Suzanne Mettler Says the Rural-Urban Divide Threatens American Democracy

 We barely disagree with each other, but we can't stand one another's party. 

Suzanne Mettler

Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University. She is the coauthor of Four Threats with Robert Lieberman and Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy coauthored with Trevor Brown. 

The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. 

Read the full transcript here.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• From a 2-Point Gap to a 20-Point Chasm - 3:10
• The NAFTA Betrayal Democrats Never Escaped - 15:01
• Why Are You Kowtowing to These Elites? - 23:31
• Power Without Prosperity - 34:35

Links

Read the book Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy

Learn more about Suzanne Mettler

Learn more about the Kellogg Institute

Apes of the State created all Music

Email comments or questions to jkempf@democracyparadox.com

Transcript

Introduction

Today’s guest is Suzanne Mettler. She is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at Cornell University. I’ve followed her work closely for years. A few years ago she cowrote the book Four Threats with Robert Lieberman. But more recently she has focused on the rural-urban divide in American politics. Her most recent book is Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy coauthored with Trevor Brown.

As someone who’s lived in the Midwest my entire life, I’ve followed the debates about the rural-urban divide closely. I’ve found some of the research insightful, while others I have found unhelpful. I don’t agree with everything Suzanne finds, but I think it’s among the strongest contributions to discussions on the subject. 

Suzanne finds place based polarization is a critical threat to democracy in the United States. Because the constitution gives significant influence to rural voters, this cleavage creates an imbalance in American politics. It’s a cleavage the political parties did their best to avoid for generations. But now that it is here, it poses significant risks that politicians should try to escape. 

One danger in discussing these issues is it can come across like we are giving Democrats advice on electoral strategy. I don’t want that to be the message. I’m more interested in understanding what is happening, why it is happening, and what it means for democracy. The hope is political actors will make decisions that are in the best interest of democracy rather than their narrow political goals. 

My challenge for you is to consider how to overcome place based polarization. If you are an Democrat in an urban environment, it’s going to take something bigger than redistributive programs for rural voters. But I also want to hear from Republicans what they can do to earn the votes of urban constituents. What tradeoffs are you willing to make to appeal to those voters? I’m especially interested in hearing views of people from other countries who face similar issues of place based polarization. 

If you listen to Spotify, you can leave them as a comment on the episode. You can also send me your ideas to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. There is a link to the complete transcript in the show notes.

The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. But for now… here is my conversation with Suzanne Mettler…

Podcast Interview

jmk: Suzanne Mettler, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Suzanne Mettler: Thanks, Justin. Good to be with you.

jmk: Well, Suzanne, like many, I followed a lot of your work for a long time, but I was very interested in your most recent book, Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy. And I'm going to note that it's very focused on American politics, but I did feel that there are some aspects to this that we can think about within a much larger context — United States, Europe, Western democracies, and to a lesser extent, some other democracies, like even within Latin America and some others.

But I know that your research is focused on what's happening here in the United States, but I do feel that this is a topic that moves beyond just the American political context. But to start there with the idea of what exactly it is when we're thinking about rural identity and urban identity, and especially rural voters and urban voters, it feels like the definition of it has changed a lot over time.

When I look at older research, it feels like when we talk about urbanization, people who are today classified as having a rural identity would've been described as being part of an urbanized workforce. I mean, just this idea of what it is to be rural seems like it's changed a lot, particularly over the last maybe 50 years, but probably even more recent than that.

It feels like we've kind of expanded that idea because the sense of rural identity seems like it's different than necessarily what it used to be. How does that affect the way we think about this political debate between rural versus urban?

Suzanne Mettler: So my co-author is Trevor Brown, and what he and I are looking at in our book, Rural Versus Urban, is quite specific. It's how people vote and whether they're voting for Democrats or Republicans. So there are many scholars now who are looking at rural identity and how people think of themselves, and that's really not our focus. What we are interested in is the fact that in the United States, if you look at presidential voting through the middle of the 20th century, rural and urban Americans voted overall just about the same in presidential elections, always electing the winning candidate, and they were divided by only about two percentage points as recently as 1992.

