THE RURAL VOTER
The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America
PREFACE
The idea for this book probably emerged after some pleasantly distracting conversation about maple sap, cider-making, chickens, or the long list of things we needed to do to get ready for winter. Since we met at Colby College in the autumn of 2019, we have spent too much time wasting away the productive hours of our days talking about our little slice of heaven here in rural Maine.
We are a tad unusual for academics in that regard. Our colleagues like to joke that we have “gone native,” but both of us have fond connections to rural areas and rural people, even as we have followed our academic careers to different parts of the country than where we grew up. At the end of the day, we wrote a book on rural America because there is much we love and admire about rural life. There is something truly special about rural communities. Sure, living out in the country takes its toll, and our urbane colleagues and students often scratch their heads with wonder as to why we would ever put up with frozen septic tanks, hauling cord wood, the lack of good take-out, all the driving, and, more than anything else, all those Trump voters.
To a point, we have asked ourselves the same things. Why would we live such different lives, and alongside people who seem to have such a different view about what type of leader this country needs? We have lived the rural-urban divide—a divide that took on an even more tragic
dimension with the spread of COVID-19. We saw farmers struggle when they were unable to get migrant workers because the border had shut down; we talked with so-called nonessential laborers who had never missed a day of work in their lives; we struggled to make sense of why our neighbors dismissed the severity of the disease as it ripped through places like New York City and then refused to get vaccinated just as the pandemic was wreaking its worst havoc on rural communities. Inevitably, the conversation would pivot to something Trump did, or the idiocy of something Biden said. And yet, where others would end the conversation there, seeing it as nothing more than a cult of personality, naked partisanship, or stubborn irrationality, we suspected something else was going on. We have no desire to make excuses for our neighbors, but in the early days of trying to piece all this together, we quickly realized that the image we had been given of the “rural voter” was not the one standing before us.
No doubt the disconnect had much to do with the pictures of rural America we carried in our heads from growing up alongside rural people. Nick remembers the old dairy farmers at church talking about the days when cows would break free and run down Main Street; but as the suburbs rapidly crept over western Virginia, his mother was having to drive him to the ever-moving hinterlands to pick up hay for their rabbits and find eggs to incubate. Rural Virginia seemed like a lost idea when the last working farm in town was paved over the year after he left for college in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was booming at the other end of the state’s steady march toward suburbanization. Fortunately, Nick feels it will be a long time before someone even thinks about plopping a subdivision in Vassalboro, Maine. Any developer should be scared off by the sounds of his rooster, which starts the day for many of his neighbors on the Priest Hill Road.
Dan was raised in rural upstate New York; his roots were planted deeply in the rocky soil of the northern Catskills. Daily life was in a small town, but escapes to old farms and woodlots to fish and hunt with brothers, cousins, and uncles were recurrent. His dad taught him the grandeur of a twelve-inch native brook trout and his mom, the magic of loons at dusk. A connection to an extended rural family was cemented
most weekends when all would gather on “Bowers Hill,” just up the road from Roscoe, for big Sunday dinners, tall tales, and family gossip. Over the years, he’s moved between a few rural college towns and now spends his leisure time with his wife and kids gardening, tapping maple trees, and fly-fishing in the great woods of northern Maine.
In its rapid disappearance and our constant search to remain connected to the land and its people, we both value what Robert Frost described as the “country things.” Of course, the simple interpretation is that there are just things one learns about living in rural parts: felling trees, picking off garden-meddling groundhogs—you know, the fun stuff. But we know that it is much more than that—a mindful disposition about what matters, a careful reflection about nature and its awesome power over us, a commanding sense of stewardship for the land and the people who call it home. Frost wrote the poem three years after the U.S. Census announced that for the first time, a majority of Americans lived in urban areas. Would they, he wondered, learn the same lessons living a city life? Would they develop the sense of humility and love of place that keeps us grounded and oriented to larger purposes?
