Urban–rural polarization grows in Virginia election
Rural Virginia has trended Republican in the past two decades, and the statewide election this week underlined its political divergence from the state’s metropolitan areas, said the Daily Yonder.
Will rural Virginia decide the governor’s election today?
A year ago, rural America voted two-to-one to put Donald Trump in the White House. Rural Virginians are certain to vote heavily for Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie in today’s election, and “the margin ... may affect the statewide result,” says the Daily Yonder.
Bustos to run ‘heartland engagement’ as House Dems work for majority
House Democrats are targeting often-conservative rural districts in their drive to gain control of the House in the 2018 midterms, and the DCCC has named Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois to lead the effort.
Weeks from departure, Obama team revamps fair-play rules in livestock marketing
As quickly as the Obama administration unveiled a package of rules meant to make it easier for livestock producers to prove unfair treatment at the hands of processors and packers, the largest cattle and hog groups called on the incoming Trump administration to blunt their impact.
Like U.S., rural voters are a force for anti-establishment populism in Europe
They may be leftists or right-wing, but anti-establishment populists in Europe "share common ground in their core constituencies, rural voters," says the New York Times. "Just as Donald J. Trump rolled up a big rural vote in his unexpected presidential victory, Europe’s populists are rising by tapping into discontent in the countryside and exploiting rural resentments against urban residents viewed as elites."
Rural Democrats aim to recover from electoral losses
Vickie Rock, a member of the Democratic state central committee in Nevada, describes Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election this way: "The Democratic Party ceded rural America to the Republicans quite some time ago," reports Roll Call. It says rural Democrats "are now hatching plans to un-do the damage, convinced that a handful of simple steps would go a long way toward winning votes."
Local landslides rule in a narrowly decided national election
The presidential election was decided by a fraction of a percentage point, but most voters – slightly more than 60 percent – live in politically lopsided counties where President-elect Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton carried the vote by at least 20 points, says the Daily Yonder. "Even bigger is the percentage of rural voters who lived in a landslide county," amounting to three out of every four.
California’s rural vote is complicated
California went to Clinton, but rural areas were split, says the Sacramento Bee, with many counties in the white, rural north going to Trump. “Trump beat Clinton in 25 California counties, mostly in the Central Valley and the mountains of Northern California, places that long have been bastions of conservatism,” says the Bee.
Rural and urban vote becomes more polarized
The split in Republican and Democratic support in U.S. cities versus rural America widened as Donald Trump won the presidency, says the Daily Yonder. Trump garnered 66 percent of the vote in rural counties, up by five points from fellow Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, while Democrat Hillary Clinton got a much smaller share of the rural vote, 29 percent, than President Obama's 38 percent in his 2012 re-election.