And then something happened where this gap begins to grow between rural and urban people in their voting patterns, and rural people start increasingly giving their votes to the Republican Party. And the biggest cities had long been more ensconced in the Democratic Party, but urban areas generally, which includes all sorts of sizes of cities as well as suburban areas, more densely populated places, which is where 80% of Americans live today, gravitated more toward the Democratic Party.

But the biggest change was among rural dwellers. You now have — what was a two percentage point gap in 1992 is now a 20 percentage point gap in presidential elections, and that's at the national level. We drill down and we find it's happened in every region of the country. The gap is even larger in the Midwest than it is the South.

A lot of people assume, oh, this must be about the South, which used to be solidly Democratic. It has gradually shifted to be Republican. But the shift has been even greater in the Midwest, and it's large in the West, a little smaller than elsewhere in the Northeast, but it's very significant all the same.

And it's happened in most states over the same time period, from the late 1990s to the present. So the puzzle to us was what explains that growing voting gap, and that's what we really drill down and look at. Now, it is true that this rural-urban political divide has been happening in other countries as well, and in many other countries, it was occurring earlier than it happened in the United States.

But in recent decades, it's grown especially fast in the United States, and here I'm drawing not on our own research, but Jonathan Rodden's work with various co-authors. But what Trevor and I argue is that it's most consequential in the United States because of the way it intersects with our political institutions in a way that gives extra clout, extra political clout to those less populated places.

jmk: I would say that it's more important that we've seen the shift within the Midwest, because in the South, you can explain away the shift as being tied back to the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon. It's tied very closely to a change in racial politics. In the Midwest, it's a little bit more confusing because it didn't happen as a consequence of the civil rights movement necessarily. And even Obama's election, which some people will again tie to racial politics, a lot of that shift was happening before Obama was elected as well.

So there's not always a clear explanation as to why a place like Iowa would shift from being more of a Democratic state to more of a Republican one. Why a state like Indiana would have elected Evan Bayh to the Senate in the past, but now it's almost impossible for the Democrats to compete on statewide office.

We can look at it from multiple different states. Wisconsin is a state that seems like it should be very firmly Democrat, and it's starting to shift that way yet again, but it's still a very purple state. And not that long ago, was really kind of the domain of Scott Walker and a very far-right, at least within the United States, very far-right push in terms of what it meant to be Republican that was actually getting elected within Wisconsin.

It wasn't a middle of the road Republican. Scott Walker was a little bit more on the fringe at the time, and part of his popularity was due to that and due to rural voters within Wisconsin putting him into office. So why is it that so many different parts of the United States that are identified as rural have made that shift within recent years, within recent decades, I would say?

Suzanne Mettler: Well, this was a central question for us. Before I get into that, I do want to push back a little bit on the South, because what was very interesting to me was — you know, we think of the South as changing from being solidly Democratic among whites to becoming more Republican over time. But in fact, that really did not happen in rural areas until the 1990s.

It was urban areas of the South that were making that transformation in earlier decades. So that's really fascinating. And there were still a lot of Democrats being elected from the rural South until you get to, say, the 1994 election. So I've already mentioned presidential elections, but when we drill down and we look at Congress and you look at the House of Representatives, 1994 was a wave election, and specifically a lot of rural Democrats lost their seats, and they were replaced by Republicans then.

A lot of that was happening in the South. And then we had another wave election in 2010, the Tea Party election. And since then, the House of Representatives has really become polarized by place. When you look at where people are from, it's like the Republican Party is predominantly from more rural places, and the Democratic Party predominantly from more urban places.

But to look at the question of why this has happened, we built a big data set of all counties in the United States, of which there's well over 3,000, from 1976 to 2020. We looked at all kinds of indicators over that long time period to try to see what was happening. In the early part of that time period, you don't have a rural-urban divide.

Once it starts to emerge in the 1990s, we find that what is driving it is economic factors. The rural counties that were losing jobs moved toward voting for Republicans for president, and those that were losing population did the same thing. So we really studied this to find out what was happening to the rural economy in this time period.