And then, we wonder, could one ever imagine finding such sentiments in a campaign speech by Donald Trump, a man who made his career paving over the country things we hold dear and commercializing on his urbane pride? Humble, frugal, and outward-looking—if that is what rural means to us, why did so many of our rural neighbors see this guy as their salvation? Worse still, that is surely not the image we got from all the news reports and flyover commentary in the aftermath of 2016. Rural people were mad, loud, primed for a rebellion. Maybe they no longer valued the country things. J. D. Vance told us of their homes being ripped apart by drug addiction and job loss, communities in disarray. Others pointed to all those whites in the countryside who hated immigrants and wanted to keep them out of the country. Maybe Thomas Frank was prophetic when he told us about how the yokels had been hoodwinked in Kansas when Republicans stormed into power by stoking fears of abortion, same-sex marriage, and women working outside the home!
At every step of this long journey, we have been more than ready to confront the grim reality that the rural America of our past and our
mythology has disappeared and that, in its place, we have come to live alongside people chronically depressed, irredeemably racist, and culturally backward.
But that is not what we discovered in writing this book. The country things are still to be found in rural America. But you need to know where to look.
In writing this book, we have benefited in untold ways from the hundreds of conversations we have had with our students, colleagues, and friends. Nick would not be thinking much about rural politics if not for the warm friendship he developed with the displaced rural Montanan Kal Munis at the University of Virginia. Their early musings on place and rural identity were fervently criticized and ultimately encouraged by several scholars, especially: Kathy Cramer, Lynn Sanders, Justin Kirkland, Nick Winter, and Sid Milkis.
Not far from Dan’s mind at every step of this process was an admonition from his mother, Rosemary Bowers Shea, stretching back twenty years or so. Not long after he had completed his doctorate and written a few books, they were riding in the backroads of Delaware County on a fair spring day. As they bent around a curve, yet another dilapidated farmhouse came into view, rife with burn barrels, rusty lawn furniture, junked cars, and outbuildings pitched to the side. Dan muddled, half under his breath, “What slobs. . . . Can’t they clean up that mess?” In a beat, Rosemary’s head shot around. “Who the hell do you think you are? Those are your people, Danny. That’s where you come from and don’t you forget it.” They rode home in silence, and he never did.
But the seeds of those early lessons and mentors could blossom into the much larger work presented here only with strong support from our Colby College community. The President’s Office and the Provost of the college provided tremendous financial support, and the Rural Voter Survey would simply not have been possible without David Greene and Margaret McFadden’s commitment to research at our small liberal arts college. Our Diamond Hall colleagues have endured hundreds of small
distractions as we crossed the hallway between our two offices on a near daily basis these last two years. We are thankful for not only their patience but also their support as they have shown a genuine curiosity about our work: Tizoc Chavez, Nazlı Konya, Sandy Maisel, Lindsay Mayka, Carrie LeVan, Joe Reisert, Ken Rodman, and Jen Yoder.
The Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs at Colby College offered us financial support and, under the leadership of former director Kimberly Flowers, enabled us to speak and engage with rural voters across the country.
The research would not have been possible without the tireless support of our student researchers. From the start, Claudia Miner, now pursuing a Ph.D. of her own, crunched data and helped lead other research assistants. A small team of ambitious Colby undergraduates joined us as we sketched out the first few questions of the Rural Voter Survey: Ellie Batchelder, Emily Glass, Olivia Greif, Emma MacCallum, Will Short, and Maddie Wehr. As you will soon read, we pulled together one of the largest historic election/census data sets ever created, and that massive undertaking would not have happened but for the hard work of Brooklyn Clark, Nicole Huebner, and Azalea Yunus. An array of research support came from Ben Dixon, Linh Dinh, George Fitzgerald, Eleanor Goldman, Joe Grassi, Amir Jiru, Margo Kenyon, Natasha Rimalovski, Caroline Scarola, Dov Shore, Maddie Silano, and Lily Yustein. Mandie Lisco and Sabrina Jiang had the “pleasure” of coding openended questions from more than ten thousand respondents, for which we are eternally grateful.
