The urban/rural political divide

The urban/rural political divide

Policies dating to the 1930s helped shape the conflict that defines today's politics

By Guian McKee

Read the full article at The Washington Post

The 2020 election revealed a stark divide between rural and small-town voters—who overwhelmingly supported Republicans—and those in cities and suburbs, who favored Democrats. In 2020, this growing pattern enabled Joe Biden to capture formerly safe Republican states like Georgia and Arizona, while President Donald Trump targeted longtime Democratic-bastion Minnesota.

This “geographic sort” between metro and non-metro areas has also played out across issues including variations in coronavirus vaccination rates, ongoing legislative redistricting fights and people’s very identities, with many extolling the virtues of hailing from a city or the country, and feeling alien from those living in the opposite circumstance.

Today’s blue/red divide then plays out not between regions—as we saw in the famous 2000 electoral map, which introduced the concept of such divisions and pitted red states vs. blue ones—but between metropolitan and rural areas within states.

Read the full article at The Washington Post

Guian McKee headshot

Guian McKee

Guian McKee is an associate professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center. He received a Ph.D. in American history at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2002, and is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (University of Chicago Press, 2008). At the Miller Center, McKee works extensively with the Presidential Recordings Program. His research focuses on how federal policy, especially in the executive branch, plays out at the local level in American communities. He has written extensively about urban policy, including a book that explored the connections between local and federal economic, urban renewal, and antipoverty policies in Philadelphia between the 1950s and the 1980s.