So we found that already starting in the 1980s, you'd had agricultural consolidation happening, loss of family farms, and then you have the loss of jobs in extractive industries like mining. A lot of that's due to technology. Each of these things is some blend of public policy changes and then other changes as well.

And then you get the loss of jobs in industry. And it was a surprise to me how much rural places had relied upon industry. And this is another area where de-industrialization had been going on for some time, and it had long since been affecting cities, but rural areas held onto their industry longer, and they were really losing it in the 1990s and early 2000s.

And that happens as a result of the move to free trade, so like NAFTA and more trade with China, as well as deregulation. We found that from the New Deal onward, rural Americans, in most places, not everywhere, but most places, tended to feel that the Democratic Party had their back. The Democratic Party, they saw as the party of the working person, and that it was defending their interests.

In the 1990s, they lost that faith. So they'd handed it down across generations, but in the 1990s, the local economy is doing badly in rural places, and they look to who's in the White House. Scholars of political behavior find that people blame the person at the top. They blame the president.

So here's President Bill Clinton, and he signed NAFTA into law, and it was a very high-profile fight because most Democrats in Congress were opposed to it, and they opposed it loudly, vociferously. So that's what got it started, was this decline in the economy. And then we find other factors take over once you get into the 21st century.

jmk: I'm not surprised to hear that a lot of industry is actually in rural America, because I feel like that's the case today. I mean, if you look at where the factories are, they're generally in small towns. They might not be in an extremely small town, but they might be in a place like Lafayette, Indiana, rather than Indianapolis, Indiana, because it's easier to build a large factory there, or a town like Warsaw, Indiana, that isn't very big.

It's got a decent number of people living there. But because it's a relatively small town, you've also got a lot of factory workers who are living within a radius of an already small town that are living in even smaller communities. So a lot of the people that are actually working in industrial jobs are oftentimes living in very small communities, very small towns.

That's really not unusual.

Suzanne Mettler: You are so right, and it was a surprise to me that that's true, and I think this is a surprise to most people. I mean, urbanites often have the image that rural people are farmers and ranchers, and that is a tiny, tiny percentage of the American public, and even of the rural workforce.

You're much more likely to work in industry in a rural area. You're also more likely to work for government — state, local, or federal government — in a rural area.

jmk: Yeah, especially if you work for a place like DNR, Department of Natural Resources, or again, one of the many different state agencies that need to have offices throughout the state.

What shocks me oftentimes is that a party can get punished for a change in policy when they were the voice opposed to it. I mean, I understand that Clinton was at the top and that he was supporting it, but the Republican Party was very much in favor of NAFTA. It's not like you got a change of party and Clinton left, Bush came in, and he had Trumpist-type policies.

I mean, Trump's turn on trade is very late in the game compared to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama. You have a lot of different administrations of which Republicans remain very solidly saying, "Hey, we're the party of free trade," trying to push the envelope even further than the Democrats would. The Democrats, it felt like, were trying to play catch up to the Republicans during this time.

Why is it that they would get punished for a policy change that the other side wouldn't reverse?

Suzanne Mettler: I love this question. Politics is just so full of paradoxes, and this is a great one. And this story I found really fascinating. I mean, I remember NAFTA myself, so it was interesting to go back and study it and to figure out what was happening then.

You had, first of all, Bill Clinton, when he was running for the presidency, initially was opposed to NAFTA, and it was George H.W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress who had been trying to get it over the finish line for a long time, and they almost had it there, didn't quite have it there. And then Clinton, once he's in the White House, decides he's in favor of NAFTA.

But some changes were happening in a portion of the Democratic Party. I mean, the Democratic Party had long been opposed to free trade and was more protectionist on the side of workers and industry who wanted that position. And then you had new Democrats who were being elected, I believe from suburban areas, starting in the 1970s, who were more in favor of free trade and some deregulation, but they were still a small portion of the Democratic Party in Congress.

But on those issues, they would ally with Republicans, and then they would have a winning majority on the issues. So that was just enough votes to get these things through Congress, and then Clinton signs it into law. On NAFTA, it's even more interesting because here you had Dick Gephardt, and he had grown up in Missouri, working class family, father worked in a factory, and he was vociferously anti-free trade and really thought this was going to hurt American workers and have long-term repercussions.