And, of course, we have been unable to talk about much else but rural politics these last few years, and we owe a debt of gratitude to our friends—fellow scholars and neighbors—who contributed to our thinking: Richard Burke, Emile Lester, Anthony Sparacino, and our many neighbors in Vassalboro and Mt. Vernon.
We are deeply indebted to Kal Munis, as well as Zoe Nemerever and Sam Hayes, for reading the manuscript in its entirety and offering honest and insightful comments on each chapter. Three anonymous reviewers commissioned by Columbia University Press also gave keen and careful and attention to our work.
It has been a pleasure to work with Stephen Wesley and the entire team at Columbia University Press. Stephen has been an enthusiastic supporter of this project from the time we pitched it, and he is a committed partner in our effort to make rigorous scholarship accessible to a wider public audience.
If our friends and colleagues think we constantly talk to each other about rural politics, they have no idea what our wives go through on a daily basis. Rachel Jacobs and Christine Gatto-Shea are not only deeply supportive and patient partners, they are keen observers of rural politics in their own right. Not a single good idea you read in this book has not been subject to some eyebrow raising across the dinner table on their part.
And finally, there are our children—the most important reason we call rural Maine home and seek to better understand it. Sometimes academic work can feel a bit detached from the concerns of everyday people. We sincerely hope this book can play some small part in preserving what we love and value in rural life so our children can pass it along (even if they leave us and move to the big city).
Nick would like to dedicate this to his kids—the future caretakers of the Jacobs homestead: Benjamin and Anderson.
Dan would like to dedicate his efforts to his mother, Rosemary, who remained a proud fern picker’s kid all her life.
“In this important book, two political scientists—rural themselves—set the record straight on the rural voter. Based on a massive voter survey stretching from 1824 to 2020, Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea carefully puzzle over reasons so many rural Americans now despair of the Democratic Party and even see it as the enemy. They add to this a brilliant analysis of Hollywood’s view of rural Americans, shifting from quaint to backward to menacing and beyond. If you live in the city, read this book.”
—ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD, AUTHOR
OF STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: ANGER AND MOURNING ON THE AMERICAN RIGHT
“Jacobs and Shea examine and often dismantle long-standing stereotypes and conventional media narratives with empathy. The data and historical research are rigorous and important, but the nuance and curiosity the authors bring to the table are The Rural Voter ’s special sauce.”
—AMY WALTER, PUBLISHER AND EDITOR IN CHIEF OF THE COOK POLITICAL REPORT WITH AMY WALTER
“Forget what you think you know about rural politics in the United States. With high-quality data and careful analysis, Jacobs and Shea demonstrate that rural voters are not particularly down-andout or fired up by religion, racism, conservative media, and ideology. Instead, rural economic and civic struggles, which are not unique, have generated a sense of place-based grievance that reflects rural voters’ beliefs about the value of rural life and a linked fate as rural residents.”
—DOUGLAS
D.
ROSCOE,
AUTHOR OF
THE PROMISE OF DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES
“It’s a rare book on American politics that has a sense of place. The authors, who hail from rural communities and know their neighbors, show that ‘geography matters’—but not at all in the ways our stereotyped notions of rural (and urban) tell us.”
—BILL BISHOP, AUTHOR OF THE BIG SORT: WHY THE CLUSTERING OF LIKE-MINDED AMERICA IS TEARING US APART
“This book contains what surely must be the most comprehensive study of rural voters ever produced. Based largely on a massive new database, Jacobs and Shea’s analyses provide a treasure trove of new findings and along the way modify or overturn a number of popular generalizations about urban versus rural voters.”
—MORRIS P. FIORINA, AUTHOR OF UNSTABLE MAJORITIES: POLARIZATION, PARTY SORTING, AND POLITICAL STALEMATE
“For those seeking a comprehensive, thoroughly researched volume about rural voters with original data and insightful analysis, stop looking. The Rural Voter provides an unbiased account of rural voters that does not fall prey to partisan stereotypes. I have little doubt this pathbreaking book will reshape our understanding of a key change in American politics.”
—JOANNE CONNOR GREEN, AUTHOR OF GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS IN THE LONE STAR STATE
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