Surely it wasn’t because such stories couldn’t be found. Prolonged school closures disproportionately damaged urban students — precisely those whose families turned out heavily for Democrats. Their ambivalence on crime and policing left the working-class and minority neighborhoods of blue cities to bear the brunt of rising disorder.

And surely it’s not because pundits are reluctant to frame stories in terms of voters being hurt by the very politicians they supported. Quite the opposite. When it comes to rural voters, this genre of storytelling is practically its own subfield. Timothy Noah’s recent column in The New Republic is the latest entrant, warning that Trump’s new tariff proposals will again “badly screw” the very voters who support him. Jennifer Rubin repeatedly paints Trump’s base as a self-immolating mass of misinformed populists. And it is nothing new; this narrative was everywhere during Trump’s first term: “Trump Country Could Be Hit Hardest by His Policies”; “Trump’s Trade War Hurts the People Who Elected Him.” 

And yet, this peculiar framing — a mix of self-righteous indignation and condescending schadenfreude — seems reserved exclusively for Trump-supporting rural voters. Why?

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The truth about 'white rural rage'

By Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea

It’s not that these pundits don’t understand policy; they do. And I agree with them: Trump’s economic agenda — tariffs, trade wars, the fantasy of decoupling — is bad policy. I believe, without hesitation, that free trade and open markets have lifted more people out of poverty worldwide than any government program ever has.

But I also know this: those same policies have drained jobs, shuttered factories, and undercut the economic backbone of the rural communities I study and live in. That is why a majority of rural voters favor tariffs on China. According to the 2020 CES, 74% of rural voters supported tariffs on goods from China; 66% supported 25% tariffs on steel, excluding Mexico and Canada. Among Trump-supporting rural voters, the number was higher still: a full 91% of rural-Trump voters supported tariffs on China, along with 90% of the millions more urban and suburban Trump voters too. 

If Biden or Obama were that responsive to their constituents (a majority of whom also support tariffs), they would be celebrated for their commitment to democracy and the empowerment of the people. Instead, it’s easier to just overlook the fact that 66% of all voters in households making less than $60,000 per year want to abandon the liberal consensus, hike tariffs on trade partners, and try something new. 

You can disagree with these opinions, but to disregard them as “the dumbest idea yet” or that they’d “please voters and damage the economy at the same time,” is just reflexive emoting, passing for analysis in a media ecosystem more comfortable with sneering at discontent than confronting deep, structural inequality. It’s the kind of armchair clarity that comes easy when you’re writing from the winning side of globalization. And in the name of opposing Trump, many progressives have done a full about-face — defending the very economic order they once claimed was rigged. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, only Trump could make “neoliberalism” great again. 

Personally, as one opposed to tariffs and committed to rural opportunity, I’d welcome a serious reckoning with trade policy — but not one that starts by mocking the people who’ve borne its costs. We could start by exploring all the ways in which free trade hasn’t actually been free — not just for its upwardly redistributive effects (which many, including Noah, lament), but its spatial ones as well.

We could start by asking whether free trade was ever that “free”  — not just for its upward tilt (as Noah notes elsewhere in his work), but for the way it hit some places far harder than others. American policymakers didn’t just fail to shield domestic workers from unfair practices like Chinese steel dumping or currency manipulation, they actively chose not to in the name of market integration. They embedded investor protections in agreements like NAFTA and the TPP, while stripping out any meaningful enforcement for labor standards in overseas territories, while subjecting American producers to a labyrinth of growing regulations. It created tax incentives that rewarded offshoring, kept the subsidies flowing as agribusiness consolidated, and told displaced workers to learn to code. 

If that’s “free” trade, it was free only for the powerful. Everyone else paid full price. So maybe the story isn’t that rural voters want to blow up the system — but that it took them this long. 

We could continue the story — that it wasn’t just theory that failed rural America. It was the implementation, the politics, the choices — choices with a blue and red hue, but now which clearly benefit the core constituencies of the modern “Left”. 