And he went to Bill Clinton and he said what he thought. And Clinton said, "Well, what I want you to do is to go to Mexico and meet with the leaders there and cut a deal, make an arrangement so that we're going to have free trade, but it's going to respect workers, take care of the environment," et cetera. So Gephardt goes off to Mexico and he comes back, no deal.

So he says to Clinton, "I can't support it." And so then he and David Bonior, other congressional leaders, they came out very strongly against NAFTA, and they were joined by labor unions and by all sorts of organizations of people that loudly protested NAFTA. But then it passed, and then the Democratic president signs it into law.

So they had made it clear to the American public, this is bad for working people, and people internalized that message, and then it's like a boomerang to the Democratic Party. And I think that it was one policy among many, and it was one factor among many, but I think it had outsized significance because it was so visible to people, and probably is one of the key things that led rural people to blame the Democrats.

jmk: Do you feel that the Democrats made — I don't know if it was a conscious decision, but it was a decision nonetheless strategically — to side with urban workers and really just urban voters, let's say, over rural voters?

Suzanne Mettler: You know, we really tried to look at to what extent were party leaders in either party driving this growing divide, and we have not found much evidence of it.

I think they both found that they benefited in various ways from the divide, and then they worked to heighten it. But we don't find much evidence that they were really trying to make it happen. But already in the 1990s, while these things are happening that I'm describing to you, highly educated urbanites, people with more education in the United States — if you go back to the 1980s, the average American, non-Hispanic white American with a college degree or more education, was supporting the Republican Party.

And then in the 1990s, that starts to shift. And those folks are attracted to Clinton and what he's doing, and it might have been in part for these kinds of policies, which — you're beginning to see the rise of jobs in tech in urban areas that are helping these highly educated workers, the so-called knowledge economy.

So that is helping the party. I don't have the evidence that the party was really catering to that.

jmk: I grew up in St. Louis, so I knew of Dick Gephardt. I mean, he wasn't representing my district, but growing up, he was in the adjacent district. I remember him as a pro-life Democrat that represented a very Catholic constituency.

It reminds me very much of a change in the Democratic Party that was shifting during this time, where in the past, it was very common for Democrats to be pro-life and even sometimes pro-gun because they were representing very different types of voters. I mean, Catholic voters are a great example, which have started to shift very much towards the Republican Party purely based on the abortion issue, it feels like.

Although you could argue that the demographics have shifted, that people make more money now, so maybe they're more comfortable with moving into the Republican Party. But regardless, it was a very different demographic that it felt like Gephardt was representing at that time, and it reflected in terms of the type of issues that he represented.

It feels like the politicians didn't make a conscious effort. It feels like the voters kind of led them towards different issues, but it definitely feels like the type of politicians who were leading the Democrats and the type of politicians leading the Republicans are very different, both in terms of their personality profiles as well as their policy positions than they were back then, like 30 years ago.

Suzanne Mettler: So it is true that there used to be some number of members of Congress who were pro-life Democrats, and often, like you said of Dick Gephardt, they were really pro-union and so on. But when you look at voters, this is interesting. So Trevor and I looked extensively at Americans' views about public policy, and we compared rural and urban non-Hispanic whites and their views.

And on most policy issues, we found no significant differences, and this is the case for all kinds of issues where you're asking people about how much should government be spending on the environment and on social welfare and healthcare, and on and on and on. There's just no difference between rural and urban voters.

When it comes to the issues that we call culture war issues, like abortion and guns, there are gaps between rural and urban voters, and rural people take more conservative positions on average. But what is striking is this: those gaps are not that big. They tend to be in the single digits, and they tend to not be growing over time.

By contrast, the voting gap, which is our big focus, has grown from barely existing to being enormous. And so the culture wars don't seem to be the explanation overall about what's happening.

jmk: What is the explanation then? Is it that people just feel that they see themselves better represented as a demographic within one party versus another, and the policy positions don't really matter much at all?

