation.’ ”
Public Religion Research Institute, October 2022 poll results, reported in “Challenges in Moving Toward a More Inclusive Democracy: Findings from the 2022 American Values Survey,” PRRI, October 27, 2022. The exact percentages for Dreamer opposition and stolen 2020 election are, respectively, 21 percent and 54 percent.
PRRI’s 2015 American Values Survey, as reported in Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), Figure 3.2, p. 86.
Public Religion Research Institute, “Competing Visions of America.”
Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi, “When Rural and Urban Become ‘Us’ versus ‘Them,’ ” see Table 1.
Paul D. Miller quoted in Morgan Lee, “Christian Nationalism Is Worse Than You Think,” Christianity Today, January 13, 2021.
Chammah, “Does Your Sheriff Think He’s More Powerful than the President?”
Chammah, “Does Your Sheriff Think He’s More Powerful than the President?”
“Confronting the Demographics of Power: America’s Sheriffs,” Reflective Democracy Campaign, Women Donors Network, June 2020.
Maurice Chammah, “We Surveyed U.S. Sheriffs. See Their Views on Power, Race and Immigration,” The Marshall Project, October 18, 2022.
Jonathan Edwards, “Okla. Governor Calls on Officials to Resign After ‘Horrid’ Audio Emerges,” Washington Post, April 18, 2023.
Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti, “2020 Election Deniers Seek Out Powerful Allies: County Sheriffs,” New York Times, July 25, 2022.
Steve Vockrodt, “Johnson County Sheriff Claimed He Got 200 Tips of Election Fraud. A Records Request Yielded Only One,” KCUR Radio, July 28, 2022.
Peter Eisler and Nathan Layne, “Inside One Far-Right Sheriff’s Crusade to Prove Trump’s Bogus Voter-Fraud Claims,” Reuters, July 29, 2022.
On mask mandates, see Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman, “Sheriffs, Right-Wing Extremism, and the Limits of U.S. Federalism During a Crisis,” Social Science Quarterly 104, No. 2 (February 2023), 59–68; on immigration, see Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman, “All Politics Is Local? County Sheriffs and Localized Policies of Immigration,” Political Research Quarterly 70, No. 1 (March 2017): 142–54; and on domestic violence, see Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman, “Public Officials and a ‘Private’ Matter: Attitudes and Policies in the County Sheriff Office Regarding Violence Against Women,” Social Science Quarterly 96, No. 4 (December 2015): 1117–35.
Frank Figliuzzi, “This Is How Biden Should Respond to Sheriffs Who Won’t Enforce Gun Laws,” MSNBC, March 16, 2023.
Julia Harte and Alexandra Ulmer, “U.S. Police Trainers with Far-right Ties Are Teaching Hundreds of Cops,” Reuters, May 6, 2022.
Jessica Pishko, “Here’s the Secret ‘Sheriff Fellowship’ Curriculum from the Country’s Most Prominent MAGA Think Tank,” Slate, September 21, 2022.
Robert Snell and Kara Berg, “Two Ringleaders Convicted on Whitmer Kidnapping Conspiracy Charges,” Detroit News, August 23, 2022; Hannah Knowles, “Wolverine Watchmen, Extremist Group Implicated in Michigan Kidnapping Plot, Trained for ‘Civil War,’ ” Washington Post, October 9, 2020; Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Shaila Dewan, and Kathleen Gray, “F.B.I. Says Michigan Anti-Government Group Plotted to Kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,” New York Times, October 8, 2020.
Nils Kessler quoted in “Jury Convicts Two Men of Conspiring to Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,” CBS News, August 23, 2022.
“Jury Convicts Two Men of Conspiring to Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.”
Richard Hofstadter, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,” preliminary chapter in Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 10–11.
Meet the Press with Chuck Todd, October 30, 2021, NBC.
Anissa Herrera and Mark Stroeher quoted in Brent Burgess, “Threats, Stalking Lead to Election Office Resignation,” Fredericksburg Standard–Radio Post, August 10, 2022.
Lindsey Brown, interview with the authors, Fredericksburg, Texas, October 27, 2022.
Amy Gardner and Patrick Marley, “Trump Backers Flood Election Offices with Requests as 2022 Vote Nears,” Washington Post, September 11, 2022.
