More from The Rural Voter (Jacobs and Shea), this time from Politico Nightly

Politico Nightly recently featured a short interview with Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea, authors of The Rural Voter (2023). I've earlier blogged about the book here (well, in truth I picked up the Daily Yonder's review of the book).  Here's an excerpt from the interview with Politico: 

Question:  Donald Trump won large majorities among rural voters in 2016 and 2020. What explains a Manhattan billionaire’s strong appeal in rural America?

Jacobs: You have to get beyond Trump’s persona. You have to look beyond this idea that Trump is a typical Manhattanite. I think that’s where people try to carve out this disconnection: How could this billionaire living in his Manhattan skyscraper identify with these people? But the truth of the matter is he never pretended to be a rural person. He didn’t go around making a whole to-do about being born in Scranton like Joe Biden or chumming up with coal miners like Hillary Clinton. It made him not authentically rural, but authentic as a non-typical politician. And when he would speak about rural issues, like taking pride in mining coal, it was more empathy than anything. … A politician or a leader like Trump doesn’t necessarily have to pretend to be rural to play into rural identity politics. Just like progressives on the left don’t have to be a certain demographic to speak the language of identity politics.

* * * 

Question:  What are some of the implications of your research for the 2024 presidential election?

Shea: I hope Democrats appreciate the size of the rural voting bloc. This is a group of voters that is more important for the Republican Party than either Black voters or young voters are for the Democratic coalition. This is a big important group, and if the Democrats can’t chip away and make some inroads, it is not good on a national level and it’s going to be very bad at the state-level. … One of the reasons it may be hard for Democrats to go into rural areas is that they’ve come to believe these are bastions of crazy Trumpers. … But what we show in this book is that there are genuine concerns that pre-date Donald Trump by decades. Take the anxiety that all Americans feel about the future, double it, and extend it back extra decades. That’s the story of rural America.

I have read nearly the entire book at this point and am very much a fan of the work these scholars have done.  I expect to be writing more about the book during this election cycle.