In 21st century politics, there has been the sense that rural populations are to blame for the election of figures such as Donald Trump. A full two election cycles before Donald Trump ran for president, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama attempted to explain small town Americans' frustration while attending a San Francisco fundraiser.
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady of Arkansas, called then-Senator Obama "divisive and elitist" over his comments, prompting a row about Clinton's authenticity in courting rural voters. A mere eight years later, Hillary Clinton commented that half of then-candidate Trump's supporters fit into a "basket of deplorables" while the other half felt the "government let them down" and were "desperate for change." In light of her defense of small-town America eight years prior, it's not unreasonable to think Hillary Clinton put rural voters in the latter category. Nonetheless, rural voters felt maligned, even in spite of sympathetic voices from the left. Rural voters did not defect to the Republican Party overnight in 2016. Rather, a prolonged process of vote defection occurred as the New Deal and Great Society coalition of the Democratic Party inevitably broke up.
I. Rural Populism in the Gilded Age
The rapid urbanization which made rural communities their own distinct sub-class in spatial terms occurred in the first part of the 20th Century, accompanied by the industrial revolution and the type of populist social consciousness not yet seen in Western countries. The period between the American Civil War and World War One was marked by explosive economic growth, the benefits of which were not distributed equally among the socio-economic classes of America. It is now known as the Gilded Age. Likewise, one look at the current stock market's all-time highs and another look at median wages will say something similar about the present moment. With many calling the present moment marked by extreme wealth inequality a new Gilded Age, it's important to look at the first one.
Emblematic of rural people's interests in the Gilded Age was William Jennings Bryan, who ran in 1896 against William McKinley. While McKinley ran on a platform of high tariffs and maintaining the gold standard, Bryan delivered his Cross of Gold speech, outlining a platform of shifting to a more inflationary silver standard to aid indebted people, support for the descendants of "those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness" away from the Atlantic Coast, and against government favoritism toward business interests. A populist, Bryan insisted that the "attorney in a country town," the farmer, the miner, and the "merchant at the crossroads store" are just as much businessmen as their urban counterparts. The topic of Bryan's speech included calls for inflation, praise for laborers, and denunciation of idle capital holders.
From an economic perspective, modern audiences would equivocate William Jennings Bryan with left-wing political views. However, he was also a Fundamentalist Christian who promoted the criminal prosecution of the teaching of evolution even as late as 1925. Bryan also held complex, seemingly contradictory views on race and religion, extending religious pluralism to Catholics, Jews, and Native Americans while at the same time advocating for the exclusion of East Asian immigrants and Black Americans.
Ultimately, William Jennings Bryan lost his election, the nation split on then-traditionally partisan lines with the industrialized Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast voting Republican. The South, frontier prairie states settled in the late 1800s, and Washington State voting Democrat. William Jennings Bryan attempted to run again "in 1900 and 1908, before serving as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson." He would be the last presidential candidate of either the Democratic Party or Republican Party to run on an explicitly pro-rural platform, although many candidates have since made overtures to rural communities as a mere part of their election coalitions rather than the mainstay of their coalitions.
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1896 candidate William Jennings Bryan may seem like ancient history, but some parallels may be drawn from his appeals for the sake of rural populations to modern-day political appeals to rural populations in political coalition-building.
II. The Great Party Switch
In the years succeeding the start of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt built a
New Deal Coalition of working-class voters that secured a steady flow of Democratic presidents from 1932 to 1980. While Southerners and rural voters were included in the coalition and benefitted from the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration, Roosevelt's
"prototypical coalition member was a white worker in a unionized factory. " Rural voters were a part of the Democratic Party's big tent rather than being the center that William Jennings Bryan envisioned thirty-six years prior.
Starting in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson released another policy package to rival The New Deal: The Great Society. The overarching goal of the Great Society was to combat poverty and inequality in the United States. Among the package were provisions that specifically extended aid to rural areas of the United States. The
Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 sought to mobilize volunteer workers through the Job Corps to both urban and rural areas. The act's Title III provisions also eased the issuance of loans to those living in rural communities.