Brennan Center for Justice and Bipartisan Policy Center, Election Officials Under Attack: How to Protect Administrators and Safeguard Democracy, report, Brennan Center and BPC, June 16, 2021.
U.S. Census Bureau “Quick Facts” entry for Boundary County, Idaho.
Nick Watt, “Conservatives Join Liberals in ‘Quiet and Polite’ Idaho Protest to Protect Their Library from Book-Banners,” cnn.com, September 5, 2022.
James Wesley Rawles quoted in G. Jeffrey McDonald, “Secession Theology Runs Deep in American Religious, Political History,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Religion News Service, November 30, 2012.
Anthea Butler, in interview with Jared Holt, host of Posting Through It podcast, Episode 180, December 19, 2022.
Jillian Cheney, “Trump-Supporting ‘Jericho March’ Ends in Protest, Burning of BLM Banners,” Religion Unplugged, December 14, 2020; Emily Davies et al., “Multiple People Stabbed After Thousands Gather for Pro-Trump Demonstrations in Washington,” Washington Post, December 12, 2020.
Annie Grayer and Kristin Wilson, “21 Republicans Vote No on Bill to Award Congressional Gold Medal for January 6 Police Officers,” CNN, June 16, 2021. Categories for the twenty-one members voting “no” were drawn from CityLab’s 2010 district classifications, as follows: ten “purely rural”; eight “rural-suburban”; two “densely suburban”; and one “sparsely suburban.”
“The Harassment Faced by Jan. 6 Witnesses After Trump’s False Claims,” Washington Post, June 21, 2022.
IOP National Online Study No. 220265.
Robert A. Pape, “21 Million Americans Say Biden Is ‘Illegitimate’ and Trump Should Be Restored by Violence, Survey Finds,” The Conversation, September 23, 2021.
“Deep, Divisive, Disturbing and Continuing,” Slide 23 in presentation by Dr. Robert Page, Chicago Project on Security and Threats, January 2, 2022.
Economic Research Service, “Rural America at a Glance, 2021 edition,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, n.d.
Zeeshan Aleem, “America’s Growing Problem with Political Violence, Explained,” interview of Lilliana Mason, MSNBC, November 23, 2021.
Rachel Kleinfeld, “The Rise of Political Violence in the United States,” Journal of Democracy 32, No. 4 (October 2021): 160–76.
Andrew DePietro, “Richest Cities and Poorest Cities in Every State in 2021,” Forbes, December 22, 2020.
Michael Chameides, “Rural Voters Surge to Polls—Elect Progressive Leader in Enfield, NC,” Rural Democracy Initiative blog, May 31, 2022.
Mondale Robinson, interview with the authors via email, May 30, 2023.
D. W. Rowlands and Hanna Love, “Mapping Rural America’s Diversity and Demographic Change,” The Avenue, a publication of the Brookings Institution, September 28, 2021.
C. M. Figueroa et al., “Healthcare Needs of U.S. Rural Latinos: A Growing, Multicultural Population,” Journal of Rural Nursing Health Care 21, No. 1 (2021): 24–48, see Table 2.
Emily Walton, “What’s It Like to Be a Person of Color in Rural New England? Basically Invisible,” WBUR, November 4, 2019.
Don Davis, interview with the authors, Greenville, N.C., February 16, 2023.
Brian Murray Walter, “Nostalgia and Precarious Placemaking in Southern Poultry Worlds: Immigration, Race, and Community Building in Rural Northern Alabama,” Journal of Rural Studies 82 (2021): 542–52; Susan Hartman, “How Utica Became a City Where Refugees Came to Rebuild,” Literary Hub, June 9, 2022; Maria Sacchetti, “A Rural County in Iowa that Supported Trump Turns to Latinos to Grow,” Washington Post, May 14, 2022.
Kenneth Johnson and Daniel Lichter, “Growing Racial Diversity in Rural America: Results from the 2020 Census,” report, Carsey School of Public Policy, University of New Hampshire, May 25, 2022.
Mary Logan Wolf, “Yes, Red-State Liberals Exist,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (Winter 2018): 7–23.
Johnson and Lichter, “Growing Racial Diversity in Rural America.”
Economic Research Service, “Rural Hispanics at a Glance,” Bulletin No. 8, U.S. Department of Agriculture, December 2005.