Suzanne Mettler: The bottom line is that we are in a crazy state in American politics today where it's all about your partisan identity. That's where identity comes into play. We had these questions we look at where people are asked to place various groups on a feeling thermometer, and rural Republicans and urban Democrats are asked to locate all sorts of ethnic groups, and gay people, and all sorts of groups.

And with all those groups from zero to 100, for, like, Black Americans and Latino Americans, it's somewhere up in the 70s. For gay people, I think it was around high 50s or 60. Even when they're asked about illegal immigrants, that wording, it was still 39%. But when they're asked about Democrats, it was, I believe, 14%.

And then when the urban Democrats are asked about Republicans, it was about 17%. So, in other words, here's our bottom line about what I've just said. We barely disagree with each other, but we can't stand one another's party. This is about hostility to the political party of those people who live in those other places, and there's this big geographic gulf in between us, so we don't like each other's parties.

So what Trevor and I are trying to explain is why. And so that gap begins, as I was saying, in the late '90s with the economic changes that happened, but then we see a pattern we call sequential polarization, because there's two more dynamics that come into play. Once you get to 2008 to 2020, there's a new dynamic that takes over.

And so the first one, starting in the '90s, early 2000s, is what we call the rise of place-based inequality, and the rise of place-based inequality leads toward more Republican voting in rural places. Then 2008 to 2020, elite overreach is the new dynamic, and this is where rural people begin to experience the Democratic Party as run by people who are better off than themselves.

It's very important that this happens in sequence after the first phase. So they're looking at the Democrats, and they're like, "They have more comfortable lives than we have, but they're telling us what to do." On all kinds of policies, they don't consult us, they don't understand our communities, they don't seem to respect our communities, but they're telling us what to do.

That is the feeling of rural people, and I've already talked a little bit about the growing educational divide. So already in the '90s, people who had college degrees start gravitating more toward the Democratic Party, and rural people who tend to have less formal education have long been supporting the Democratic Party, but then they see these folks in it, and they're like, "Maybe this is not our party.

This party just doesn't seem to be people like us, and it's not representing us." And then in several policy areas, they feel that these folks are foisting things upon them. In the book, we explore, for example, policies in various states to move toward the adoption of clean energy, so to adopt wind farms or solar farm installations.

And of course, this has to happen particularly in rural places because that's where the land is. And there's a fascinating literature upon this with case studies from all over the country, and I was struck by how common people's experiences were, that they feel that some company comes in, wind or solar, they cut a deal with a big landowner, and all this happens quietly before the local community hears about it.

And they get all sorts of waivers and tax advantages and so on. And then the local community learns about it. At this point, it's way down the tracks. It's too late for them to have a voice, too late for them to intervene, and they feel like they've been sidelined. And there was actually — I remember one article was quoting a person in rural Indiana who said, "It's not that I'm against wind energy.

I'm against how it was done here." And that kind of sums up a thread that I saw running through all of these case studies, and it's reflective of how rural people on many issues feel they don't have a voice. And I will say that since our book came out, now there's data centers going up in all kinds of rural areas.

And when I read the news stories, it's the same dynamic where people feel that they are not being consulted. It's even happening with ICE detention centers these days, where there are journalists who will interview people in rural places, and some of them will say that they were in favor of Trump's immigration policies, but they do not like the way these centers have been foisted upon their local areas.

So, rural places tend to be used in those ways, and they feel like they're being used.

jmk: Well, if you drive through any rural community nowadays, you'll oftentimes see signs up that say, "No solar," say things about no data centers. I mean, that is not an uncommon sight, and it's really shocking because for most people, they don't really understand how having solar energy brought onto somebody's land that is their own personal land would actually be an offense to the community.

But it is in those places, and it's a hot button issue right now.

Suzanne Mettler: Oh, yeah. No, definitely. Definitely.

jmk: Yeah. I've got a question for you here, though. In terms of identity then, when they're thinking of these Democrats who are looking much more professionalized, much more college-educated, one of the things that's always on my mind is it feels like for decades, the Democrats and Republicans tried to elect leaders at the top of the ticket that would oftentimes act outside of type.

