Not So Different?
Polarization in the United States expresses itself in clashes of conservatives vs liberals, Republicans vs Democrats, and rural citizens vs urban citizens. Urban voters are more liberal than rural voters on social and political issues. A 2018 Pew Research study found 62% of urban voters identifying as Democratic vs 31% identifying as Republican.
Rural residents tend to be more conservative and vote Republican than urban residents. However, the same Pew study found the gap between Republican and Democratic voters to be much narrower: 54% of rural voters identified as Republican vs 38% who identified as Democratic. As recent as 1998 rural voters were virtually evenly divided between Democratic and Republican.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, political scientist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett conducted hundreds of hours of phone interviews with rural residents, combining anecdotal with social and economic data to create her book, The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means For Our Country. She concludes that division between urban and rural populations are “driven by extremes, not by the views of ordinary Americans.” Democrats and Republicans answered “almost identically … on topics of equality and democracy.” She found rural areas to be doing as well as cities in terms of home ownership, employment, and income.
Alternatively, Jonathan Rodden, another political scientist, in an interview on WBUR, the Boston National Public Radio station, argued that “the major axis of conflict in American politics right now isn’t necessarily left versus right, but rural versus urban.”
How different living in rural areas is from living in urban areas was on display in a Wall Street Journal story several years ago titled, City vs. Country: How Where We Live Deepens the Nation’s Political Divide. The article featured El Dorado Springs, Missouri, population 3,600, two hours south of Kansas City. With more than 30 churches, the population is older, virtually all white, overwhelmingly Christian, and mainly Republican. Until 2023 El Dorado Springs was represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by Vicky Hartzler, who was raised on a farm in Archie, Missouri. El Dorado Springs High School principal, Dave Hedrick, herds cattle as a hobby to relieve stress from work.
The Pew study enumerated three demographic forces that have “reshaped the overall U.S. population in recent years: growing racial and ethnic diversity, increasing immigration and rising numbers of older adults.” These trends have had different effects on rural and urban communities. While white people have become a minority in most urban counties, they are an 89% majority in rural counties. Rural areas have not experienced the concentration of immigrants occurring in urban areas. And the share of population age 65 and older is higher in rural areas than urban areas. Rural areas also have a smaller share of young adults.
Changes in the U.S. economy have favored urban areas over rural areas. One matter on which urban and rural majorities agreed is that rural areas receive less than their fair share of federal dollars. So, to return to the question, are rural and urban areas so different, certainly their lives are very different – what they do, to whom and what they are exposed, what their career options are, what cultural amenities are available. But Elizabeth Currid-Halkett found they are happy where they live.