DelReal and Clement, “Rural Divide.”
Rowlands and Love, “Mapping Rural America’s Diversity and Demographic Change.”
Mara Casey Tieken, “There’s a Big Part of Rural America that Everyone’s Ignoring,” Washington Post, March 24, 2017.
“Rural Employment and Unemployment,” a report by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, updated May 10, 2022.
Economic Research Service, “Rural Unemployment Rates Recovered Faster from 2020 to 2021, Remained Highest for ‘Black or African American’ Residents,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, updated May 2, 2022.
Economic Research Service, “Rural Poverty and Well-Being,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, updated September 8, 2023, n.d.
Teresa Wiltz, “Hispanic Poverty in Rural Areas Challenges States,” Stateline, August 14, 2015.
Economic Research Service, “Rural Poverty and Well-Being.”
Robin Davey Wolff, “Rural Housing, Race and Persistent Poverty,” Enterprise blog, February 5, 2021.
Tracey Farrigan, “Rural Poverty Has Distinct Regional and Racial Patterns,” Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, August 9, 2021.
Alliance for Entrepreneurial Equity, “2023 Vital Signs: The Health of Minority-Owned Small Businesses,” January 18, 2023.
Alliance for Entrepreneurial Equity, “2023 Vital Signs”; rural Asian American–owned businesses are an exception.
“Kaine, Colleagues Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to Support Rural Minority-Owned Businesses,” press release, Office of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), October 27, 2020.
Al Gameros, interview with the authors, November 7, 2022.
Mike Feinberg, “Homeownership in Rural America,” Rural Research Brief, Housing Assistance Council, Washington, D.C., June 2020.
Housing Assistance Council, “Race and Ethnicity in Rural America,” Rural Research Brief, Washington, D.C., April 2012, p. 2.
Matt Krupnick, “Economics, Culture and Distance Conspire to Keep Rural Nonwhites from Higher Educations,” The Hechinger Report, January 18, 2018.
Jon Marcus and Matt Krupnick, “The Rural Higher-Education Crisis,” Atlantic, September 27, 2017.
Maraki Kebede et al., “Segregation Persists in Rural School Districts Despite Rising Ethnoracial Diversity,” Center for Education and Civil Rights, Department of Education, Penn State University, August 2021.
“Rural Health Disparities,” Rural Health Information Hub, November 28, 2022.
Carrie E. Henning-Smith et al., “Rural Counties with Majority Black or Indigenous Populations Suffer the Highest Rates of Premature Death in the US,” Health Affairs 38, No. 12 (December 2019): 2019–26; and Nasim B. Ferdows et al., “Assessment of Racial Disparities in Mortality Rates Among Older Adults Living in US Rural vs. Urban Counties from 1968 to 2016,” JAMA Network Open 3, No. 8 (August 2020).
Probst quoted in Liz Carey, “Study Finds Rural Health Care Access Lacking for Minority Populations,” Daily Yonder, April 24, 2023.
Stacy Grundy and Beth Prusaczyk, “The Complex Intersection of Race and Rurality: The Detrimental Effects of Race-Neutral Rural Health Policies,” Health Equity 6, No. 1 (2022): 334–37, emphasis added.
Sharita R. Thomas, George M. Holmes, and George H. Pink, “To What Extent Do Community Characteristics Explain Differences in Closure Among Financially Distressed Rural Hospitals?” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 27, No. 4A (2016): 194–203.
Whitney E. Zahnd et al., “The Intersection of Rural Residence and Minority Race/Ethnicity in Cancer Disparities in the United States,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 3, No. 18 (2021): 1384.
Erika C. Ziller, Carly Milkowski, and Amanda Burgess, “Rural Working-Age Adults Report More Cost Barriers to Health,” Policy Brief, University of Southern Maine, March 27, 2023.
DW Rowlands and Hanna Love, “Mapping Rural America’s Diversity and Demographic Change,” Brookings Institution commentary, September 28, 2021.
Rebecca Tippett, “NC in Focus: Black Population,” Carolina Demography, February 27, 2015.
Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott, and Flora J. Hatley Wadelington, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 3.
Crow, Escott, and Wadelington, A History of African Americans in North Carolina, pp. 3–4.