The Food Stamp Act of 1964 served the dual purpose of giving aid to Americans living under food insecurity and bolstering the agricultural economy.
The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965's Title X provisions extended insured rural housing loans, an interest rate capped at 5%, an extension of housing authorizations, and provided an expanded statutory definition of both under "2,500 inhabitants" or under "5,500 if it is rural in character." The act also extended financial assistance to nonprofits constructing water distribution and treatment facilities in "smaller municipality or rural areas."
Historical data compiled by a 2014 article by Drew DeSilver at the
Pew Research Center from the Census Bureau indicated marked success in reducing poverty rates among children and the elderly. From a regional perspective, anti-poverty measures yielded the greatest percentage decrease in the American South, although the region still outpaces the West, Midwest, and Northeast in terms of poverty. The continuing disparity may be indicative of why American Southerners continue to feel left behind going into the 2010s.
Delineating further from a regional view to a population density view, the
US Department of Agriculture compiled data on the decline of poverty rates in metro and nonmetro populations from 1959 to 2019. The data indicated a sharp decline from 1959 to 1974, followed by stagnation, an increase going into the 1980s, and then an unsteady decline before rising again in the mid-2000s. Although the decline in poverty clearly begins at least starting in 1959, during Eisenhower's penultimate year in the White House, it is a reasonable presumption that the Great Society's economic measures were not counter to the material interests of rural populations. The Great Society being a continuation of the New Deal makes more sense of the chart.
Despite its focus on urban renewal, the Great Society's economic package hardly abandoned rural communities. Government support and economic liberalism won over white working-class voters, many of whom called rural communities their home. However, the social revolution of the late 1960s made it difficult for the Democrats to hold their coalition together. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 resulted in another split between the Democrat Party and its Southern constituents during the
1964 election. Although predominantly rural states in the Midwest and Great Plains rallied for Johnson in 1964, the Democratic Party lost the Deep South to Barry Goldwater.
In the 1964 election, the particular history of segregation in the Deep South resulted in a defection from the Democratic Party while every other characteristically rural state remained with the Democratic Coalition.
Now would be an important time to mention, although it is beyond the scope of this paper, that rural communities have their own regional and cultural traits. The predominant religious denomination of a community will
also influence the political leanings of that community. The traditionally English-American
Calvinist (i.e. Reformed Church, Baptist, Methodist, etc.) rural South will carry their own political beliefs separate from rural German-Americans in the Lutheran
Upper Midwest. The presence
of Catholic communities
not usually associated with the rural United States adds its own political flavor. The difference in local cultures is one explanation for why distinctive regions of the United States associated with rurality may vote for comprehensively different candidates in the same election cycle.
On the dimension of economic sustainability, Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society policy package lifted an enormous amount of Americans out of poverty. However, it
contributed heavily to deficit spending. The fiscal costs of the ongoing
Vietnam War added even more to the budget deficit.
Republicans interrupted the Democratic winning streak in the 1952, 1956, 1968, and 1972 victories of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Although victorious in their respective elections,
Eisenhower and
Nixon both operated under the overarching social welfare economic paradigm set by the New Deal and Great Society policy packages. However, as more Southern Americans began defecting from the Democratic Party in the late 1960s, President Nixon was able to exploit the growing social rift among the Democratic Party and working-class white Americans. Among Nixon's supporters were a geographically diverse array of
Manhattan construction workers frustrated with college-educated protesters,
Native Americans seeking self-determination, and white Southerners disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Among his other seemingly contradictory acts, Richard Nixon
created the Environmental Protection Agency in spite of his private disdain for counterculture environmentalists. Like William Jennings Bryan, the social conservatism of Richard Nixon was complex and difficult to caricature.
