Well, we are divided by place in terms of which party people support. That’s not because there’s a difference in Americans’ actual views in those two places on major issues. So then why are people in rural America electing representatives who are so different on policy to the people they used to elect? What we find is that when the rural-urban divide began to grow in the 1990s, it was economic factors that were driving it. And so you’d had economic decline that was happening starting in the 1980s, loss of family farms with agricultural consolidation, loss of jobs in extractive industries like mining and oil and the like, and then deindustrialization. It hits rural areas to an extent that really surprised me. I wouldn’t have realized there was so much industry in rural places. So that’s in the late ’90s, early 2000s. And as all of that’s happening, rural people start to feel that this party that they had long thought was there for them, they start to feel like it’s abandoned them and that it’s no longer there for them. I think it’s a factor that Bill Clinton is president during that point in time. So even though most Democrats in Congress were opposed to NAFTA and opposed to a lot of deregulation that was happening, there were just enough Democrats endorsing it and then Bill Clinton signing it into law. And so rural people moved away from —— from the Democratic Party and started supporting the Republican Party. One thing that your book really did convince me of is that if you look at the timing of different things, the political divergence and the economic divergence really do track each other. But as you say, a lot of the policies people often blame here, not just NAFTA, there were a lot of free trade policies. There was a lot of deregulation. Deregulation is a big focus of your book. They’re heavily supported by Republicans, to say nothing of taxes that are cut for rich people. And then the spending cuts fall on programs people in rural America use very heavily. Obamacare in very important ways subsidizes a lot of health care. in rural America, helps hospitals there, helps people who are uninsured there. The thing I was thinking as I was reading your book was that there is what happens, and then there is who is blamed for what happens. And where something happened that could plausibly be blamed on Democrats, you see it blamed on them. Why? Well, I think you’re putting your finger on why this is so puzzling and paradoxical. So like I said, it starts with the economic stuff. But then the second phase is the development of resentment, 2008 to 2020. Then, at that point, rural Americans are looking at the Democratic Party, and they start to think of it as having a center that is affluent people, wealthy people, people better off than themselves who are running the party and who don’t seem to understand them or their communities, but they’re creating policies that they’re foisting upon them in all sorts of different areas, and they resent it. So that’s when grievance begins to grow. So there’s this sense of anger, and it has become channeled at the Democratic Party, even though that is in many ways unfair. But I think it is true now that much of the Democratic Party, because it’s become so distant from rural voters, doesn’t understand their situation and their communities.
Opinion | How the Democratic Party Lost Rural Voters
