Impeachment and the rural-urban divide

Everyone talks about the rural-urban divide in politics a lot more than they used to, in part because of Trump's presence on the national stage and the disproportionate support he has garnered from rural America.  The same is true now that Trump's impeachment trial is over and he has been acquitted.  The headline I just saw in the Washington Post is "69 million Americans voted for senators who supported impeachment," and the subhead is "Or about 55 percent of the votes received by sitting senators."  Phillip Bump's story is to contrast citizen support for impeachment with citizen opposition to it, responding to a figure oft-quoted by Republicans in recent weeks--that 63 million citizens voted to put Trump in the Oval Office.  Bump writes: 

The charges against Trump must be so robustly proved, Trump attorney Robert Ray said last month, that “the 63 million people like me who voted for President Trump accept his guilt of the offense charged” — enough to “overwhelmingly persuade a supermajority of Americans and thus their senators of malfeasance warranting his removal from office.”

Those 63 million people, the people who backed Trump in the 2016 presidential contest, were presented as being at risk of having their presidential vote thrown out.

Bump also contrasts the number of votes that put the Democratic senators in office with those that put the Republican senators in office, which of course highlights the fact that "rural states" get two senators each just like urban ones do.  Here's Bump's data point:

Nearly 69 million votes were cast for senators who supported removing Trump from office based on that first article of impeachment, about 12 million more votes than were received by senators who opposed his removal.

That's the count in the Senate.  Over in the house, members "who supported the first article of impeachment received about 38.5 million votes in 2018 — over 6 million more votes than were cast for members who opposed the article."

All of this reminds me of a funny piece a few days weeks ago about whether cows are better represented in the Senate than people, also from the Washington Post.