White Rural Rage authors push back; debate is a powerful illustration of Twain's "lies, damned lies, statistics"

Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller wrote in The New Republic last week in response to recent critiques of their book, White Rural Rage.  Under the headline, "An Honest Assessment of Rural White Resentment is Long Overdue,"  they suggest that their critics, scholars like Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis, political scientists who have done some of the empirical work Waldman and Schaller cite, are being selective with the data they share.   What Waldman and Schaller don't acknowledge is their own cherry picking among the data from the political scientists who did the empirical investigation they reference.  Having reviewed both books and the flurry of commentary that has followed them, I'd say that Schaller and Waldman have been far more selective in their use of the data--and that they've done so in the service of supporting a sensational thesis:  white rural voters are the greatest threat to our democracy.  

Of course, that thesis is less sensational than it was even a decade ago because so many folks--at least in my coastal elite world--now believe it.  As Nicholas Jacobs wrote in one of his responses, Schaller and Waldman started with a thesis and then went looking for evidence to substantiate it.  That's where the cherry picking became necessary.   It's also where the phenomenon Mark Twain described as "lies, damned lies, statistics" came into play.  As a student with a degree in the hard sciences once told me, you can take most quantitative data sets and make them say whatever you want them to say. 

In their piece in The New Republic, Schaller and Waldman also make some interesting assertions about media protection of rural folks:   

[W]e have been surprised by the ferocity of the criticism we have received from scholars of rural politics. Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history.

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[I]f you dare to criticize the rural whites who are among Trump’s most devout followers, you’ll be met with an angry rebuke.

I find this assertion incredible--not least because it is so at odds with attitudes toward rural folks in my coastal elite world.   No, in my world, people are quite keen to "pile on" rural folks, seeing them as just the villains Schaller and Waldman selectively marshal data to depict.  

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Also published last weekend was this column by Eric Levitz in Vox, "Don’t sneer at white rural voters — or delude yourself about their politics."  Levitz asserts the debate between the authors of The Rural Voter and those of White Rural Rage can be boiled down to these five truths: 

1) Rural white people are more supportive of right-wing authoritarianism than are urban or suburban ones

2) Millions of rural white Americans support the Democratic Party

3) Rural white Republicans are not New Deal Democrats who got confused.

4) The economic challenges facing many rural areas are inherently difficult to solve.

5) Most people inherit the politics of their families and communities.

I agree for sure with numbers 2, 4, and 5 (though not necessarily that these are agreed upon in the two books).  As for the others, I'm not so sure given the findings of The Rural Voter and white rural people I know.  I also think that, regarding five, the politics people inherit are not necessarily the ones they stick with throughout their lives.  After all, many Obama voters migrated to Trump in 2016, and many more voters (third party or Democratic in 2016) migrated to Trump in 2020.  In other words, movement does happen.

Finally, Nick Jacobs and Daniel Shea recently published this essay in UnHerd, which got picked up in slightly amended form in the Washington Post.  Dee Davis published this in the Daily Yonder.