The Deepening Rural-Urban Divide

When considering some of the largest causes for divides within the United States’ electorate today, many would look towards race, education, age, and sex. However, one cleavage remains seldom discussed yet may be the most important in correlating to increased polarization between America’s two parties. The factor of rural versus urban electorates has remained a strong sorting mechanism between the two parties throughout the last century and has only increased in recent years. Though not much can be done to stop this attributing factor of party polarization, its effects will continue to have significant consequences for the American electorate in the coming decades.

            The rural and urban divide in the United States was quite insignificant back at the time of its inception. Thomas Jefferson was well-known for his disdain of city life back in 1803 when he wrote that cities were evil, dirty and possibly monarchist compared to the virtue and wisdom inherent to an agrarian lifestyle. This penchant for pastoralism was undoubtedly quite popular during a period when 94 percent of the US population was located in rural areas. However, by 1920 a majority of the US population for the first time was considered as living in urban areas, causing discourse to change with examples like journalists describing Republican President Warren G. Harding giving speeches to “small town yokels … low political serfs.” (Grier 2018). Rural and urban divides have only increased in today’s political climate and have exacerbated unequal representation within the national government due to using a system that attempts to balance rural and urban interests even at the cost of “penalizing the party with the more concentrated base of support.”

            It is well known in contemporary politics that “urban areas tend to vote Democratic, while suburban and rural areas often lean Republican” and is known as the geographic constituency for a member of Congress (Adler, Jenkins, and Shipan pg. 82 2019). These geographic constituencies may go back centuries, as seen in Figure 1 below, which shows the correlation between the distance of old railroad junctions during industrialization in the 19^th Century and Hillary Clinton’s vote share in the 2016 election. The farther away a voter is from these rail nodes, the less likely overall they are to have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016.

Figure 1.

This correlation also has large impacts on which candidates are chosen in these districts as well as their representation. Due to Democrats living in ultra-homogenous politically affiliated districts compared to less solid but more numerous Republican-leaning districts, America’s winner-take-all district system leads to “the more concentrated party losing out on transforming votes to seats” (Florida 2019). Another consequence of this is that “Democrats end up winning substantial majorities in their core districts my margins like 80-20 or 70-30” while Republicans can win more districts while having less of an edge as a majority in the district (Florida 2019). These large Democratic vote margins can encourage more radical candidates, which overall does more harm to the party platform in the long run within states, as noted by Andrew B Hall’s “What Happens When Extremists Win Primaries?” The increased potentiality of creating more extreme candidates of either party “causes severe damage to the party’s electoral prospects, … makes the party much more likely to lose the general election today and … makes the opposing party much more likely to win two to four years later” (Hall 2015).

            Solutions to this issue may involve alleviating partisan gerrymandering of districts in an effort to negate the homogeneity of Democratic voters within a state's districts. One such clear example was Pennsylvania in the 2012 general election, as even though "Democratic candidates for Congress won 51% of the votes state-wide [they] came away with majorities in only 28% of the districts." However, even with a computer program that tried to rectify this imbalance of votes to party seats, these "party blind" plans nevertheless still gave Democrats a disadvantage (G.E.M. 2019). Party polarization seems to not be abating anytime soon but author and Stanford political scientist Jonathon Rodden did note that suburbs are key to becoming the possible solution to this clear divide. “In the long run, perhaps the changing populations and greater mixing of the suburbs may help us overcome some of the extreme polarization that plagues us today” (Florida 2019). 

Works Cited

Adler, Scott, Jeffery A. Jenkins, and Charles R. Shipan, The United States Congress, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 82.

Brown, Patrick, “Why Democrats Lose,” 31 July 2019, accessed at https://www.city-journal.org/urban-rural-electoral-divide, 15 Oct 2019.

Florida, Richard, “Why Cities Are Less Powerful in U.S. National Politics,” 26 Sept 2019, accessed at https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/09/jonathan-rodden-why-cities-lose-book-interview-us-politics/598693/, 15 Oct 2019.        

G.E.M., "How America’s urban-rural divide shapes elections," 3 June 2019, accessed at https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2019/06/03/how-americas-urban-rural-divide-shapes-elections, 15 Oct 2019.

Grier, Peter, “The deep roots of America’s rural-urban political divide,” 26 Dec 2018, accessed at https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/1226/The-deep-roots-of-America-s-rural-urban-political-divide, 15 Oct 2019.

Hall, Andrew B., “What Happens When Extremists Win Elections?” Feb 2015, accessed at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055414000641, 15 Oct 2019.