By the time President Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon following the latter's resignation, concerns about economic stagnation and inflation forced both parties to shift toward fiscal austerity. The types of policy aid packages delivered to the working poor under the New Deal and the Great Society became increasingly rare. Both the social and fiscal aspects of the Great Society's policy package fell out of popularity. President Ford was the first to attempt to address inflation with his
"Whip Inflation Now" plan, amounting to a call to American households to limit spending in an effort to keep prices down. Unsurprisingly, the plan was
unpopular and was likely a contributing factor to Gerald Ford's defeat at the hands of Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter. An observation gleaned from the 1976 election map is that America's Southern states had not irreversibly defected to the Republican Party. When presented with a Democratic candidate from Southern agrarian roots, Deep South Americans were willing to vote Democrat; this pattern would later be repeated in 1992 and 1996 with the election of Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter continued Ford's efforts to halt inflation, appointing
Paul Volcker to be the chair of the Federal Reserve. Although
at the price of high interest rates and the resulting double-dip recession of 1981 and 1982, the Carter appointee finally defeated the inflation scare by the early 1980s.
In December of 1979, after over two years of preparations, Jimmy Carter announced his
Small Community and Rural Development Policy, an effort aimed at reducing the type of rural material deprivation he experienced as a young man and establishing local councils to inform state decisions on agriculture and rural development. Unfortunately, the nature of the short four-year term of the presidency makes long-term projects difficult to manage. In 1980, Carter polled unusually well in the rural South,
carrying the vast majority of rural black voters. Reagan carried only 60% of the most rural 90% white majority counties in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Nonetheless, Carter lost the election in an electoral landslide. The Reagan Revolution put an end to Jimmy Carter's designs in the next year.
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III. The Reagan RevolutionWhere rural Americans benefitted from the New Deal and Great Society's left-leaning economic package, they felt alienated by the increasing social liberalism of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution offered the opposite: fiscal conservatism and social conservatism. The government would begin investing in financial institutions and businesses rather than directly into communities. Factors from within and without the United States in the 1970s culminated in the
1980s Farm Crisis. Reagan's
Food Security Act of 1985 attempted to mitigate the effects of the farm crisis by temporarily reducing interest rates to 1988, expanded the list of eligible rural utility borrowers, set price supports for particular crops, expanded the eligible use of food stamps, and set government purchase quantities for many of those same crops. Two years later, Congress and Reagan passed the
Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, which sought to extend financial aid to agricultural financial institutions. Although Reagan is criticized for failing to stop the continued loss of small farms, it is worth mentioning that farm centralization held a
steep trend starting in the 1930s with that trend tapering off only by the mid-1970s.
One-hundred years from William Jennings Bryan's 1896 election, rural communities were once again in play. In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton, former Arkansas governor and
expert saxophone player, won two consecutive elections against World War Two veterans
George H.W. Bush and
Bob Dole. The Southern States appeared split between the candidates while the Great Plains region predominantly leaned toward Bush and Dole. Like Carter before him, Clinton's Southern roots led Southerners to see in him a trustworthy candidate. Clinton accomplished his victories by
capitalizing on discontent with the Republican Party's tax advantages given to the rich during the Reagan Revolution and defending against seemingly reckless spending cuts to education and Medicaid. Nonetheless, Clinton operated within the prevailing paradigm of the social and fiscal Reagan Revolution, giving concessions to Republicans in the form of police union-approved crime bills and welfare reform limiting recipients to two years before assistance would be rescinded. His relative social conservatism won him points with rural communities, although his willingness to embrace the new financial professional class and globalized economic order
ultimately proved disastrous for the economies of rural communities.
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Clinton went on to split rural voters again with the Republican Party again in 1996 before George W. Bush won predominantly rural regions of the United States in 2000 and 2004. The split between urban and rural residents for Gore and Bush was measured at 34 percentage points, only to be outstripped by "Jews and white Christians" at 40 points and "other voters and the religious right" at 36 points. Al Gore's environmentalism in particular made him appear threatening to communities dependent on coal mining and power generation. The election of 2000 proved to be a massive reversal of Clinton's gains in rural counties, and it was the final party reversal of most rural states to date.