And I think of that going back to the Kennedy administration, where you have John F. Kennedy coming into the White House as president of the Democrats, supposed to be the working party, and he brings in all of these people from Harvard and all of the best experts to be in charge. Years later, you've got Reagan come in, and he seems like the uber common man as opposed to being the leader of the super wealthy people and Americans.

And even though he was very wealthy as a movie actor, he didn't seem like it. He seemed like the exact common person. And then Clinton comes in, and even though he has a kind of aw-shucks attitude, he's still a Rhodes scholar, and he's super credentialed, and he tries to bring in lots of credentialed people.

And Obama did it by far. I mean, he was probably the most qualified person when you looked at him on stage. You're like, "Okay, that guy is incredibly qualified to be able to take this position," and looked for people who were extremely qualified. Whereas George W. Bush and Donald Trump after him, people made fun of them for not being qualified enough or not being smart enough, they would oftentimes say, for the presidency.

I mean, even George W. Bush, who comes from a WASP background, a very privileged background, got described as if he didn't have the qualifications to be president. I guess what I'm saying is that it feels like as these parties were trying to position their leaders against type, that eventually people saw that as being who the parties were, as opposed to the leaders representing something that was against that type.

I mean, do you kind of see that dynamic happen? Because I think that with Obama, it's easy to focus on the racial aspect, but part of it too seemed to be the fact that he was almost too professionalized, too educated, too meritocratic, that when he started talking to people, he was like, "Hey, I know what the right decision is because I've already talked to the best people in the room, and we're going to do X, Y, Z for you."

And I think that ruffled some people the wrong way that came from less educated backgrounds, particularly in rural America, that had traditionally been Democrats. I mean, I don't want to say that the racial aspect had nothing to do with it, but I think that's oftentimes overlooked — the way that it felt so meritocratic at that moment.

Suzanne Mettler: I think that's a really insightful question, and it actually builds very nicely on this theme of elite overreach. And I think that the way the two political parties and their base was being transformed from the 1990s through the early 2000s, these things became important in a way that they weren't previously.

So I do think you're right that to a lot of rural people — I mean, it's important to say that in 2008, rural areas helped elect Barack Obama, and this was an exception in this whole long time period from the 1990s through the present, where actually Obama really did well in rural America. But then I do think that there was some portion of rural America that started to bristle and to kind of perceive this sort of eliteness from him and from the party.

And so then part of what Trevor and I did for this book, that I really loved, was interviewing county-level political party chairs, and we actually traveled around Ohio. Trevor's from Ohio, so we did the Ohio interviews together, and we were interviewing a Republican Party county chair in a kind of south central part of the state, and we were trying to ask him the kind of questions you're asking me about why in the 1990s it was voting solidly for the Democratic Party and now has shifted and votes solidly for the Republican Party.

So we're like, "What changed? What happened?" And he was so interesting. He said, "You know, people just got tired of government." And then he said, "Along comes Donald Trump, and yeah, he's done all these things." But he was like, "Why are you kowtowing down to these elite people, these Democrats? Why are you kowtowing down to them?

They're not like you." And he said, "I think that really traveled well in rural America. People connected with that." So in other words, what Trump did — and Romney before him had not done this, McCain had not done this — Trump put his finger on the pulse of that anti-elitism in the Republican base in rural places, and it worked very effectively.

And already for many years, rural people had been moving toward the Republican Party, but it became exacerbated under Trump. It's like he channeled those dynamics that were playing out.

jmk: Now, in your book, you make the case that this is mainly white rural people that are shifting towards the Republican Party. But in the most recent election, and to be fair, past few elections, we've seen people of color shifting a little bit more to the Republican Party. It feels like there's a bit of racial depolarization.

And when I talked to Lynn Vavreck about it back — a couple of years ago now, about four years ago, back in 2022, when she had written her book about the 2020 election — her explanation for that phenomenon back then was just that it's not that people are changing their views, it's that people who are conservative are aligning with Republicans and people who are liberal are aligning with Democrats, which would mean that there'd be a floor to how far the Republicans could actually go in those communities.

It would depend on how conservative they are. But my question for you is, with seeing how the 2024 election results have turned out, seeing how things have kind of shifted since then, do you feel that there is any momentum, any kind of shift that's going to be happening in the future where people of color are shifting towards the Republican Party based on their own rural identity as opposed to their racial identity?

