Daily Yonder analysis: rural-urban political divide driven by big city Dems, not rural Republicans - Entrepreneur Generations

The chart shows the percent of the two-party vote Republicans and Democrats received in congressional (red and blue lines) and presidential elections (red and blue bars) from 2006 to 2018. (Daily Yonder charts)

Navel-gazing news stories about the rural-urban divide are common, especially in recent years. The reporters who write these stories often seem to believe that rural communities caused this rift by becoming more conservative, but "when we look at the numbers, however, we see it’s not just a rural phenomenon. The gap is growing in the other direction in major urban areas. Since 2006, at least, the nation’s largest central cities have grown more Democratic while rural areas got more Republican, Bill Bishop and Tim Marema report for The Daily Yonder.

Bishop and Marema analyzed elections results by party and population in all House and presidential races from 2006 through 2018. Votes for Republicans and Democrats were all but even in 2006 except in the largest cities, which voted far more for Democrats. "Over the next six election cycles, Democrats continued to gain in these central city counties. Republicans gained majorities in smaller cities or in suburbs of medium sized cities and in rural counties. The two parties battled in the suburbs of the major metropolitan areas, where over 29 percent of voters lived in 2018," Bishop and Marema report. "The political division wasn’t rural versus urban. It was big city Democrats versus everybody else."

In the 2018 House races, "the gap between rural and urban areas shrank a tiny bit even as both geographies got considerably more Democratic," Bishop and Marema report. "In other words, 2018 didn’t see an increase in the rural/urban gap. This election saw a Democratic comeback in rural areas and an increasing concentration of Democratic voters in central cities."

President Trump, if not the Republican Party in general, is losing some ground in rural America. In a Washington Post poll earlier this year, rural voters' approval of Trump's job performance dropped by 38 points to a net plus-eight. It's unclear whether the Democratic Party will take advantage of this trend to make inroads with rural voters though. Most Democratic voters are suburban and urban, and increasingly so. If it's a numbers game, "the Democratic Party has less reason to consider voters outside the nation’s largest cities because fewer Democrats live there," Bishop and Marema write.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2u4VLc3 Daily Yonder analysis: rural-urban political divide driven by big city Dems, not rural Republicans - Entrepreneur Generations

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