And yes, Trump and DOGE threaten more than just higher prices; the unraveling of the rural safety net — that patchwork of programs and services that, while frayed, still holds many communities together. The closure of local USDA offices, the loss of community health centers, and the potential reduction in educational programs like Head Start have tangible effects on daily life. 

But if your experience of government is the extension agent who still has their job when your farm shut down; or your experience is that you couldn’t, in fact, keep your doctor after the hospital closed in the wake of the Affordable Care Act; or that the school bus route has got longer because two towns had to consolidate classrooms — then it’s not crazy to think the government isn’t working. When every program feels designed for someone else, when the “investments” go to tech corridors and consulting firms, and when your own town hears more from regulators than from repair crews, it makes perfect sense to choose disruption — even knowing, like most of my neighbors do, that it carries substantial risk.

But I doubt that is really what Sargent and others want. Instead, there is a certain glibness in the way they think of rural suffering. But one can believe that rural voters may end up economically worse off under another Trump presidency (I think that’s the likely outcome) and also hope the dividends flowing to New York investors in Cargill, JBS, or Tyson take a bigger hit than the family farms already scraping by. If someone has to feel the pain, let it dent the quarterly earnings call of Dollar General’s board — not the paycheck of a cashier. But even if they don’t, let’s be honest: the damage was done long before Trump came along. Rural voters aren’t choosing tariffs because they think it will make them rich — they’re choosing them because they’ve already lost faith in a system that keeps delivering gains to everyone else. If you’ve already lost the game under decades of “smart” policy, why not flip the board?

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The betrayal of rural America

By Jeff Bloodworth

Still, the “hurting themselves” genre continues, because it comforts liberal audiences by assigning blame downward. It allows political writers to bypass any reflection on how Democratic governance might also be failing. And it satisfies a deeper urge to feel vindicated, to watch the people who voted the “wrong” way suffer the consequences. Urban, college-educated voters are granted agency — their mistakes are tragic choices seen as complex, morally legitimate, and grounded in values. Rural, working-class Trump voters, by contrast, are seen as emotional, ignorant, even pathological.

But Trump’s voters know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve calculated — often correctly — that the programs designed to help them are more likely to help someone else. So go on sneering, comfortable in the knowledge that the real problem is out there, somewhere in flyover country. But if you actually care about democracy — and about preventing another Trump presidency — you might ask what stories like these really accomplish. Because they certainly don’t persuade rural voters. They don’t build coalitions. They don’t correct the underlying failures of economic governance. All they do is harden the divides they claim to lament.

Forsaken by the Democrats, rural America has offered its soul to the MAGA movement. Donald Trump took 65% of the rural vote in 2020, up from 62% in 2016. The 2020 figure was even higher among rural whites at 71%. The resulting polarisation between blue cities and red countryside is a “byproduct of the Democrats”, says Matt Barron, who specialises in rural Democratic races as the principal at MLB Research Associates. “They don’t even try to compete in rural America.”

While only one in five people lives in rural or small-town America, the Republican Party has a monopoly over 24 states with large rural populations. The Constitution’s rural tilt means that the Republican Party can claim two senators for every state — however small or rural. As a result, the Senate is trapped in a stalemate with an almost equal number of Republicans and Democrats. Meanwhile, at the state level, rural voters give Republicans nearly double the number of state legislative chambers as Democrats. This, in turn, gives the Republicans more influence in the House of Representatives, which is also stuck in a deadlock.

But the Democrats haven’t always been rural pariahs. In the post-war era, the party regularly earned half of the rural congressional vote. In the Nineties, Bill Clinton won the heart of rural America, and in 2008, Barack Obama received 43% of the rural vote due to the strength of his grassroots organising. Yet Obama took his victory for granted. His operatives came to believe that the Democratic majority was destiny: there was no need to organise, canvass or traipse round knocking on doors.

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By Nicholas F. Jacobs

“The Obama people showed-up [in 2008] and then they left — there was no follow-up,” Chloe Maxim, a former state representative in rural Maine, told me. “Voters felt abandoned.” The percentage of rural voters identifying as Democrat fell from 45% in 2008 to 38% in 2016. During the Obama presidency, Democrats lost 13 seats in the Senate and 69 in the House, as well as 11 governorships, 913 state legislative seats and 30 state legislative chambers. Rural voters were punishing Democrats for their betrayal.

