Mississippi in 2010. Photograph taken by the author. All rights reserved. This is the fourth article in a series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.
‘The United States is coming to resemble two separate countries, one rural and one urban,’ political analyst David Graham proclaimed in a 2017 article in The Atlantic. Viewing the map of 2016 presidential election results, it is hard to avoid a similar conclusion. Donald Trump carried over 2,500 largely rural counties and Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, less than 500 mostly urban ones.
The ‘two countries’ thesis echoes scholars of uneven development going back decades, from Michael Lipton’s study of ‘urban bias’ to Cynthia Duncan’s Worlds Apart and – more recently – Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment. Too often now, though, ‘rural’ has become a synecdoche for ‘Trump voters,’ ‘working-class’ or ‘white’ – misrepresentations that Samantha Bee demolished in hilarious video interviews with small-town minority voters. In fact, Trump voters had a higher median income than Clinton voters, reflecting backing among affluent whites without university degrees, many of them business owners in suburban counties. In fact, Trump voters had a higher median income than Clinton voters.
