From the Iowa caucuses to today, Hillary Clinton has fared best in urban areas, while traditionally conservative rural Americans have preferred Donald Trump; a recent Washington Post poll found a 20-point gap between the presidential candidates in rural and urban areas. NPR tried to tease apart the reasons for the split.
Rural Americans tend to be older and have lower income that city dwellers, who are younger and more likely to have a college degree. Some of that is due to the fact that college education has become more common since the 1960s, and because the urban population is growing while rural areas tend to have stable populations. Older people also are more likely to be conservatives, according to a political rule of thumb.
Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, says there’s also a common feeling in rural areas that their communities get short shrift compared to the cities, said NPR. Cramer labels these intense, negative feelings as “rural resentment” and it has a variety of sources, rather than being as easy to parse as economic anxiety or populism.
“The resources, the people, the respect seem to be going somewhere else, or to other types of people, and here comes someone who says, ‘You’re right, you’re not getting your fair share,'” Cramer told NPR, referring to Trump,
Earlier this month, Cramer told public broadcaster WUWM-FM in Milwaukee that rural resentment is targeted mainly toward cities, government, and public employees, including school teachers, who seem to have better pay packages that their neighbors in small towns and rural areas. “It comes from this sense that rural areas are going through enormous change and small towns in Wisconsin, like many places around the country, are in many ways disappearing,” said Cramer. The attitude existed before the economic recession of 2008-09 and the slow economic recovery.
The long-term social and economic change in rural areas combined to give politicians an easy target — the government — as enemy. “She says the best roadmap she knows of to remove decrease this resentment is for people to talk and listen to each other,” said WUWM-FM.