After such humiliation, can Joe Biden win back rural America? It would certainly transform his electoral prospects: even a 5% bump with rural voters would be a “game changer”, according to Adam Kirsch, a Midwest-based Democratic political consultant. For one thing, control of Congress would no longer shift every two years, allowing a Biden White House to make headway with its political agenda.

The trouble is that rural voters are difficult to reach. In the Nineties, liberals all but ceded talk radio to the conservatives, an act of foolishness given the platform is crucial to connecting with a car-loving population. Soon after, the internet transformed the economics of newspapers: nearly 3,000 American newspapers have folded since 2005. Rural newspapers were hit especially hard. Today, more than half of all American counties have very limited, if any, access to local news. On top of this, nearly a quarter of rural Americans lack broadband internet. How can they keep up with Washington politics while living in a media vacuum?

Despite these obstacles, Democrats can move the electoral needle in rural America. They don’t even need to win a majority of the rural vote — just reduce the margin of defeat. Barron points to the 2020 Arizona senate election: in a race in which Democrat Mark Kelly spent nearly $100 million, it was a $20,000 rural radio advertisement that turned the tide. Unlike past Democratic candidates, Kelly took more than 30% of the vote in every rural Arizona county bar one. This turned out to be vital in a race decided by 60,000 votes.

Political consultants, however, seem wary of this strategy: many would rather pad their bank accounts than reach out to rural voters and win elections. I was told by many sources that consultants prefer placing advertisements in urban rather than rural media, as their pay cut will be higher. Ricky Cole, the former two-term state chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party, tells me: “Our politics became nationalised by a cadre of professional operatives. It has become a big industry. It is a money game so that they can pay for their vacation homes. It is a cynical multimillion dollar Ponzi scheme.” Posner agrees: “It is about turf, power, and money. If the Democratic Party gave a shit, it would fund parties and campaigns from the bottom up.”

I keep hearing the same thing: if the Democratic Party could be bothered, it could claw back rural loyalty. Jane Kleeb, the state chair of Nebraska Democrats, tells me that four full-time paid organisers could turn the Cornhusker state competitive, if not purple. But alas, donors finance campaign consultants rather than grassroots organising. And campaign consultants would rather send mailers to dump leaflets on rural areas than pay grassroots activists. This is because, as Posner puts it, “consultants get a cut of the mailer. They don’t consult on actual strategy. They consult and decide based on their economic incentives.”

Their incompetence is leading the party to ruin. Without inspiring candidates or local organisation, the party’s brand in rural America is “non-existent”, according to Kirsch. Rural voters have come to see elections as “us versus them, not Left versus Right”. And the Republicans successfully appeal to the “us” mentality.

With party gentry deaf to the problem, a constellation of local and state Democrats is seeking to rebuild the grassroots Democratic Party. One of these rebels is Sara Taber, who is running to be North Carolina’s Agriculture Commissioner. The crop scientist and ex-farmworker refers to rural North Carolinians as “my people” and admits that in her neck of the woods, “it helps to know your place as a Democrat”.

Another is Ty Pinkins, an African American Democrat who is running against Mississippi’s white Republican incumbent, Senator Roger Wicker. It appears to be an uphill battle — but Cole thinks Pinkins has a real shot if Democrats can get out the vote. He points to 2023, when a Democrat, Brandon Presley, lost to Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, by 20,000 votes. The margin of defeat, he says, was a lacklustre African American turnout.

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Rural America has lost its soul

By Steven Conn

Pinkins seems determined not to repeat history. Slim and youthful looking, the 50-year-old politician is an army vet with a Bronze Star and Georgetown law degree. Since June 2023, he has put 70,000 miles on his Black Chevy Tahoe, canvassing in 67 of the state’s 82 counties. But his goal is not just to win one election; instead, he is building an entire get-out-the-vote infrastructure. He aims to have a campaign honcho in every county and a team leader in all 1,762 state precincts.

