Does rural culture travel? the lingering influence of "Dust Bowl" migrants on California politics

I have often pondered when national media refer to states like South Dakota or Arkansas as "rural"--implying they are rural in their entirety--how this might be so.  Mostly, I think media like the New York Times are just very sloppy about this sort of labeling, but as I have thought about it, I have concluded that states like Arkansas and South Dakota are probably more rural culturally than many other states because, even though their populations are now largely concentrated in cities, these cities' residents are more likely than those in, say, New York, California, or even Texas, to have tries to rural parts of their respective states.  My sense is that this is because more residents of cities like Little Rock and Sioux Falls have migrated from the country to the city in the recent past; the state's population has shifted urban only relatively recently. Thus city dwellers in these "rural states" still have ties to the rural, perhaps grandparents still living on a family farm.  

That earlier train of thought may be why I read this Wonkblog piece from the Washington Post as suggesting that rural culture travels--in particular, that it traveled from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri and Texas all the way to California during the early decades of the 20th century.  This essay by Andrew Van Dam can further be read as suggesting that an Okie/Arkie culture persists--that it is alive and well in the counties of California where most Dust Bowl migrants settled.  He further asserts that the descendants of these migrants form the core of what's left of the Republican Party in the Golden State.  Here's an excerpt: 

[Dust Bowl migrants] made up a huge segment of the population in Central Valley counties such as Kern, Tulare and Madera. You can still hear their legacy in the country music known as the Bakersfield Sound and what researchers say are the remnants of Dust Bowl speech patterns. You can also see it in the area’s politics. Even after you account for its agrarian heritage, that part of the Central Valley remains more Republican than you’d expect.

You can thank the Dust Bowl for that, according to a new working paperfrom New York University Abu Dhabi political scientist Adam Ramey. Ramey found a strong relationship between the share of a county’s population that hailed from Dust Bowl states as of 1940 and support for Republican candidates in the 2018 midterms.

Van Dam quotes Ramey: 

No matter how I sliced it, I kept finding those results.

Van Dam continues: 

There’s a popular misconception of those California migrants as windburned dirt farmers — think the cotton-growing Joad family of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and Dorothea Lange’s famed photo of a migrant mother. But there were fewer farmers than you’d expect, according to a comprehensive analysis by Wheaton College economist Jason Long and his University of British Columbia colleague Henry Siu. 

Ramey had explained: 

If you actually look in the Census data from 1940 you find that agricultural employment is actually a low proportion of Okies.

Rather, Van Dam explains, "many of the migrants were white-collar and oil-and-gas workers, and they settled well beyond farming country. Bakersfield became a hot spot of Okie culture because of its oil wells, not because of its farms."

* * *

The divide between urban and rural counties remains decisive in California, as it does in the nation as a whole. An area’s Dust Bowl heritage looms almost as large. Hispanic voters have displaced Okies as the largest group in many areas, yet Republicans have held on in counties with a strong Dust Bowl heritage even as they get “shellacked” in places like Orange County, Ramey said.

All else being equal, the share of the vote earned by Republican candidates fell almost a percentage point a year in the least Okie parts of California between 1980 and 2016. 

In the places that accepted the most Okie refugees, the Republican share rose a few points over that time, Ramey found, even when other factors have been accounted for.

This analysis suggests that folks coming to California as part of the Dust Bowl migration were conservative, Republican leaning.  But I'm not sure that's an accurate representation of the early 20th century politics of Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and, of course, Oklahoma.  Indeed, these states turned "red" only relatively recently.  That said, I wonder if there was something in the attitudes/culture they brought with them to California that made them lean Republican, as the party evolved over the course of the last century.  If so, does that something make them more sympathetic to the current iteration of the party?

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.  More coverage of the 2018 mid-term elections is here.