The following is adapted from the book “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” published by Random House and available on February 27, 2024.
Congressman Chip Roy represents Texas’ Twenty-First Congressional District, which begins in the suburbs of San Antonio and Austin and then stretches 150 miles west into more sparsely populated areas of central Texas. After the 2020 Census, state Republicans redrew the district’s lines, taking it from a district that leaned slightly Republican to one that leaned strongly Republican. This meant that Roy’s chances of losing re-election went from slim to none.
A few days before the 2022 election, we caught up with Roy at an event at a restaurant in the tiny unincorporated town of Hunt. He and a group of campaign staffers rolled in with a spring in their step and matching white collared shirts, each with Roy’s name and an American flag embroidered on it, as befitting an incumbent with a hefty war chest who knew he was going to win. After he delivered an inside-baseball discussion of congressional strategy to the crowd of seventy-five supporters, he gave us a few minutes to talk. We asked him if there was a particular agenda he was pursuing that would enable his rural constituents to get what they needed from Washington, and how their needs might be different from those of his suburban constituents.
At first, Roy seemed a little confused by the question. “You’re talking about appropriations?” he said, something in which, as a staunchly anti-spending conservative, he’s not that interested. When we said that it could include anything, he ticked off issues he said were of concern to all his constituents, including illegal immigration and inflation, and then went on to explain why he usually opposes the enormous farm bill passed periodically by Congress, which is the vehicle for many of the copious subsidies given to farmers (Roy doesn’t like it because it’s where food stamps are funded).
In other words, like many of his colleagues who represent districts that cover rural areas, Roy has no particular rural agenda. Four days after we spoke to him, he pulverized his earnest but underfunded Democratic opponent, a twenty-eight-year-old Latina who managed to raise only a tiny fraction of the money Roy did. He then returned to Washington, D.C., and led a revolt against Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be speaker of the House, humiliating McCarthy and extracting a series of promises that helped lead to the debt ceiling crisis of 2023.
For Roy and the legions of politicians like him at all levels of government who represent rural White Americans, everything is working out fine. Their positions get more secure with each passing election, even as their constituents’ problems go unaddressed. The deep challenges affecting rural Americans—in economic opportunity, health care, education, infrastructure, and more—keep so many of them dissatisfied and disgruntled. Their elevated status as the essential minority provides a means to pander to them even as it increases the distance between what they get and what they feel they deserve. Their outsized electoral power enables Republicans to retain control of government, often to such a degree that the party is all but exempted from electoral competition. And they are represented at all levels by politicians who use these structural, material, and cultural conditions to manipulate rural Americans in ways that translate into little or no improvement in their lives—and often make those lives worse.
For those politicians, the threats coming from rural White America—racism and xenophobia, conspiracism, anti-democratic beliefs, and the justification of violence—are not threats at all. They’re either not a problem to worry about, or even worse, they’re tools that can be used to maintain the support of those voters and direct their anger in whatever direction the politicians find most advantageous.
Rural America’s party problem
With the rural/urban political divide as stark as it is today, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always this way. In fact, for much of our history, rural and urban Americans did not vote all that differently in the aggregate; Republican presidential candidates would usually outpoll Democratic candidates by just a couple of points in rural areas. Beginning with the 2000 election, however, rural and urban votes began drifting apart, and that separation is now a chasm. In 2016, 62 percent of rural Whites supported Donald Trump. Two years later, in the Democratic sweep of the 2018 midterms, 64 percent of rural Whites backed Republican House candidates. Then 71 percent voted for Trump in 2020, and 74 percent voted GOP in 2022.
This divergence made rural America less politically competitive, giving both parties little incentive to devote substantial resources to winning votes there. Yet it’s only Democrats who are endlessly lectured about “ignoring” rural America, and they do largely ignore it—if all you’re talking about is politics and not policy. In many places, there is scant Democratic presence; the party has little or no organization, and if there is a Democrat at all on the ballot in many races, they may just be a placeholder, someone who agreed to have their name entered but doesn’t do much campaigning.
What isn’t as widely understood is that Republicans ignore many rural areas, too, for essentially the same reason as Democrats: They know races there won’t be competitive, so they don’t need to bother. “For the most part, Republicans rack up big margins in red areas by default,” says Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler. Nevertheless, when it comes to policy, Democrats at both the state and federal level never stop trying to help rural America, as politically unrequited as their efforts might be. Every Democratic presidential campaign puts out some kind of rural agenda, full of policies and programs and economic development ideas. And when they take office, they back it up with dollars; when Democrats pass a big spending bill, they’re likely not just to make a point of guiding funds to rural areas, but putting resources in place to help rural communities access funding and navigate federal bureaucracies.
On issue after issue, rural Americans are getting not nearly enough, or nothing at all, from the Republicans they elect to represent them. More than that, they are often actively harmed by the party’s policy positions and ideological commitments. Republicans press for school vouchers that take money away from public schools and direct it to private schools, but in many rural areas, there simply are no private schools; if the local public schools are starved for resources, the whole community suffers. The GOP is the party of climate denial, yet farmers are more affected by climate change than almost anyone else, from peach farmers in Georgia to hay farmers in upstate New York, seeing their crops devastated by warming temperatures and weather disasters.
