We say very clearly that rural America is hurting. But we refuse to justify attitudes that some scholars try to underplay.
Something remarkable happened among rural whites between the 2016 and 2020 elections: According to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter study, as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump, rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62 percent to 71 percent support. And among the 100 counties where Trump performed best in 2016, almost all of them small and rural, he got a higher percentage of the vote in 91 of them in 2020. Yet Trump’s extraordinary rural white support—the most important story in rural politics in decades—is something many scholars and commentators are reluctant to explore in an honest way.
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What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
I don’t know if there’s a single reason, but I would suspect a large part of it is that the alternative is giving in and conceding on pretty much everything. Sure, there’s a possibility that if they suddenly started voting for Democrats, they might see some more funding sent their way, more programs to help them get by, or possibly even create jobs. It doesn’t seem too likely they’ll be the same old jobs that used to sustain those rural towns, though. They also won’t be able to dominate the discourse of the party with a worldview built around Evangelical Christianity. That’s going to mean just flat out giving up on a lot of the culture war battles they’re fighting via the GOP at the moment. I don’t see them getting the Democrats to walk back support for gay rights, for example. A lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric basically just has to die off, or else urban Democratic voters will not support them.
For me, the real question is why they think they should be able to hold the vast majority of the population to their decidedly minority views? I’m sympathetic to wanting to be able to live the way you and your family have for generations, but there’s no bringing that back at this point, so they need to try something new.