Can he succeed? Anthony Flaccavento, a farmer in southwest Virginia who ran for Congress twice as a Democrat and later set up the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative, tells me that rural people often “believe Democrats just don’t like them”. Here, as in any relationship, trust is what matters most. For instance, during his 2014 Congressional race, Flaccavento was approached by a retired United Mine Worker raging against Obama’s support for gay marriage. Flaccavento had lived in southwest Virginia for years; he knew how to handle his interlocutor. In a span of three minutes, Flaccavento told him that Jesus had instructed humans to love another, and that he personally intended to do just that. The miner shrugged and admitted: “I guess they were just born that way.” He went away satisfied with the answer, not because it was a particularly original one but because Flaccavento had spent years building trust and respect in the local community.

Pinkins, too, understands the importance of trust. He says: “I see it every day. The moment you walk up to [voters], you see the look in their eyes. They are eager to tell you what is important to them.” But trust is a two-way bond. If the Democrats are going to take on MAGA in rural America, they’re going to have to trust small-town voters enough to try their luck.

Just last month, academic Thomas Schaller, co-author of the erroneous book, White Rural Rage, stoked this prejudice on MSNBC: “[Rural voters] are the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country… They are the most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.” He was trending on X in no time. But his ideas aren’t exactly new: after the 2016 election, Frank Rich published an essay titled “No sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York magazine, while the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly churns out op-eds on rural rage.

As two scholars of rural politics, who have spent the past three years pouring over thousands of survey interviews with rural Americans, this caricature of the rural rabble-rouser is deeply puzzling. Instead of threats to democracy, or rebellious politics, or reflexive anger, we keep finding something different: pride in rural living, a sense of communal belonging, a shared fate that intertwines the economic well-being of rich and poor in rural communities. Yes, there are resentments, especially towards government officials and experts. But resentment is not a stereotype. It’s a motivation, a story.

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The Constitution won't save America

By N.S. Lyons

Still, rageful stereotypes sell better than complex backstories. And they’re easier for our political and media ecosystems to make sense of. Reference some data point about QAnon conspiracies in the heartlands, and you’ll raise more money from nervous liberals in the city (who just so happen to live next to three times as many conspiracy believers). Lash out against the xenophobia in small towns, and you’ll mobilise your city voters to the polls. Rage draws clicks. It makes a splash.

However, unlike rage, which is explosive and directed towards immediate targets, scholars have shown that resentment in rural areas emanates from a sense of enduring injustice and marginalisation. It is not primarily about anger towards specific groups such as black Americans, immigrants, or LGBT individuals. Instead, resentment or grievance is a deeper, more persistent feeling that arises from real and perceived slights against rural communities. These include economic policies that have devastated local industries, a lack of investment in rural infrastructure and education, and a sense of cultural dismissal from urban-centric media and politics.

Such failures help to explain the deep-rooted scepticism in many rural areas towards government policy solutions. Just consider the aftermath of the North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented in 1994. Nafta’s champions, including both Democrats and Republicans, promised that the deal would bring prosperity to small farmers, but between 1998 and 2018, one out of every 10 small US farms disappeared. Not long after the trade barriers were removed, Canadian cattle ranchers flooded the American market with beef and prices plummeted, forcing small farms out of business. Meanwhile, large-scale agribusinesses capitalised on the open borders. If government neglect drove your grandpa off his farm back then, why would you trust it now?

Yet the stereotype of the raging rural American misrepresents these complexities of the rural experience. It is why Hollywood fell for J.D. Vance’s story of Appalachian poverty, while failing to recognise that he was running a political campaign that spoke to the resilience, values and pride of rural residents. And it is why most progressives don’t have much empathy left for rural voters — despite feeling deeply for nearly every other marginalised group in American society.

In some circles, this lack of empathy stems from the fact that these so-called “deplorables” are blamed for having brought Trump to power. As Paul Waldman, the second co-author of White Rural Rage, said on his book tour: “If Donald Trump gets back to the Oval Office, it will be because — once again — rural Whites put him there.” But rural America is not responsible for Trump. If simply voting for Trump makes you “enraged”, then the residents of cities and suburbs, from which Trump derived 80% of his total votes in 2020, are downright furious. Pinning Trump’s gains on decades of rural America’s losses is just another form of confirmation bias — reinforcing existing beliefs without critical examination. Rarely do you hear mentions of figures such as Bill Clinton, who championed Nafta, or Hillary, who seemed to openly celebrate the fact that she lost the places that were economically suffering the most.