David Cecelski, “James R. Walker, Jr., and the Struggle for Voting Rights in North Carolina’s Black Belt,” blog post, Davidcecelski.com, November 7, 2020.
Lassiter v. Northampton County Bd. of Elections, 30 U.S. 45 (1959).
John Wynne, “Northampton County,” Politics in North Carolina, April 2, 2013.
Abril Castro and Caius Z. Willingham, “Progressive Governance Can Turn the Tide for Black Farmers,” Center for American Progress, April 3, 2019.
Andrew Laurence Carter and Adam Alexander, “Soul Food: [Re]framing the African-American Farming Crisis Using the Culture-Centered Approach,” Frontiers in Communication 5, No. 5 (February 2020).
Newsroom, “Senator Reverend Warnock, Colleagues to USDA: We Urge You to Act to Address Historic Discrimination Against Black Farmers,” press release, Office of Reverend Raphael Warnock, U.S. Senator for Georgia, June 2, 2022.
Ximena Bustillo, “Black Farmers Worry New Approach on ‘Race Neutral’ Lending Leaves Them in the Shadows,” NPR, February 26, 2023.
Dan Sullivan, “His Ancestors Were Enslaved People, but Now This Hemp Farmer Owns the Plantation,” Lancaster Farming, October 16, 2022.
Patrick Brown, interview with the authors, July 2, 2023.
Mondale Robinson, interview with the authors via email, June 2, 2023.
Don Davis, interview with the authors at his district office in Greenville, N.C., February 16, 2023.
Geneva Riddick-Faulkner, interview with the authors, Jackson, N.C., February 17, 2023.
Rep. Shelly Willingham, interview with the authors, Tarboro, N.C., February 17, 2023.
Kandie Smith, interview with the authors, Greenville, N.C., February 17, 2023.
Sarah Miller, Norman Johnson, and Laura R. Wherry, “Medicaid and Mortality: New Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data,” NBER Working Paper 26081, January 2021.
According to the Department of Education, the areas most likely to receive Title I funding were the most densely populated urban areas and the least densely populated rural areas. See National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts,” IES/NCES.
Emily Walkenhorst, “NC Lawmakers, Controller Want Leandro Back in Front of the State Supreme Court,” WRAL, February 10, 2023.
Jeffrey S. Passel, Mark Hugo Lopez, and D’Vera Cohn, “U.S. Hispanic Population Continued Its Geographic Spread in the 2010s,” Pew Research Center, February 3, 2022; county population sizes drawn from U.S. Census Bureau’s “Quick Facts” webpage.
Rogelio Saenz and Cruz Torres, “Latinos in Rural America,” in David L. Brown and Louis E. Swanson, eds., Challenges to Rural America in the Twenty-first Century (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).
Jon Shelton, “On, Wisconsin!” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 51 (Winter 2019): 99–105.
Salvador Blanco quoted in Fidel Martinez, “Latinx Files: Greetings from Russellville, Alabama!” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2022.
Joint Economic Committee—Democrats, “Report Finds Economic Power of Latinos Growing Amid Demographic Shifts,” JEC, October 7, 2019; and Joint Economic Committee, “The Economic State of the Latino Community in America,” JEC of the U.S. Congress, October 7, 2019, p. 9.
Wiltz, “Hispanic Poverty in Rural Areas Challenges States.”
“Not Enough Food on the Dinner Table: A Look into Food Insecurity Among Hispanics/Latinos Living in Rural Communities in the United States,” UnidosUS, January 2023.
Pete Rios, interview with the authors, Mesa, Ariz., November 7, 2022.
Carmen Huerta-Bapat, “The Racial Profiling of Latinos in North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 2017).
Sarah Dewees and Benjamin Marks, “Twice Invisible: Understanding Rural Native America,” Research Note #2, First Nations Development Institute Research, April 2017.
“Michael Bird,” interview by Sampada Nandyala, Public Health Post, August 20, 2018.
Reclaiming Native Truth, Research Findings: Compilation of All Research, RNT, June 2018, p. 53.
Philip Bump, “How Donald Trump’s 1993 Comments About ‘Indians’ Previewed Much of His 2016 Campaign,” Washington Post, July 1, 2016.
The Red Road, “Native American Poverty: An Endless Cycle.”
The Red Road, “Native American Poverty.”