In his first year of office, George W. Bush
announced his opposition to the Agriculture, Conservation, and Rural Enhancement Act of 2001 due to concerns about overproduction, price depression, a regressive tax on milk consumption, subsidies going to the largest of food producers, and the risk of "subsidies exceeding limits under WTO rules." Much like Clinton and Reagan before him, George W. Bush openly embraced the bipartisan consensus around the globalization of trade. Unlike previous iterations of agricultural bills, Bush seemed to be opposed to subsidies, ultimately relying on his trust in free trade and the free market. Ultimately, the bill was
not passed. In 2004, Bush went on to solidify his lead in his election against John Kerry. By 2008, years of free market and free trade principals came to a head. The
1999 Repeal of Glass-Steagall significantly deregulated the banking sector, encouraging the mingling of commercial banking and investment banking interests. The opening of international trade to developing markets allowed US employers to shut down largely rural manufacturing centers in favor of
cheap labor elsewhere during the leadup to the 2008 recession. After working-class America felt the brunt of the recession, the
Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 seemed to
reward major corporate and financial institutions. Working-class Americans were left to their own devices.
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The rise in income inequality due to the recession, where the upper income bracket recaptured the vast majority of the income share lost by working class families, started to fuel an increasingly loud movement of political populism. This brings us to the moment described in the introduction of this post: the 2008 landslide victory of Barack Obama without any need to appeal to rural voters. By election day 2008, rural communities were already thoroughly disillusioned with both parties. Rural turnout declined massively from 2004 in many locations. By 2012, Democratic priorities fully shifted away from the Clintonian 1996 strategy.
IV. The End of History
While social conservatism may have been the cause of rural defection to from the New Deal Coalition starting in the 1960s, it does not fully account for the now uniform changes starting in the 2000s.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, world leaders announced a new economic
world order defined by commercial interconnectedness. The 2001 accession of China to the World Trade Organization was already met with
suspicion of non-compliance from the start. The increasingly global nature of economic competition hit rural areas hard. In spite of the credit Reagan enjoyed from rural voters, his NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico
deprived rural areas of the manufacturing appeal they previously enjoyed when compared to the previous manufacturing sites in larger cities. The trend, starting in the 1980s, only intensified with the introduction of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The 2000s further deprived rural areas of
"about a quarter of their manufacturing jobs due both to overseas competition and increases in productivity." Left-behind working-class communities ultimately sought out both progressive and protectionist economic policies to scrape back what their leaders gave to multinational corporations and foreign workforces.
V. The Present Moment
The United States does not have its modern-day William Jennings Bryan. Desperate for change, rural voters swung in favor of New York reject Donald Trump.
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The 2020 election yielded similar results as far as predominantly rural states went, looking almost like a reversal of the 1896 map. Although Joe Biden won victories in the Rust Belt, states which saw their hay-day during America's industrialization, rural-coded states in the
late-to-be settled Great Plains and
late-to-industrialize South largely held for Trump.
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In the absence of
Scranton Joe from the end of the 2024, the Democrats lost a number of blue-collar communities in the Rust Belt.
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The subtext in the last three elections is this: rural America was not the deciding swing factor in Trump's victories and defeat. They have swung Republican in every election since 2000. Rather, the Rust Belt states in the Upper Midwest were in the balance. The rural political appetite, disillusioned with the establishment of both major parties, would have better stomached the economically left political outsider
Bernie Sanders than Clintonian party establishment figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Recent polling from the 2024 election was conducted across 1,713 interviews and ten battleground states. The poll attributes economically populist policies to rural voter preferences and attributes the unwillingness to vote for, at the time, Joe Biden to the lack of appearances and messaging directed toward rural communities. When poll answers were phrased without party attribution, responses trended toward more economically left and populist policies calling for elite and corporate accountability. Contrary to expectations, conservative social topics did not predominate the concerns of rural voters. Given more polling, Democratic Party strategists may come to understand that rural areas are not unwinnable so long as they refer to historical winning strategy of letting fiscal progressive messaging take center stage in the party platform. Although he partially got rural America into this mess, Democrats should still heed the immortalized words of Bill Clinton: "It's the economy, stupid."
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