Or consider abortion. Republican-run states passed a wave of draconian restrictions in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, restrictions that are not only certain to increase unwanted pregnancies in rural areas, with all its attendant impacts on the economic lives of women and families, but also to have wider negative effects on rural people’s ability to access health care. In Sandpoint, Idaho, for instance, ob-gyns fleeing the state after being threatened with criminal penalties for providing care led to the closing of the only maternity ward in an entire rural region.
Then there’s broadband internet service, one of the most vital ingredients a community needs to create and sustain economic vitality. As of 2022, seventeen states had severe restrictions or outright bans on municipalities providing their own broadband service to residents, even in places where private companies don’t find it profitable to install high-speed internet access. In most cases, those bans have been spearheaded by Republican legislators at the behest of the telecommunication companies. In 2021, congressional Republicans introduced legislation that would “prohibit a State or political subdivision thereof from providing or offering for sale to the public retail or wholesale broadband internet access service,” claiming with a straight face that relieving telecoms of competition from municipal providers would “promote competition.” And if you live in a rural area where none of the telecoms wants to give you service? Too bad.
Everywhere you look, Republican ideological goals are having their intended effects in rural America, which winds up making life worse. In 2017, a pair of researchers examined rural counties to determine where upward mobility was most common—in other words, where economic opportunity existed and the American Dream was more of a reality. In the end, they identified three factors that would have the greatest effect in promoting mobility in rural America: strong schools, good broadband, and the availability of family planning so women were less likely to have unwanted pregnancies before they’re economically ready to have children.
None of that should come as a surprise. Yet, in all three cases, the party that dominates rural America is directly undermining its ability to create upward mobility. Republicans denigrate and defund public schools. They actively work to prevent municipalities from setting up their own broadband systems. And they undermine family planning at every turn, from promoting counterproductive “abstinence only” education, to filing lawsuits to prevent people from getting contraceptives covered by insurance, to outlawing abortion everywhere they can.
The missing piece of rural politics
The way to end the Republican Party’s exploitation of rural communities is not as simple as convincing them that they should all vote for Democrats (though some of them surely should). For many, the positions of the Democratic Party on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ+ rights will always be unacceptable. What those rural, White voters need to do is not to vote Democratic, but to get themselves better Republicans.
There are multiple ways rural citizens can move toward a better economic future, and some methods will work better in some places than others. But more than anything else, breaking the dangerous cycle in which rural misery leads to anti-democratic revanchism will require a new rural political movement. If they created a movement, rural Americans—and rural Whites especially—would have an extraordinary opportunity to be courted by both parties. Imagine a future in which rural Americans’ needs and demands were a central component of the national political debate, and both parties labored relentlessly to convince rural voters they had something to offer them. If those voters had clearly defined demands, Republicans would have to satisfy them, and Democrats would want to satisfy them. Rural voters are already embedded within the GOP, and Democrats are desperate to win more rural votes. Yet, at the moment, rural voters are squandering their position by asking the parties for nothing.
The first step to creating a potent political movement must be rural Whites’ acknowledgment that they’ve been blaming the wrong people for their problems. Hollywood didn’t kill the family farm and send manufacturing jobs overseas. College professors didn’t pour mountains of opioids into rural communities. Immigrants didn’t shutter rural hospitals and let rural infrastructure decay. The outsiders and liberals at whom so many rural Whites point their anger are not the ones who have held them back—and as long as they keep believing that they are, rural people won’t develop an effective form of politics.
We won’t presume to tell rural Americans exactly what policies they should be asking for; that’s something any movement has to decide on its own. There are plenty of ideas out there in think tank reports and economic papers, and there are people in rural areas working hard to fashion a new future. Some have focused on creating a recreation-based economy to replace the old one based on resource extraction. Others have welcomed the immigrants moving into the heartland as an engine of revitalization, rather than fearing and rejecting them. Still others are agitating to resist the predations of corporate consolidation. All of those are worthy efforts.
But it’s absolutely crucial that any rural movement be not a White rural movement, but one that includes the interests and voices of all people who live in rural America, including the quarter of them who aren’t White. Black, Latino, and Native rural Americans have their own distinct struggles, but share many of the same problems as rural Whites.
Past need not be prologue, but so far, rural Whites as a group haven’t shown the inclination to create a movement with a vision for the future, let alone one that sees increasing rural diversity as an asset and not a problem. Instead, they go further and further down a dark path. Their resentments feed the idea that they are surrounded by enemies who must be destroyed if they themselves are to survive. They’re increasingly drawn to politicians who view democracy not as a treasured value, but as an impediment to getting what they want, one that can and should be discarded. They’re told that their ugliest selves are their truest selves, and too many believe it. Unless they can see their way clear to a different path, not only will their own lives not improve, they’ll keep dragging the country down with them. The result could be the most frightening political crisis since the Civil War.
Editor’s Note: The authors capitalize “White,” but the Washington Monthly does not.
Tom Schaller is a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of five other books, including Whistling Past Dixie. Paul Waldman is a journalist and opinion writer. He is the author or co-author of four previous books, including Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success.
