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Q&A: Rural Voter Behavior Is Driven By Economics, Not Just ‘Culture Wars’ [1]
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Date: 2024-01-12
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Keith Orejel is a historian of rural 20th-century political economy who teaches at Wilmington College in Ohio. Below, we discuss the industrialization of the American countryside, the geographic diversity of culture wars, and “Bidenomics” in rural places.
If you’re a close reader of the Yonder, you might notice that there’s significant overlap between this conversation and a book review on The Rural Voter that we published in early January. That’s because I researched my questions for Orejel a couple months ago, and by the time I sat down to write the review, his analysis had become really important to my understanding of recent political trends.
If you haven’t already read that review, check it out for more discussion on rural politics.
Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Way back in 2017 you wrote a piece for Dissent arguing against the notion that, in rural areas, cultural issues are more politically salient than economic ones. You wrote that that misconception persists in part because people in cities don’t understand how industrial rural areas are. Can you elaborate on that idea a little? How do you think the idea that rural people aren’t sensitive to economic trends got so popular?
Keith Orejel: To some extent there have always been stereotypes about the economic ignorance of country folk, one need only point to Karl Marx’s comment about the “idiocy of rural life” to see that many of these tropes have been around for a long time. In our current moment, however, I think the notion that culture wars trumps economic interests really traces back to Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter with Kansas?
Frank argued that the Republican Party had conquered the American heartland by convincing voters to forsake their economic interests in return for GOP support on religious and cultural wedge issues, such as abortion and gun rights. Ever since, it has been an article of faith among many pundits and scholars that white rural voters are motivated primarily by “guns and bibles” much more so than pocketbook politics. I think the central flaw with Frank’s argument was that he started with the presumption that rural Americans had to be voting “against their economic interests” because they were supporting corporate friendly, pro-business politicians who were not meeting the needs of impoverished communities. But Frank made this assumption without examining the nature of the modern rural economy or how white rural voters understood their own interests.
“Rural America’s long-term support for pro-business Republicans and corporate friendly Democrats, as well as their more recent embrace of Donald Trump, owes a great deal to the economic transformation of the countryside since World War II.”
In my 2017 Dissent article, I tried to show that rural America’s long-term support for pro-business Republicans and corporate-friendly Democrats, as well as their more recent embrace of Donald Trump, owes a great deal to the economic transformation of the countryside since World War II. I argued that rural America’s pursuit of industrial development gave rise to a pro-business political movement led by small-town boosters. These local elites convinced many in the countryside that business-friendly measures — low taxes, weak unions, generous subsidies, and infrastructural modernization — would serve rural economic interests by procuring factories to replace disappearing agricultural employment. By the 1970s this had become such an article of faith in the countryside that both parties embraced this centrist pro-business approach to win over rural voters. Likewise, the collapse of rural manufacturing in the first decade of the 21st century produced widespread anger in rural America towards the forces of globalization and free trade, leading many to embrace Trump’s economic nationalism and industrial protectionism.
DY: If you were to make any addendums to that piece now, in late 2023, what would they be? How have popular ideas about the rural voter changed since the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election?
KO: To be frank I’m not entirely sure that popular ideas about rural voters have witnessed a big shift since 2016. In fact, I think that if anything Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and the outlandish statements made by MAGA followers have hardened conceptions that rural voters are driven by similarly base sentiments. In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election there was a robust debate about the motivations of rural voters, largely whether these patterns resulted from white working class “economic anxiety” or a general cultural backlash against immigration, abortion rights, and other threats to white Christian nationalism. Although there was some support for economic interpretations, material causes were largely dismissed in favor of some combination of cultural grievance, racial resentment, and religious prejudice. Among scholars, I would say the dominant viewpoint is that rural voters are largely driven by “resentment,” “rage,” and other immaterial impulses.
Now you would have to be a fool to deny the existence of these forces in American politics. But I have yet to see a really satisfying explanation for why these elements are more prevalent in the countryside or what exactly triggered such an intensification in rural cultural grievances over the past ten to fifteen years. This is why, at least for me, economic interpretations are more satisfying. In the last two decades, as we have seen major shifts in rural voting patterns, what has really distinguished the countryside from urban and suburban places is divergent economic fortunes. While metropolitan areas have thrived and prospered in recent years, rural areas have languished and stagnated.
DY: How did rural areas become so industrial? Can you elaborate on the historical processes that brought factories to former farmlands in the postwar period?
KO: Over the course of the 20th century, rural and small-town America experienced a prolonged economic crisis caused by the tremendous loss of jobs in agriculture and other extractive industries. As farming consolidated into fewer, larger units, millions of people left agriculture, producing massive rural outmigration and depopulation. With fewer people, local businesses, churches, schools, and other institutions struggled to survive. In response, small-town business leaders began to pursue industrial development starting in the 1940s and 50s, hoping to secure factories to replace disappearing farm jobs. Though boosters experienced only modest success initially, they laid the groundwork for later gains by modernizing infrastructure — paving roads, updating water systems, improving electrical networks, and embracing business subsidies — development bonds, industrial parks, tax breaks. Fueled by a healthy amount of federal aid, rural areas experienced a major industrial boom starting in the 1960s, with manufacturing growth far outpacing that of metropolitan areas. By the 1970s, rural America had achieved a post-agricultural economy, where manufacturing employment was more than twice that of farming. Although the boom tapered off in the 1980s, rural industrialization enabled the formation of a stable, if slow, growth economy built around manufacturing and services. This post-agricultural period persisted till the beginning of the 21st century when rural manufacturing precipitously declined.
