Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea, The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America (2024)

A very important book in our current, politically unstable, moment. Before I praise the book, however, I'll allow myself a few words of complaint. Unfortunately, this important book is marred by dozens, if not hundreds, of careless errors. These range from typos, missing commas, and missing or mistaken words (e.g. riff instead of rift) to flaccid paragraphs (the authors announce two or three points about something, but then in the following text one can't distinguish the different items). In one or two cases, the poor editing means that important questions are alluded to, but not addressed (for example, how could Obama do better in rural America in 2008 than Kerry had in 2004, but then do much worse in 2012? This shift from 2008 to 2012 marks one of the biggest downward steps in support for Democrats in rural America, and the initial support for Obama and subsequent withering of it are important in light of the issue of rural America's racial attitudes.) I find it baffling that an elite university's press (Columbia) would allow so many errors to slip through its fingers. Nonetheless, the book makes a persuasive contribution to current debates about why (and even whether) our country is as divided as it appears to be. The authors start by observing that even delineating what parts of America should count as "rural" is not as easy as one might think. Many states often referred to as rural - based on state-wide population density - in fact have significant portions, even majorities, of their populations living in suburban or urban tracts. If I remember correctly, only four states have populations that are majority rural. Many media commentators (including Paul Krugman) fall victim to this basic mistake, when they write, for example, about rural states receiving far more funding from urban states than they give. A further, and even more important, contribution is based on the authors' Rural Voter Survey, which they have administered several times in the last few years. This survey provides an unprecedented look at how rural voters think about their own lives and communities, as well as politics more broadly. Anxiety about the local economy and the future of their way of life has contributed to strong loyalties to their locales and a sense of "linked fate." The rural voter really is different than people of the same demographic background (white, Christian, older, etc.) who live elsewhere. At the same time, though, the rural voter is much more complex than one would think, based on how he/she is often portrayed. For example, the authors use their survey data to tease apart different strands of racial attitudes in rural (and suburban and urban) America. The results don't exculpate the rural voter but add important nuance - to the extent that racial animus is stronger in rural America than elsewhere, it derives from the belief that poor African-Americans (and other minorities) are poor because they allegedly don't work hard. Jacobs and Shea describe how the Republican party, starting around 1980, worked to create an image of rural America as "the real America" - an effort that largely succeeded. But this success was facilitated by the Democrats' lack of interest in rural Americans, and at times outright disdain. I plan to use parts of the book in a course I'm currently teaching, How Democracies Die.