Is Rural America Still Dependably Republican?

Welcome to Radio Free America, Aaron Kleinman’s take on stories that matter in state politics but aren't getting enough attention.

Nov. 8, 2016, one of the worst nights of my life, actually started out pretty well. I saw that Hillary Clinton was holding her own in the more populous counties in Indiana and Kentucky. I noticed that those states’ smaller counties were going gangbusters for Donald Trump, but I doubted they could keep that up nationwide.

They kept it up nationwide.

Since that night, small counties have come through for Republicans over and over again. As you can see above, rural America gives bigger margins to Republicans than urban America gives to Democrats now. And for a while, it seemed to work out for everyone involved. Republicans got huge vote margins, agribusiness got pro-industry politicians and farmers saw the party as good for their bottom line. And the rural voters who mostly just care about right-wing cultural issues got plenty of red meat (not to be confused with the actual red meat that their neighbors were sending to grocery stores across the country). But the results of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last night showed some cracks in that coalition.

Democratic-aligned candidate Chris Taylor won a landslide victory over Republican-aligned Maria Lazar last night. (“Aligned” because the race is nonpartisan.) The outcome of the race was never really in doubt — Taylor outspent Lazar by a six-to-one margin, and the electorate for an April contest while an incumbent Republican president’s approval ratings were below 40% was always going to favor Democrats. 

But it’s still useful to look under the hood a bit to see how the electorate shifted since last year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court contest, as the relative changes could give us some ideas about the parties’ shifting coalitions. And, based on the results as of Wednesday morning, the map of where Taylor gained the most over last year’s Democratic-aligned candidate paints an ugly picture for Republicans.

If you have a passing familiarity with the geography of Wisconsin, you know that counties along the north and west boundaries (the darkest blue counties) are for the most part rural. In this week’s run-off, they had the biggest shifts toward Democrats. Whereas the smallest shifts toward Democrats were in the state’s population centers to the southeast.

Another way to look at this is by seeing which counties saw the greatest dropoff in vote for the Republican-aligned candidate; those are the areas where they lost the most voters.

Again, the biggest losses were mostly in rural Wisconsin, whereas suburban and urban areas saw smaller shifts.

Now, this could just be because both parties saw their biggest turnout dropoffs among the hardest parts of their coalition to turn out; Democrats saw their smallest gains in counties with higher nonwhite populations. That would make sense, considering that there was more than ten times as much spending in the 2025 election, with Elon Musk telling Republican voters that no less than Western civilization was at stake.

But it’s still a really bad sign for Republicans that they’re going to have to work that much harder to get the bedrock of their coalition to turn out. Especially if it’s tied to the changes in their material conditions arising from Trump’s policies, like cratering our agricultural exports and cutting off key fertilizer sources right before planting season. And if you want to skip down to the Book Review section of the newsletter, I have some ideas on how Democrats can try to win them over. But even if they do nothing, Republicans may have to start thinking about what to do in a world where they no longer win rural America by 40 points.

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A year ago, I said offhand that we need a site where you can pull images and GIFs of moments from King of the Hill like you can for The Simpsons with Frinkiac or 30 Rock with Funcooker. Well, Esthie Standard Duong decided to take on this challenge and created Boompane, where you can search for any scene from King of the Hill history. Check it out, and thank you, Esthie!

So we all know that MAHA is mostly BS. But what if liberal icons like Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan and Alice Waters are, too? That’s the thesis of Feed the People!, a new book from Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg that posits that industrial agriculture actually does a really good job of feeding lots of people. Rather, instead of scrapping it and trying to shift to inefficient and expensive localized food movements, we should focus on keeping the economies of scale (you can actually get a lot of quality, fresh produce at Walmart). Instead, activist energy and policy work should go toward improving the things that aren’t working, like ethanol subsidies, low wages and too much focus on cattle.

As I noted above, you can kind of see thinking like this help shift the Democratic coalition. What if the pitch to big agricultural states is that, actually, they want to see Conagra, General Mills and ADM thrive (as opposed to MAHA, which has adopted some of the more regressive, back to the land views of Berry, Pollan and Waters)? That they want to provide lots of food at cheap prices and that agribusiness plays a key role in that? That they want to open foreign markets to agricultural exports? That they want to make sure fertilizer makes it through the Strait of Hormuz? Again, they don’t need to win rural America, just lose it by less. And this seems like a potential way of doing so.

After last week’s hockey post, I was welcomed onto the Buffalo Sabres playoff bandwagon with open arms. To which I say, his skate was in the crease!

As for this week’s request, I want to go back to Boompane. When Esthie released it on Monday, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of GIFs that I could create. And then on Tuesday, I was overwhelmed by the sense of dread accompanying threats to obliterate a 90 million person country. So I think it’d be easiest to come up with a little contest: what’s the best King of the Hill GIF that you can create? Other than Pocket Sand, of course. Hit reply and share yours.

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