Kristin Lunz Trujillo grew up proud of her family’s way of life. She spent summers getting ready to show cattle at the county fair. During the school year, she rushed home after class to feed the chickens on her family’s corn and soybean farm. Neither of her parents went to college, but they encouraged their daughter when she decided to go to Carleton College, a liberal arts school a two-hour drive from their farm in Minnesota.
Despite being physically close to home, Lunz Trujillo was surprised by how foreign her upbringing seemed at the college. She was dismayed when she checked out the farm club and learned that its members wanted to brew kombucha, not milk cows. When an art history teacher asked students which famous paintings they’d seen in person, Lunz Trujillo stayed quiet, because she had never been to an art museum. This sense of cultural alienation molded her research when she became a political scientist: What is rural identity? How does it shape a person’s politics?
This year, Lunz Trujillo, now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, was reading a new, best-selling book that cited her research to explore those same questions. But this recognition didn’t bring the thrill she might have expected.
“It seemed to be more of a hit piece on rural America,” she said.
Published in February, “White Rural Rage,” by journalist Paul Waldman and political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.
Several rural scholars whose research was included in the book immediately denounced it. In a critical Politico essay, Nick Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College, wrote, “Imagine my surprise when I picked up the book and saw that some of that research was mine.” Lunz Trujillo excoriated the book in an opinion piece for Newsweek as “a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing” people unlike them.
People who study rural communities often feel that politicians and pundits extract the wrong lessons from their research, partly because they are too far removed from those communities. That’s an issue that rural-studies scholars have tried to remedy, but also feel acutely. Some of these academics were raised on farms or in small towns, but their connections to universities can breed suspicion among the people they research. Books like “White Rural Rage” can make it all the more challenging to overcome that suspicion.
“We contribute to the further denigration of expertise when we say, ‘This is what the experts say about these rubes and bumpkins,’” said Jacobs, a co-author of “The Rural Voter.” “Who’s going to trust the experts when that’s what the experts have to say about you?”
A rural renaissance
There is an obvious reason for academics’ neglect of the political urban-rural divide until recently: It barely existed.
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, rural counties resembled urban ones in their presidential choices, including supporting Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton. It’s only since the late 1990s that there has been a marked gap between rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections, and it has widened ever since. In 2016, Trump won 59% of rural voters. Four years later, that climbed to 65%, according to Pew. And in the 2022 midterms, Republicans won 69% of the rural vote.
Even if that shift does hint that “rural” may now be its own kind of identity, it’s a cohort that’s hard to define. (The authors of “White Rural Rage” threw up their hands and declared that they were “agnostic” about the different definitions across the studies they cited.)
The Census Bureau classifies any community as rural if it isn’t within an urban area, meaning it is not part of a densely settled area with 5,000 or more people or 2,000 or more housing units. (In the 2020 census, 20% of Americans were classified as rural.) The Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service looks at different measures of counties including population size, proximity to metropolitan areas and commuting patterns.
Beyond these basic definitional problems, rural communities can be wildly different socially. “When you aggregate to the national level, you lose so much,” said Zoe Nemerever, a political scientist at Utah Valley University. “I get frustrated especially when people talk about rural America as white America. In some states, it’s Latino America. In the Deep South, it’s Black America.”
Traditionally, political scientists argued that measuring the effects of place was just a proxy for looking at other parts of identity, such as race or education. And because many did not come from rural areas, growing up rural didn’t tend to strike academics as a salient part of political identity.
Maybe because so few people fashioned themselves as “rural political experts” until recently, the few high-profile explanations for the rise of rural Republicanism were widely embraced by the chattering classes.
The most digestible theory, for years, was laid out by Thomas Frank in his bestselling 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Frank, a historian, argued that the Republican focus on social issues, such as abortion and guns, persuaded rural voters to put aside their economic interests and vote on cultural values rather than for candidates who supported unions and corporate regulation.
But the “Kansas” theory of heartland Republicanism wasn’t satisfying to some readers who actually lived in rural America. In fact, a handful of academics were so frustrated with the book that it inspired them to pursue their own research.
Michael Shepherd read the book in high school, college and again in graduate school, and never changed his opinion. “I felt like it was pretty snooty,” said Shepherd, now a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, who grew up in Bardstown, Kentucky, the heart of bourbon making. “It really missed a lot of what was going on in communities like mine.”
Another scholar who disagreed with Frank’s diagnosis was Kathy Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cramer’s 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment,” quickly became an anchor in the growing field of rural political studies. At least half a dozen academics credit her with foundational thinking for their research. The “White Rural Rage” authors cited Cramer’s work, too, though she was dismayed by their conclusions.
“A lot of the focus has been on ‘What’s wrong with those people?’” she said. “But most people studying what’s going on with rural political behavior are people with empathy for people who live in rural places. They aren’t discounting them as ignorant or uninformed. There’s more of an attempt to understand the way they’re seeing the world.”
Broadly, rural Americans see free trade and the rise of new technologies as hurting their communities while helping cities prosper, Jacobs said. So the resentment they felt toward urbanites didn’t come out of nowhere, though Jacobs differentiated that resentment from the idea of “rural rage.”
“Rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms,” he wrote in Politico. “Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience.”
And while resentment, like rage, doesn’t easily dissolve, he suggests that trying to understand where it comes from could start to build a bridge over that ever-widening urban-rural divide.