The Power of the Rural Vote
If the pattern from 2016, 2018 and 2020 holds, this year’s midterms are likely to provide more evidence that the rural-urban divide is one of the most salient schisms in American politics. Rural areas now vote solidly Republican, while cities are Democratic strongholds.
Why is the rural vote so important? Rural America holds about 14 percent of the country’s population and, in general, its population shrank from 2010 to 2020, while urban centers grew. (During the pandemic, some of the largest cities in the U.S. experienced population loss, but the people who left tended to move to suburbs, exurbs and other metropolitan areas and not rural areas. There’s no indication that the pandemic reversed longer-term migration trends.) While many rural counties are diverse or diversifying, rural America is whiter than the country as a whole. Rural residents have lower levels of educational attainment, which explains some overlap between the rural-urban divide and the educational divide.
But that doesn’t mean rural America is losing its political power. In FiveThirtyEight’s urbanization index, which was inspired by the version from Bloomberg’s CityLab and takes into account population density and the geographic consistency of a region, 139 congressional districts are classified as Mostly Rural or Rural-Exurban. By comparison, only 80 congressional districts fall into the two densest categories, Dense Urban and Urban-Suburban. This means that rural districts punch above their weight when it comes to their representation in Congress. Additionally, some states are more rural than others but have the same representation in the Senate, giving them equal representation with much more populous, more urban states.
Suburban and exurban seats are the most politically competitive
Congressional districts by urbanization index grouping, with each grouping’s average share of the population in rural, exurban, suburban and urban census tracts and the districts’ average partisan lean according to FiveThirtyEight’s metric
| Grouping | Districts | Rural | Exurban | Suburban | Urban | Lean |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dense Urban | 36 | 0% | 1% | 3% | 97% | D+49 |
| Urban-Suburban | 44 | 1 | 2 | 19 | 79 | D+34 |
| Dense Suburban | 105 | 3 | 16 | 50 | 30 | D+14 |
| Suburban-Exurban | 111 | 22 | 35 | 37 | 6 | R+7 |
| Rural-Exurban | 89 | 47 | 35 | 18 | 0 | R+25 |
| Mostly Rural | 50 | 72 | 25 | 3 | 0 | R+30 |
Rural districts have a lot of say in national and statewide politics, which is part of why Democrats are always trying to win some of those voters while also turning out their urban base. (Although they don’t hold quite as much sway as the swingy suburbs.) Rural voters remain skeptical that Democrats are addressing their concerns, and a majority remain solidly Republican. It’s something to remember as we watch results come in from rural states and districts.