Why do white rural voters vote for Republicans?

Editor's note: The following first appeared in Everything Is Horrible, Noah’s newsletter.

Last week, Politicoran one of its periodic “Shame on you, Democrats! Shame!” articles about rural voters. The thesis of these pieces is always that Democrats are an out-of-touch urban liberal elite, and that they therefore don’t know how to talk to authentic heartland rural voters, who are (implicitly or explicitly) the true repository of authentic Americanness. Democrats are therefore failing America and deserve to be crushed by the disproportionate power of those rural votes.

There are a range of problems with these criticisms. The biggest one though is this: Democrats struggle not with rural voters in general, but with white rural voters in particular. And white rural voters do not vote for the GOP because they are rural. They vote for the GOP because they are white.

Dangerously divided by race, not region

The definitive (if rarely cited) book on the importance of racial division is Zoltan Hajnal’s 2019 study, Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in America. Hajnal’s innovative approach is to focus less on who votes for which party, and more on who wins in American elections. Who gets what they want out of democracy, and whose candidates triumph — white voters? Black voters? Rich voters? Working-class voters? Rural or city dwellers?

What Hajnal finds is that race is the single most important factor in determining whether a voter wins elections — more important than class, more important than religion, more important than gender, and, yes, more important than urban/rural residence. “A key aspect of this story is not just that race matters,” he writes, “but also that it eclipses the other important dividing lines in American society" (italics in original).

After looking at national, state and local elections in the 21st century, Hajnal concludes that “African Americans, more than any other racial or demographic group, are consistently more likely to end up as political losers. Blacks are the only group that loses more than half of the time across most of the contests I examine.” He also concludes that Black people lose more “on policy, they lose more consistently across all policy areas, and they lose more consistently over time.”

In contrast, Hajnal found that rural voters did as well as urban voters in electoral contests and outcomes. “I could find no connection between region and electoral victory,” he says. In terms of electoral divisions and vote preferences, “after I control for race and other demographic factors, the urban-rural gap largely fades away.”

Contrary to accepted wisdom, rural voters are not ignored or disadvantaged by electoral politics; on the contrary, in electoral politics, they generally get the candidates in office they prefer about as often as urban and suburban dwellers. Nor is it true that rural voters are especially antipathetic to the Democratic Party, since urban/rural voting differences mostly vanish when you control for factors like religion, income and, especially, race.

Of course, rural communities do have distinctive identities, distinctive concerns and distinctive challenges. Hajnal is not arguing that rural and urban communities are exactly the same. He’s simply pointing out that these differences do not meaningfully drive votes because our electoral system is driven first, last, and foremost, by divisions around race.

It doesn’t, then, really matter what Democrats say to rural voters. It doesn’t matter even that Democratic policies (like support for rural broadband and rural hospitals) are clearly better than Republican policies. The key problem for Democrats is that white rural voters — especially white rural Christian evangelical voters — vastly outnumber POC rural voters. And white voters vote for the GOP because the GOP is a white-identity party that promises to elevate white people at the expense of everyone else.

The mythology of the white rural working class

These dynamics are not really that complicated and they aren’t especially unclear. Political pundits are aware that Democrats do very well with Black rural voters in South Carolina. They also know that rural Native Americans vote strongly for Democrats — Biden won rural Menominee county, home to the Menominee Indian Reservation, in 2020 82.2/17.6.

Yet people talk as if Democrats have some constitutional difficulty winning rural voters, even though it’s clear that Democrats just have trouble winning white rural voters. And they lose with white rural voters because (again) the GOP is the party of white supremacy, and white supremacy appeals disproportionately, and powerfully, to white people.

The confusion here is linked (not surprisingly) to racist imagination and racist myths. White American politicians and pundits have seen white rural voters as special at least going back to slaver Thomas Jefferson, who fetishized white small farmers as the backbone of American virtue, even as he presided over a sprawling agricultural prison camp that ran on enslaved Black labor.

White rural people are often viewed as the true, authentic spirit of America, precisely because they inhabit a (supposedly) homogenous (supposedly) organic society, without urban tensions (ie, Black people) or urban vice (ie, LGBT people.) The history of white people driving native people and Black people from the land via violence, dispossession and racistterror is erased, and the disproportionate whiteness of rural areas is treated as an imprimatur of purity, rather than as the result of a deliberately executed policy of racism.

This isn’t to say that rural people are less virtuous or less racist than white urbanites. White people in cities often tried to drive out Black people too; they were stymied by the difficulty of evicting larger urban populations, not by some sort of essential goodwill.

Hajnal’s work does suggest, though, that obsessive demands that Democrats change to accommodate (white) rural voters reenacts the violent erasure of rural people of color even as it validates and cheers on the white supremacy of the Republican Party.

Democrats should continue to embrace, and even double down on, policies to help all rural people; they should speak about rural voters respectfully, and in full knowledge that not all of those voters are white. But they should also realize that they struggle in rural areas in large part because, compared to Republicans, they refuse to use racist dog whistles, and refuse to promise a return to Jeffersonian racist subjection.

White supremacy is popular among white rural voters, as it is with many white urban voters. That is the problem for Democrats in rural areas, and it is not a problem they should fix by becoming more like the GOP.