With stereotypes of rage come stereotypes of irrationality. But rural folk have good reason to partly blame Democrats, experts and college professors for their misfortunes. They know full well that federal agriculture and trade policies pushed by both Democrats and Republicans did destroy rural economies. And that liberal elites stood by as rural students became one of the least likely groups to attend college, and one of the most likely to drop out. Surely, the drive for diversity and inclusion should include rural kids, too?

We’ve also noticed that city dwellers have a tendency to use stereotypes as a crutch to disguise the fact that they know very little about how different people live their lives. Both rural and urban people see the “other” as having different values. Many of these differences are overblown, but some of them are, undoubtedly, true. We see it in our own lives: as college professors who choose to live in the countryside, our colleagues playfully say we’ve “gone native”, and our neighbours think we’re squirrelly. We love both worlds and the people within them, even when they value different things. But stereotypes, generalisations, tropes and unchecked hyperbole foreclose the possibility of closing this divide.

In order to genuinely heal societal rifts and to find common ground, we have to dispel the myths of blind rage, and see instead a common desire for recognition. And yet, it appears that progressive commitments to multiculturalism and pluralism only extend to groups that vote the “right” way. It’s almost as if they haven’t learnt their lesson: as long as rural America is treated with disdain, should we really be surprised when, once again, it reluctantly turns to Trump?

He believed that independent yeoman farmers were the only Americans capable of preserving the new nation’s morals and keeping it from “corruption”. Since then, the American family farm has always stood for a way of life — the best way of life, in fact — and it has been venerated almost religiously. A heavy burden indeed.

That the aristocratic Jefferson never once harnessed up a plow and instead relied on slave labour to do all his farming for him was, at one level, a fitting irony. The small family farmer Jefferson conjured was always more myth than reality and became more so over the decades. Along the way, the myth has woven itself into the national DNA. According to a 2018 survey by Gallup, more than a quarter of Americans wish they could live on a farm. Fewer than 1.5% of us actually do.

In fact, farmers tend to be a minority in rural areas. Roughly 25% of America’s population is classed as rural, which means that most rural people are doing something other than farming. They drive long-haul trucks; they are members (or retired) members of the military; they work for local or state government; they work in manufacturing plants which have emerged in farm fields since the Sixties. These folks, however, have not become part of our rural mythos.

Jefferson’s myth of the yeoman farmer was turned into national policy in 1862 when Congress passed the Homestead Act, which offered any American 160 acres of land for free, provided the land was farmed for five years. Between 1862 and 1890 an area larger than Great Britain came under cultivation as white settlers gobbled up land that had been cleared by the U.S. Army of its original inhabitants.

But as they rushed to take advantage of this giveaway, farmers did not behave the way Jefferson rhapsodised that they would. Far from being “independent”, American farmers relied on the Federal government in all sorts of ways, particularly to provide them with water through big dam and irrigation projects in the West. Nor was self-sufficiency their goal. They farmed to make as much money as they could, and from the outset they were tied to national and international commodities markets. By the 1880s, more than 30% of those homestead farmers had mortgaged their land to raise more capital. Far from standing in some virtuous opposition to Big City financiers, farmers helped to pioneer the instruments of modern finance capitalism.

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Capitalism killed the American West

By James Pogue

Perhaps more than anything else, however, the family farm industrialised rapidly and dramatically. The Jeffersonian fantasy pitted the pastoral as the opposite of the industrial — but American farmers saw no such distinction. They eagerly purchased the latest industrial devices to make farming easier. The John Deere corporation, maker of all sorts of farm equipment, was founded in 1837, and its last reported revenue statement (2022) topped $52 billion. In 1865, when the Civil War ended, it took 61 hours of labour to produce an acre of wheat; by 1900 that time had dropped to three hours thanks to labour-saving technology. In the Twenties, International Harvester — another vast farm machinery producer — ran an ad campaign around the theme “Every Farm a Factory”.