DY: Do you think it would be fair to say that while white, right-leaning people everywhere are motivated by culture wars, white, right-leaning people in rural areas are particularly sensitive to economic issues because their towns never recovered from the Great Recession?
KO: Culture wars are a national phenomenon, you can find these battles being waged in rural, urban, and suburban communities. But like I said before, I am skeptical of interpretations positing that rural Americans are uniquely susceptible to cultural grievances because these interpretations often lack a causal mechanism. Unless someone can give an adequate explanation for why rural people are more sensitive to these issues than urban or suburban voters or what exactly changed in recent years that led rural voters to be so much more receptive to cultural grievances than before, I am going to be suspicious of these interpretations. An archival image from research for Orejel’s dissertation, “Factories in the Fallows: The Political Economy of America’s Rural Heartland, 1945-1980.” (Photo provided)
My skepticism arises in part because these frameworks often resort to essentializing caricatures that suggest rural voters are somehow innate culture warriors, like it is encoded in their DNA.
“I think many rural voters were drawn to Donald Trump because he preached a brand of economic nationalism centered on tariffs and other protectionist measures that had been almost totally absent from political discourse given the neoliberal bipartisan consensus that had been dominant since the 1990s.”
In contrast, there appears to be a clear explanatory relationship between recent political shifts and rural economic trends. In the first decade of the 2oth century, rural America experienced a dramatic economic decline, most notably in the industrial sector with nonmetropolitan areas losing 35% of manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. Owing in large part to the destruction of the rural industrial base, the countryside never fully recovered from the Great Recession of 2008. While metropolitan areas had completely rebounded within a few years, there were still fewer total jobs in nonmetropolitan America in 2019 than there had been before the crash in 2007. The 2010s, which witnessed rural America’s sharp turn to the right politically, was a disastrous decade for the rural economy, with widespread job loss and outmigration. Nonmetropolitan America lost total population between 2010 and 2020. Many rural Americans blamed this economic blight on globalization and free trade, believing that the relocation of industrial plants to China and other foreign countries was the primary cause of community deterioration. I think many rural voters were drawn to Donald Trump because he preached a brand of economic nationalism centered on tariffs and other protectionist measures that had been almost totally absent from political discourse given the neoliberal bipartisan consensus that had been dominant since the 1990s. Now obviously culture wars are a part of this story as well, but I think people are often too dismissive of rural economic blight as a catalyst in the countryside’s rightward turn towards nationalist politics.
DY: What do you think about the Biden Administration’s attempts at rural development? Do you think they’ll make an impact on the voting patterns of sparsely populated places? And, if not, does that say anything important about these economic theories of the case?
KO: I give Biden a lot of credit for his “Investing in Rural America” campaign and acknowledging rural economic struggles. I think often there is a tendency on the part of some Democrats to dismiss rural voters as a lost cause in favor of the metropolitan electorate. I think a telling example is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s famous quote on the eve of the 2016 election loss that, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
If Biden’s appeal to rural voters will work is unclear. I think that many of his policies have been good for the rural economy, especially the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That said, the hard thing about infrastructure is it often takes longer than one election cycle for people on the ground to feel the impact. This gets us to the central issue of whether or not the rural economy has experienced significant improvements under Biden. Here I think the evidence is mixed. In my opinion, the best glimpse we get into the state of the rural economy is provided by the USDA in their yearly report “Rural America at a Glance.” There were some glimmers of hope in the 2023 edition. The report showed that after losses in the 2010s, the nonmetropolitan population experienced growth again from 2020-2022 (although at the paltry rate of 0.25%). Rural poverty has also declined in recent years. The rural economy has recovered well from the pandemic, with nonmetropolitan unemployment dropping to just 3.8% by 2022 and “total nonmetropolitan employment…returning to 99 percent of pre-pandemic employment levels” by 2023. One of the biggest bright spots in rural employment was in clean energy, which has seen significant job growth.
The problem though is that even with many of these positive indicators rural areas have not kept pace with metropolitan places. The metropolitan population still grew at a faster rate under Biden than the nonmetropolitan population. Likewise, while nonmetropolitan employment was still slightly (99%) under its pre-pandemic levels, metropolitan areas had fully recovered and then some, totaling roughly (103%). In many crucial “Blue Wall” swing states, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, total nonmetropolitan employment was still lower in 2022 than it had been prior to the pandemic. Rural poverty has gone down in recent years, but “the declines have been modest” and housing insecurity remains a problem.
I agree with the report’s conclusion that there have been “positive developments in the rural economy,” especially when compared to the doldrums of the 2010s. But whether Biden is going to receive much credit from rural voters for modest economic results is unclear. Given that the rural-urban economic divide has worsened due to the uneven recovery from the pandemic, it is entirely possible many rural voters feel that even with noticeable improvements they are being further “left behind.”
I doubt this mixed picture will settle the economic interests versus culture wars debate no matter what the outcome in the 2024 presidential election. If Biden does even worse with white rural voters in 2024 than he did in 2020, it can be seen as proof that his economic achievements meant little and cultural passions rule the day. Or, it could be argued that rural America’s paltry economic gains were the reason he lost ground with voters.
Ultimately, I think this is an important debate and I’m glad people are engaged regardless of what side you take. At least it means they are talking and thinking about rural America.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Get Path Finders By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
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