Suzanne Mettler: Yeah, good question. So Trevor, and then a couple of other co-authors, and I kind of looked carefully at this, but it was before the 2024 election, and it was striking then to see how when you look at an individual level — so everything I've been describing so far is looking at a place level, but when you look at the individual level, the rural-urban divide is between non-Hispanic white voters, rural versus urban.

It has not occurred, at least up until that point, among people of color, whether Black rural and urban people or Latino rural and urban people. I will be curious to see what happens in the upcoming elections. It could be that what happened in 2024 was a one-off, as they say, and that people kind of move back to where they've been previously.

On the other hand, I did a bunch of interviews for the book in rural counties in Texas, some of them near the border, and these are majority Latino counties. And I would be interviewing Democratic county chairs who were older people, as county chairs tend to be, and some of them were telling me about how young Latinos in their neighborhoods were all excited about Trump, and these are folks who hadn't been involved in politics and seemed to be mobilized by Trump, and there was sort of a generational gulf in the community about it.

So I think you've got some of that dynamic that goes on. My hunch is that that might be more Trump-specific. We might not see it in the midterm.

jmk: I don't think we'll see it in the midterm, but if it's a long-term shift, like a 30-year shift, that would be different than saying, "Oh, this is going to reshape the next election cycle."

Suzanne Mettler: Right. Right. Yeah, I don't know. I would say it's to be determined where it goes from there, and it depends upon how each party responds to that.

jmk: Why is it that rural voters have more political influence, and yet they haven't been able to translate that political influence into economic prosperity or economic gains?

Suzanne Mettler: This is a great question. Another paradoxical question. So the dynamic that I've been describing to you, this rural-urban divide, is very striking in the United States because it has not happened before. What I mean is, never before in our history have all rural places across the nation been lined up in one political party.

It used to be that one party did well in some areas of the country, and the other party did well in other areas of the country. But now you've got this rural-urban split that's really nationwide. It's very, very striking. Who does that advantage? It advantages the party that benefits from it, and it advantages them a lot, for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

But it does not mean that it advantages those voters, because it's the Republican Party that's getting the advantage now. How much have they done for rural America to help reverse these trends of long-term economic decline? I don't think people are seeing it. I think they have been sustained by grievances, sustained by rural people's anger at their circumstances, which they have directed toward the Democratic Party.

But I think that if the Democratic Party would be organized in rural places and really make a credible case, I think that Democrats can win back some rural voters. But I don't think that's happening very much yet. But let me talk to you about the institutional factors. So in the United States, we have all of these electoral arrangements which have always given extra leverage to less populated places.

So like the US Senate, two senators from every state, regardless of population. So here you have California with something like 66 times as many residents as Wyoming, but they both get two votes in the US Senate, two senators. And that's replayed in all these other rural states, which collectively gives them extra clout in the Senate, and then that's important not only for policymaking, but also for judicial nominee confirmations.

And then you have justices put forward by presidents who have to win not the popular vote, but the Electoral College. So right now, we have a few members of the Supreme Court who were nominated by a president who at the time, when Trump won the first time, had only won the Electoral College vote, not the popular vote.

And then a majority of senators who confirmed those nominees came from states that represented less than half of the US population because of this disparity. But now you have justices that serve for long, long periods of time, and it's very consequential. So all of these things and more mean that this party, which now holds all these levers, has extra clout in the political system.

And so it helps that party, but whether it helps those voters is a question about whether that party really represents them, and I'm really not seeing it representing them in terms of improving their lives on things like healthcare and education and the like.

jmk: But if the incentive structure is such — politically, I mean — that each rural voter is worth more than an urban voter, why is it that Democrats hadn't put more resources into winning those voters?

Because I know that the Republicans and Democrats are kind of at a stalemate where one side wins, another side wins. We're probably going to see the House flip. But it does feel like the incentive structure of politics is to pay attention to rural voters just because of the way that the Constitution kind of set up the electoral game.

