(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Rural America Did not Push Donald Trump to Victory in 2024 [1]
['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2024-11-13 10:58:00+00:00
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
There is a predictable narrative that has built up over the last decade about the geographic alignment of politics: cities vote for Democrats, small towns vote for Republicans.
Take the 2016 presidential election as an example. Though Donald Trump lost the popular vote, he gained Electoral College – and presidential – victory by a tiny overall margin. He won in rural areas with a two to one margin of victory, according to a Daily Yonder analysis, which propelled the rural America equals Trump country perception. While metropolitan areas showed up big for Hillary Clinton that year, it wasn’t enough to push her over the edge in the Electoral College.
This led to a flurry of liberal, urban resentment toward rural America. In a blistering 2023 commentary, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman complained that urban America is footing the bill for rural communities, who continue to vote against their own interests, the “what’s-the-matter-with-Kansas” argument we’ve heard for two decades.
Other commentators piled onto the rural complaints: The Electoral College, this constitutional structure for counting votes in a presidential election, seemed to benefit rural America more than urban, they said (this is false. The Electoral College benefits small states – ones with smaller populations, which is not synonymous with rurality – more than high population states).
Four years later, this urban resentment was assuaged by Joe Biden’s victory, which was driven by record voter turnout. Large cities in particular were credited with this, cementing what was supposed to be a dependable voter turnout for Democrats in urban areas.
Until now.
For the first time in three elections, Trump won the popular vote. But his overall performance between 2020 and 2024 was marginal – this year, he got about 75 million votes, compared to 74.2 million votes in 2020.
In 2020, the then Democratic Party candidate, Biden, got about 81.2 million votes. In 2024, Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, got 71.8 million votes.
In the seven swing states, Harris got 605,000 fewer votes than Biden did. All but 100,000 of those votes came from the core counties of major metropolitan areas, according to a Daily Yonder analysis.
This data speaks for itself: Trump won because Democratic turnout in the core counties of major cities crumbled. Yet the urban resentment toward rural America is back.
On election night, Twitter was abuzz with anger at rural America for reddening the electoral map (I’ll spare you the mean rural stereotypes I saw circulating). Last week, the Post and Courier published an article “Rural America sent Trump back to the White House,” arguing that Trump’s appeal to rural communities led him to victory. No mention of the declining Democratic vote in cities.
“How did I let y’all convince me that rural Pennsylvania would pick the Jamaican Indian lady?” Saturday Night Live comedian Michael Che asked during the show’s weekend update. No mention of the weakened Democratic turnout in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
All this to say, the Democratic Party continually tries to make up its lack of popularity outside the core counties of major and medium-sized metropolitan areas by running up the margins in the nation’s largest cities. Sometimes that strategy has worked, like it did in 2020. And sometimes it hasn’t, like this year.
But whatever the result, rural America somehow gets the blame for Democrats’ failure to reach the very people they say are their base. And when the strategy does work, the margins of the victory are so slim, they create the political loggerhead that has defined the last decade or more of American governance.
There’s a lot of work to be done for how people understand rural America’s voting patterns. Essential to this work is emphasizing that whatever the reason Harris lost this election, it has far less to do with rural voter turnout than it does a failed strategy by the Democratic Party.
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/rural-america-did-not-push-donald-trump-to-victory-in-2024/2024/11/13/
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
