Voting and Attitudes Along the Red Rural–Blue Urban Continuum

That's the headline for a Carsey policy paper, by Kenneth Johnson and Dante Scala, for which the abstract follows:

In attempting to explain the unexpected results of the 2016 presidential election, political analysts have emphasized the differences in party affiliation and social attitudes between Republican (conservative) rural America and Democratic (liberal) urban America. Yet, our study of the 2018 congressional election demonstrates that voting patterns and political attitudes vary across the spectrum of urban and rural areas in the United States. Rural America is not a monolith, nor is urban America. The rural–urban gradient is better represented by a continuum than a dichotomy. At one pole of the continuum are large, densely settled urban cores, where Democrats have consistently been the most successful. At the other end are rural counties far from a metropolitan area, without large towns, where Republican candidates command their greatest support.

This study of the 2018 congressional midterms confirms our earlier analysis of the 2016 presidential election and demonstrates how voting patterns and political attitudes vary across the spectrum of urban and rural areas. Part of the explanation for these differential voting patterns may well rest in the substantial variation from one end of the continuum to the other in social and political attitudes. Just as we found a rural–urban continuum for voting, we also find here that voters at the furthest rural end of the continuum express social and political attitudes far different from their counterparts in the largest urban cores, with suburban residents and those in rural counties with large towns falling in between. A major point of discontinuity along the continuum is evident in the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Residents of these areas tend to vote more like their rural counterparts and share their social and political attitudes.