Suzanne Mettler: Okay, what you have just said is the message that I want shouted from the rooftops. I mean, this is a basic fundamental fact of American political institutions. I don't think the Democratic Party is grappling with that right now. I mean, there's a quote in the book from Senator Schumer in which he said — and this was in the summer of 2016, so it was just before Trump got elected.

And he was asked about this divide, the fact that the party seemed to be losing rural voters, and he said, "It doesn't matter." He said, "For every voter that we lose in rural Pennsylvania, we're picking up two in the suburbs of Philadelphia." But in fact, it does matter. Because of our institutions, it matters hugely.

And you earlier were talking about in the Midwest, all of these states that used to have Democratic senators. That was hugely consequential, and that's been lost. And so now you have a Senate where, when the majority is held by the Republican Party, they represent less than half of American citizens, and yet they can enact all kinds of policies on that basis.

jmk: So one of the things I notice within rural America is that it's aging much faster than the rest of the country, and part of the reason why is because somebody who owns a farm, for instance, or maybe just grows up in a small town, some of the kids end up moving away to urban parts of the country. If they end up becoming very successful, they go to college.

Even if they don't go to a place like one of the coastal cities, they might move to a place like Indianapolis, Columbus, Ohio, Cincinnati, Ohio. JD Vance is actually an example of that. When he moved out of rural Ohio and even came back to Ohio, he went to Cincinnati and Columbus. He didn't go to his original hometown.

So I guess the question that I've got is, is the sociological impact — like almost trauma — of watching the next generation and the best part of the next generation continue to leave these communities, is that part of what's having an effect on vote outcomes within these areas? I mean, does that have any impact, the fact that they're watching their kids leave?

And it's not just their kids, but the ones who are likely to be the most successful within that cohort.

Suzanne Mettler: Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. I think that that loss of population, and especially the young people, is really demoralizing, and several of the county chairs, both Democrats and Republicans, said this to me in interviews.

They said, "The young people, who go away to college, they don't come back, and why would they? There's nothing for them here." And that's really sad for people. And so what we find in the 1990s is rural areas that were losing population that moved toward Republican voting, and I think that's precisely the dynamic.

jmk: So the book is subtitled The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy. Tell me about what it is that the study of rural places has kind of taught you about the meaning and purpose of democracy and the current threats to it.

Suzanne Mettler: What I have really come to appreciate is how much in the United States, for government to work well, it requires people to build coalitions across place, and that's because of our institutional arrangements, as I was explaining a few minutes ago.

So the rural-urban divide is bad for various reasons. For one thing, it leaves rural areas subject to one-party government. You could also say it leaves urban areas subject to one-party government, and one-party government is not a good thing. You have less accountability. In urban areas of enough scale, there seems to be competition within the Democratic Party, different brands of the Democratic Party, so you've still got some real competition going on.

But in a small place with smaller population, it's often hard to even get people to run for office, so you really don't have competition, and then that can undermine accountability, which means that the way that democracy is supposed to work — we get to elect our officials, and then we hope that they will represent our interests, and if they don't, we can vote the bums out.

But that all breaks down if you don't have party competition. So that's bad for rural places. But then it's also bad for the country as a whole, nationwide, because of the dynamics I've already mentioned about how our electoral institutions mean that if one party has a lock on all the rural places, it has an extra advantage in winning elections and in governing as well, and so that's problematic.

And when you have a party that is willing to be extremist and not play by the rules of democracy, it's really dangerous. And then the third, and probably the most significant reason, is that this rural-urban divide creates a polarized politics where it feels like us versus them, and where we can think about the other party as the enemy instead of as our fellow citizens who happen to have different views on some issues than we do.

It becomes really hostile and a lot of animosity underlying it, and it's easier to do that when you have the geographic distance going on. So polarization by place, I think, can be particularly harmful for this reason. It's easier to demonize people when you don't interact with them in the grocery store.

We have many divides in the United States today, and many of them stack on top of each other in the parties, but I tend to think that this rural-urban divide is the most serious and most consequential, and that we've got to find a way to overcome it.

jmk: Well, Suzanne Mettler, thank you so much for joining me today. The book, one more time, is called Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Suzanne Mettler: Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.