Ben Eisen, “Scarce Credit Hinders Homeownership on Tribal Land,” Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2021.
Alana Knudson et al., Final Report: A Profile of Tribal Health Departments, NORC at the University of Chicago Public Health Research, June 29, 2012.
Indian Health Service, “Disparities” Fact Sheet, IHS, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Lisa Wexler et al., “Advancing Suicide Prevention Research with Rural American Indian and Alaska Native Populations,” American Journal of Public Health 105, No. 5 (May 2015): 891–99.
Kristi Eaton, “Report: 113K U.S. Indigenous Individuals Live in Mental Health Care Deserts,” Daily Yonder, January 24, 2023.
Shawna Claw, interview with the authors, Chinle, Arizona, November 8, 2022.
Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, “Belushi’s Farm Opens Akwesasne Cannabis Dispensary,” SRMT, October 27, 2022.
Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, “Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe Launches Regulated Cannabis Industry,” SRMT, December 14, 2021.
Douglas Burns, “As Rural Americans We Must See Ourselves as Part of the Nation’s Diversity,” Iowa Capital Dispatch, October 11, 2022.
Tieken, “There’s a Big Part of Rural America that Everyone’s Ignoring.”
Sahil Kapur and Allan Smith, “McConnell Wants to Win the Suburbs by Defusing Cultural Hot Buttons. Trump and His Own Party Have Other Ideas,” NBCNews.com, July 4, 2022.
We spent a morning with that opponent, Claudia Zapata, while she and some campaign volunteers cleaned a couple of truckloads of junk from the home of an elderly woman who lived alone (with three yapping dogs) in a dusty neighborhood in Kerrville. As they canvassed neighborhoods, rather than just asking people for votes, they would see if there was anything people needed, then do their best to help. It was inspiring to see, but also an extremely inefficient way to assemble the votes necessary to win a congressional race in which a quarter of a million votes were cast. Roy beat Zapata by a twenty-six-point margin.
“The reality of the purpose of the Second Amendment,” Roy said in a congressional hearing on July 20, 2022, is as a bulwark against the tyranny of the American federal government. That this is a common argument on the right makes it no less vulgar in its insistence that the reason one should have guns is so one can kill officials and overthrow the government should one deem it necessary.
Interview with the authors, November 3, 2022.
Mettler and Brown, “The Growing Rural-Urban Political Divide and Democratic Vulnerability.”
Hannah Hartig et al., “Republican Gains in 2022 Midterms Driven Mostly by Turnout Advantage: An Examination of the 2022 Election, Based on Validated Voters,” Pew Research Center, July 12, 2023.
Chip Roy, interview with the authors, March 24, 2023.
Ben Wikler, interview with the authors, January 18, 2023.
For instance, after an infrastructure bill was passed in 2022, the Biden administration created a “Rural Playbook” to assist rural communities in accessing funding. The White House, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Rural Playbook: A Roadmap for Delivering Opportunity and Investments in Rural America, last updated April 2022; you can see it at www.whitehouse.gov/build/resources/rural/.
Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, available at www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2022-12/lagdp1222.pdf.
Pooja Salhotra and Jayme Lozano, “A Boil-Water Notice in Houston Made National News. In Rural Texas, It’s a Way of Life,” Texas Tribune, December 7, 2022.
“Georgia Peach Crop Fails Due to Climate Change,” CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell, Thursday, June 29, 2023.
Kate Cohen, “My Husband Has Farmed for 4 Decades. Climate Change Might End His Run,” Washington Post, August 2, 2023.
Kathleen McLaughlin, “No OB-GYNs Left in Town: What Came After Idaho’s Assault on Abortion,” The Guardian, August 22, 2023.
Tyler Cooper, “Municipal Broadband 2022: Barriers Remain an Issue in 17 States,” Broadband Now, October 23, 2022.
Jon Brodkin, “House Republicans Propose Nationwide Ban on Municipal Broadband Networks,” Ars Technica, February 18, 2021.
Nick Fouriezos, “Rising Cost of Housing and Higher Education Poses Real Problems for Rural Students,” Daily Yonder, August 31, 2023.
Unnamed student quoted in Jon Marcus, “Rural Universities, Already Few and Far Between, Are Cutting Majors,” Washington Post, December 16, 2022.
