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Modest Changes in Rural Voting Could Have Significant Implications in 2024 [1]

['About The Authors']

Date: 2024-10-22 11:40:57-04:00

Key Findings Rural voters represent just 14 percent of the electorate, but their votes proved decisive in battleground states in 2020. Rural voters represent just 14 percent of the electorate, but their votes proved decisive in battleground states in 2020. Incremental changes in rural voting patterns could make a difference in the 2024 election. Incremental changes in rural voting patterns could make a difference in the 2024 election.

Kamala Harris’s choice of the Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate revealed a battleground-state strategy: to do a bit better in rural America. “If you can do a couple points better, five points better, in those rural areas, and you multiply that by all the rural areas in those states, it’s a big deal,” said a Harris adviser (Siders 2024). Rural America’s 46 million inhabitants reside on 68 percent of the land area of the United States. They represented just 14 percent of the electorate in 2020, but their votes proved decisive in battleground states, where victory or defeat depended on a few thousands votes. In this brief, we estimate how much a slightly better (or worse) performance by the candidates in the rural areas of seven battleground states could influence the outcome of the 2024 election.

Voting Along the Rural-Urban Continuum

Here we focus on partisan polarization along the rural-urban continuum and on the significant decline in support of Democratic Presidential candidates in seven battleground states. Of particular interest is the performance of Democratic candidates in the four groups of counties at the rural end of the continuum. These range from rural counties just beyond the outer edge of metropolitan areas that contain a town of between 10,000 and 50,000 (Adjacent Large Town) to remote rural counties that neither adjoin a metropolitan area nor have a town of more than 10,000 (Not-Adjacent Other).

In 2008, Barack Obama received 45 percent of the votes in these four rural continuum categories in the seven battleground states (Figure 1). Though this was not a rural majority, it was enough to prevent his Republican opponents from tallying a large enough advantage in rural areas to offset Obama’s greater support in the heavily populated urban cores of metropolitan areas. This all changed in 2016, when Donald Trump far exceeded his predecessors’ performance in rural America, gaining nearly 66 percent of the rural vote in these battleground states. Four years later, Joe Biden modestly increased Democratic performance at the rural end of the continuum, though his support still lagged far below Obama’s. The modest increase in rural support contributed to Biden winning the White House by narrow margins in battleground states, but it did little to reduce the dependence of Democrats on the urban end of the continuum.

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[1] Url: https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/modest-changes-rural-voting-could-have-significant-implications-2024

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