In late 2023, GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini published his first book Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. It's got quite a few references to the rural vote, and I'm going to highlight here some of the ones from Chapter 1, also titled "Party of the People" (emphasis mine).
The chapter leads with the assertion that political parties used to come down to class. Increasingly, however, the key axis is between those with a college degree and those without one:
The choice to finish college and to not finish (or event start) is now the choice that says the most about who you are and what you value in life—between self-actualization in a competitive professional field or an honest day’s work mainly as a way to provide for your family; between acquiring knowledge for its own sake or staying close to the people and places you knew growing up. Among whites, this basic cultural divide translated to a modest political divide in the 2000 election—when the concept of rural red versus urban blue first came into view—and a big one in the 2016 election, when one candidate intuited a path to power that involved making implicit cultural differences between the parties very, very explicit.* * *
Since a college diploma translates readily to higher incomes, the new education divide has upended the class divides that defined twentieth-century politics. As a result, the Republican Party now has more people in it who are in the bottom half of the income distribution than it ever has, while it bleeds votes among the wealthiest.
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Signs of the class role reversal are also present among Black and Asian American voters, where those in higher-income brackets voted a few points more Democratic than their lower-income counterparts in 2020. The crucial exception to this trend are Hispanics, the group where Donald Trump made his biggest gains in the 2020 election. On the margin, higher-income Hispanics voted 11 points more Republican in 2020 than lower-income Hispanics. In this, they resemble the white voters of the 1970s and ‘80s, a time when there was no appreciable education divide and higher-income members of the group were more likely to support Republicans.
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How did the class role reversal actually happen? Right in the title, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? talks about the phenomenon as one might talk about an unwell relative. In 2000, the country saw a hard shift to the right among rural voters, powering Bush victories in a raft of Clinton-voting border states or those on the fringes of the South, from Louisiana all the way up to West Virginia, a coal-mining state once considered the most Democratic in the country. Liberal readers craved answers about how poor, rural Americans could be tricked into voting against their economic self-interest. Frank’s story centers around his home state of Kansas, where Republicans had morphed from the party of the country club into the party of Sunday service—banking the votes of lower-income, deeply religious white voters opposed to abortion and gay marriage. In Frank’s telling of the story, it was the Republican bankers and donors in the wealthy Kansas City suburb of Mission Hills—where Frank Grew up—pulling the strings. “Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes,” Frank riffed. “Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization…Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking…Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes.” Mission Hills donors might grumble about the rural riffraff entering the party, but that was a small price to pay for a Republican majority that would deliver on their desired economic agenda.
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In Wisconsin, Clinton improved Democratic margins in the Milwaukee area, most prominently in the suburbs, but turnout in Milwaukee proper dropped by more than ten points, which meant fewer votes to hold back the rural red tide for Trump.
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Trump had surged all along the Mexican border with Texas, including a 55-point swing in rural Starr County in the Rio Grande Valley, nearly winning a county that Clinton had captured four years earlier by 60 points. He won next-door Zapata County, the first Republican since 1920 to do so. Votes were slower to report in California, but the surprise election to the House of two Asian American Republicans in Orange County, Michelle Steel and Young Kim, indicated a surprising shift in immigrant-heavy communities that was broad-reaching and not limited to Hispanics. With Trump’s coalition adding more working-class nonwhites and subtracting more college-educated whites, the pro-Republican Electoral College skew became more pronounced.
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It needs to be repeated that Trump lost the 2020 election. Neither his gains in key groups nor his false narratives about a stolen election change this fact. But Trump’s performance was testament to the resiliency of a Republican coalition built around the working-class voter, which in 2020 had grown to include more nonwhite voters. The rise of multiracial working-class conservatism, once on track to merit but a small footnote in the story of a landslide Trump defeat, instead became a crucial reason why the election was so close.
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The challenge for Republicans in 2023 is to show that they can reap the structural benefits of Trump’s realignment of the American electoral without Trump’s chaotic persona at the top of the ticket. Post-Trump elections show this is possible. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the 2021 race for the Virginia governorship, for example, represented a wide-ranging advance from Trump’s 2020 vote in counties across the state—including a stronger performance than Trump in the state’s rural, working-class southwest. Youngkin deftly threaded the needle in 2021, running on a genial business-savvy reminiscent of Mitt Romney, while meeting the populist moment with a campaign against a left-wing, “woke” agenda in the schools and a pledge to suspend the sales tax on groceries.
This is just a smattering of the book's attention to rural voters and their role in this re-alignment. Indeed, Chapter 9 is entirely about realignment in the largely Latino Rio Grande Valley, which has significant pockets of rural population.
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