The industrialisation of farming, made possible by its financialisation, has had two predictable results: farming itself required less and less labour, and farms got bigger and bigger in a quest for efficiencies of scale. As early as 1910, the US Census reported significant population loss from farming areas in the middle of the country, and that exodus of people continued across the 20th century. The 1960 Census, to take another example, reported that of the 1,520 counties in the 18 states that roughly constitute the national midsection, from Mississippi and Louisiana to North Dakota, Montana, and Minnesota, 61% lost population during the previous decade; this figure rose to 92% in the counties of Arkansas.

Industrialisation has also led to the consolidation of farms. The number of farming operations peaked in 1935 at about seven million. Now the figure stands at two million. As a result, the average size of an American farm is 445 acres, roughly twice the size of the average in the UK (215 acres). But even that figure is a bit misleading because of the way farms are counted in the first place. If we look at individual states in the nation’s farm belt, the numbers get much bigger: in Kansas, the average is now 780 acres; Nebraska, 1,000 acres; in Montana, over 2,100 acres. A farmer in part of rural Ohio told me a few years ago that, if you wanted to make a full-time living here, you need at least 2,000 acres. “Get big or get out!” Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, liked to tell farmers, and one wonders what Jefferson would have made of him.

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America is showing its age

By Adam Smith

That’s partly why I’m not sure we ought to even use the word “farm” anymore. It’s an old word, which elides as much as it describes. The kind of set-up it describes — with a homestead at its centre, animals raised for family consumption in the barn, crops grown for market — disappeared more than half a century ago at least. As one Illinois farmer described it: “General farming belongs to our past. . .When I was a child, of course we had pigs, and put down the pork in brine for the winter, and of course we had chickens, and cows. . . . Orchards [were] plowed under to make room for more beans. That’s what we grow now, soy beans and corn.” That was in 1957.

Farming, as it is practised in the United States today, is more aptly described as industrial calorie production. To call 1,500 acres of corn, genetically modified to withstand harsh chemical pesticides and intended for a high-fructose corn syrup plant, a “farm” is a bit like calling a highly automated Ford factory a “workshop”.

The distance between the myth of the family farm and the realities of American agriculture explains why we often speak of a farm “crisis” in the United States, and we have done so for over a century. Farmers became charity cases in 1985. Inspired by the Live-Aid rock festival to benefit Ethiopian famine victims, Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organised Farm Aid to raise money for families losing their farms. The Farm-Aid fundraising project continues to this day, and its website boasts: “Farm Aid has raised more than $78 million to promote a strong and resilient family farm system of agriculture.”

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That distance between myth and reality is also, I believe, at the root of the increasingly conservative, increasingly angry politics found in some (but certainly not all) rural areas. Of course, measured against the pastoral myth, with all of its redeeming and moral power, any reality is bound to come up short. But a sense of disappointment has become acute in economically distressed rural areas and in the small towns that once served as the social and economic centres of agrarian hinterlands. Drive through these places and you’re likely to find nothing but a bar and a pizza shop left on the Main Street, as other shops are put out of business by a ginormous Walmart 10 miles away. Much of rural and small-town America can be seen by those who live there as landscapes of loss. In these places and under those circumstances, who wouldn’t yearn to make America great again?

But as the Farm Aid website suggests, the Jeffersonian myth persists. Many Americans continue to believe that the small-scale “family farm” is at the heart of American agriculture, and even more politicians parrot that rhetoric. This celebration of the family-farm fantasy is one of the few remaining tropes shared by both political parties.

The Farm Bill, a vast, sprawling, and expensive piece of legislation, is up for renewal during this legislative session. Whatever its final details, it will undoubtedly provide an almost bottomless grab-bag of subsidies and other goodies for industrial-scale agricultural producers, as it has for the last 50 years. I’m guessing, however, that the elected officials who will shape the legislation will sing the song of the American family farm yet again, and voters will cheer in genuflection. This is a myth that will not die.