Why Aren’t We Talking About Rural Voters Anymore?
Commentary by Ann M. Eisenberg
Ann M. Eisenberg is the Patrick D. Deem Professor of Law and Research Director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University. Her research examines questions of law and sustainability, with particular emphasis on rural development, property, energy law, and local government. Professor Eisenberg’s book, Reviving Rural America: Toward Policies for Resilience, published by Cambridge University Press, applies the lens of law and political economy to rural marginalization and argues that man-made rural decline should be counteracted through climate-friendly policies that reconceptualize rural America as a commons.
Like all Commentary here on The Rural Review, this post expresses the personal opinions of the author.
If you pay attention to public discourse about rural populations, you might have noticed something missing in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election: think-pieces on rural voters. These think-pieces—musing on rural voters’ motivations, their seemingly disproportionate susceptibility to Donald Trump’s appeal, and their role in deciding the most recent election—were everywhere after the 2016 presidential election that led to Trump’s first term. Even in 2020, after Joe Biden’s victory and evidence of more complexity in rural voting patterns, analysts and pundits seemed eager to assess the role of the rural vote. Yet, rural voters just don’t seem to be top of mind for this round of post-election analysis. Why might that be?
A couple of explanations come to mind. The first is simply that those who are in positions to offer post-election analysis, such as journalists or academics like myself, are preoccupied with other, more pressing things at the moment. The constant barrage of executive orders, mass firings of public employees, and other actions of questionable legality are enough to digest in and of themselves.
But a second factor might be that rural voters did not stand out as much as they have in past election cycles. The post-2016 think-pieces were often branded as ventures into “Trump country,” where outsiders sought to understand rural localities’ apparent turn toward right-wing politics. Those narratives don’t work as well when everywhere has turned into Trump country.
Donald Trump gained more votes with more demographics in more places than he did in 2016 or 2020. He doubled his vote shares from 2020 among young Black men and won half of the votes among young Latino men. This was in addition to maintaining a majority of the white vote, especially white men. Voters making less than $100,000 per year shifted 17 points in Trump’s favor compared to 2020. According to the New York Times, “[m]ore than 89 percent of counties in the United States shifted in favor of . . . Trump in the 2024 presidential election[.]” Many Democrats acknowledged feeling shocked and humbled that, however slight the margin, Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years.
These numbers meant that “rurality” suddenly wasn’t as interesting as a determining factor in voting patterns and election outcomes. But the trends over time also suggest that whatever was happening in rural regions that made them go red first has now happened elsewhere. What might that mean?
I think rural voters being ahead of the curve of a wider, national rightward shift is significant for a few reasons. First, the lack of think-pieces scrutinizing particular demographics right now sheds light on our country’s questionable cultural treatment of rural populations. It still tends to be socially acceptable to tacitly or openly label rural populations as different: a backwards “other” that needs a special kind of scrutiny.
Researchers have extensively documented longstanding trends in which rural populations are accused of having a “culture of poverty,” or framed through other negative stereotypes that blame rural communities for the challenges they face. “Trump country” narratives play into this stereotype. These analyses frequently include the condescending question as to why rural voters “vote against their interests.”
Other demographics, of course, experience similar treatment, often expressed in worse terms. But stereotypes of rural people and places reveal a particular cultural complexity. In my own world of elite, urban liberals, cultural stereotypes are generally recognized as bad. But that same awareness is not necessarily extended to rural populations, in part because they’re deemed dismissible based on those very stereotypes (i.e., backwards, white, conservative).
That’s part of why I think it’s worth assessing the relative lack of (stereotype-driven) scrutiny for rural voters this time around. I’m wondering whether that lack of scrutiny means that urban, liberal commentators have learned their lesson—that rural voters were not the source of all our problems after all.
The realization that something other than the supposed quirks of rural voters or the inherent flaws in rural populations must be at play in determining our national elections might lead us to new, more fruitful avenues of analysis. Something structural, and not cultural, now seems like a clearer explanation for Trump’s 2024 win. And we should be doing some work to understand those structural factors.
So, what structural issues have contributed to our current sociopolitical turmoil? My own work suggests that the economy the United States has created over the past 50 years has really and truly not been working for most of its people. An embrace of so-called free markets, under the umbrella of the philosophy known as neoliberalism, has driven inequality between regions and between the country’s super-elite and everyone else.
Many voters who turned to Trump cite the economy as their driving reason. It makes sense, then, that rural voters were the canary in the coal mine, so to speak, for the rightward shift. Rural populations and regions were hurt, earlier and harder, than other groups in the turn toward neoliberalism. Transportation deregulation, manufacturing outsourcing, and consolidation in the agricultural sector have, for decades now, been driving rural depopulation and economic stagnation in ways that have often been invisible to the country’s non-rural majority. But those economic trends favoring corporations over workers and consumers have caught up with the rest of the country, too.
Another piece of this puzzle is that mainstream Democrats have really not offered meaningful solutions to the harms of the neoliberal economy. More often, they have steered the economic ship in this direction alongside Republicans. Despite the Biden administration’s impressive effort at a new industrial policy, it was too little, too flawed, and too late to really turn things around.
The national Democratic Party’s brand strives to be the enlightened alternative to conservatism. But it’s a hard brand to buy when mainstream Democrats support war just as much as the other side, refuse to embrace universalist social policies, and scold people for not being socially enlightened enough. That’s even though the practices of enlightenment, like using the right language and aligning your life with environmental concerns, tend to require some privilege. Democrats’ brand often ends up as a pitch for the “lesser of two evils,” which should perhaps be unsurprising in its lack of broad appeal.
I’m increasingly concerned that this is not a model for the kind of big-tent politics that might help take the country in more harmonious, equitable directions. Republicans—Trump in particular—have been promising people a better future. Those promises are usually misleading, and manipulative in their appeals to xenophobia and other biases. But tactically, they are doing something Democrats could learn from: talking to the working class (of which many rural people are a subset), acknowledging that their struggles are significant, and claiming to do something significant about them.
Part of the problem is that the country is too big and diverse for our limited two-party system. But if Democrats are ever to broaden their impact and popularity, we must recognize the problems neoliberalism has created, see how those problems drive modern grievances, and offer people real alternatives involving a coherent vision for materially improving living conditions. While I’m not sure exactly what that should look like, mainstream Democrats’ continued embrace of elite, techy urbanism is probably not it. Rather, big-tent politics should mean that Democrats don’t give up on rural and working-class voters, as they have so often done in the past few decades. At the very least, big-tent politics includes recognizing that votes just may be decided by the price of eggs, and taking that concern seriously.
Despite the challenges of this moment, the lack of scrutiny of rural voters this time around may be a positive sign in the form of a creeping recognition that rural people are not so different after all. Recognizing that there is no “other”—that working people of all stripes, from all places, have interconnected fates—might be the first step to steering the country away from chaos and division and toward solidarity, peace, and prosperity.
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