Liz Hamel, Bryan Wu, and Mollyann Brodie, “The Health Care Views and Experiences of Rural Americans,” poll, Kaiser Family Foundation, June 2017.
Jacob Bunge and Bob Tita, “Biden Order Takes Aim at Tractor Repair,” Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2021.
Wuthnow quoted in Illing, “A Princeton Sociologist Spent 8 Years Asking Rural Americans Why They’re So Pissed Off.”
Eleanor Krause and Richard V. Reeves, Rural Dreams: Upward Mobility in America’s Countryside, Brookings Institution, September 5, 2017.
As labor historian Gabriel Winant writes, “Within this false class politics, the suffering of working-class people is understood in conspiratorial rather than structural terms. There is no historical logic to class inequality and exploitation, only inexplicable and unique acts of cruelty that bear no useful comparison to anything that has happened to others” (Gabriel Winant, “J. D. Vance Changes the Subject: A Senator from the Unconscious,” n+1 45 [Spring 2023]).
Orbán’s undermining of democracy, his attack on the rights of LGBTQ+ Hungarians, his opposition to immigration, and his efforts to make Hungary a more explicitly Christian country have made him a hero to American conservatives. He shares another interest with his U.S. compatriots: gerrymandering. In 2022, Orbán’s Fidesz party won 53 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections but controlled 83 percent of the seats. As The Washington Post described it, “The districts, drawn with no input from the opposition, spread Fidesz voters across many small districts in rural areas while concentrating opposition voters in much larger districts in the cities, thus giving them fewer chances to win” (Kim Lane Scheppele, “In Hungary, Orban Wins Again—Because He Has Rigged the System,” Washington Post, April 7, 2022).
Andy Westwood and John C. Austin, “To Counter Extreme Politics, Revive Global Democracies’ Rust Belts,” Brookings Institution, April 8, 2021.
The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement found after the 2016 election that 60 percent of rural young people lived in what they call “civic deserts,” defined as “places characterized by a dearth of opportunities for civic and political learning and engagement, and without institutions that typically provide opportunities like youth programming, culture and arts organizations and religious congregations,” compared with 30 percent of urban and suburban youth. Young people in civic deserts tended to be disengaged from politics, had few if any political opinions, and did not see politics as a means to helping their communities. (Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and Felicia Sullivan, “Study: 60 Percent of Rural Millennials Lack Access to a Political Life,” The Conversation, March 26, 2017.)
See, for instance, Patrick Denice and Jake Rosenfeld, “Unions and Nonunion Pay in the United States, 1977–2015,” Sociological Science 5 (2018): 541–61.
James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson, “From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box: Political Effects of Right to Work Laws,” Working Paper No. 24259, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2018.
Rowlands and Love, “Mapping Rural America’s Diversity and Demographic Change.”
Johnson and Lichter, “Growing Racial Diversity in Rural America.”
As one group of political scientists found in its research, “As the share of a county that is non-white increases, urban whites become less racially resentful, while rural whites become more so.” And those rural Whites become more likely to vote Republican. Brown, Mettler, and Puzzi, “When Rural and Urban Become ‘Us’ versus ‘Them.’ ”
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 23.
Letter to David Williams, November 14, 1803.
National Center for Health Statistics, “NCHS Urban-Rural Classification Scheme for Counties,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, June 1, 2017; “Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP) Data Files,” Health Resources and Services Administration; Sarah Melotte, “Is Rural America Struggling? It Depends on How You Define ‘Rural,’ ” Daily Yonder, April 6, 2023; National Center for Health Statistics, “NCHS Urban-Rural Classification Scheme for Counties,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, June 1, 2017.
Melotte, “Is Rural America Struggling?”
Kenneth M. Johnson and Dante J. Scala, “The Rural-Urban Continuum and the 2020 Presidential Election,” The Forum 20 (June 15, 2022).
The AHS (American Housing Survey) 2017 Neighborhood Description Survey, Summary Table 1, Office of Policy Development and Research, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; Ruth Igielnik Wieder, “Evaluating What Makes a U.S. Community Urban, Suburban or Rural,” Medium, November 22, 2019.
Parker et al., “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities.”
Public Religion Research Institute, “Competing Visions of America,” Question 34a.