David Brooks takes up the rural-urban divide in Election 2020

In today's New York Times, David Brooks takes up the influence of the rural-urban divide on the 2020 election.  The headline is "The Rotting of the Republican Mind," and the part highlighting geography's role is here: 

While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.

People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war.

And speaking of Wilkinson, he has the second most read piece on the New York Times website right now, "Why Did So Many Americans Vote for Trump?"  Wilkinson's commentary centers mostly on the pandemic and contrasting responses by Democrats and Republicans, and it mentions geography only in passing, the "density" concept not at all.  

The president’s mendacious push to hastily reopen everything was less compelling to college-educated suburbanites, who tend to trust experts and can work from home, watch their kids and spare a laptop for online kindergarten. Mr. Trump lost the election mainly because he lost enough of these voters, including some moderate Republicans who otherwise voted straight Republican tickets.

He contrasts those suburbanites who (presmptively) have white collar jobs with "working-class breadwinners who can’t bus tables, process chickens, sell smoothies or clean hotel rooms over Zoom."

Wilkinson, who's pretty far left, adds: 

Democrats need to rethink the idea that these voters would have put Democratic House and Senate candidates over the top if only Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were less radiantly socialist. They need to accept that they took hits on the economy by failing to escape the trap Republicans set by doggedly refusing to do anything about the uncontained contagion destroying it.

Other ideas on how the rural-urban divide is influencing our nation's political landscape can be found in two podcasts I've listened to in the past few days, from the Trillbilly Workers Party and Densely Speaking.   Among other interesting matters, the former mentions Bill Bishop's The Big Sort as gospel, while the latter suggests that trend is reversing.