In five deep Southern states: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, Blacks comprise over a quarter of the population, and a larger share of the rural population. blacks and virtually all rural blacks live in the South ( U.S. However, the south is also among the most racially diverse regions of the country. Since over four in ten rural persons live in the South, the concentration of evangelical conservatives in this region has a strong influence on Republican victories. Of course, there are distinct regional and racial/ethnic differences in rural conservatism and voting patterns ( McKee and Teigen 2009), with southern whites being substantially more conservative on social issues. In their recent research, Scala and Johnson (2017) show a consistent gradient of social conservatism on a wide range of social and economic issues moving from large urban cores to the most rural counties. Indeed, the rural preference for Republicans is consistent with research on rural-urban attitudes toward major economic and social issues, including jobs, immigration, abortion, same sex marriage, gun control, and climate change ( Dillon & Savage 2006 Morin 2016 Scala and Johnson 2017). The Republican stronghold in those areas is not new ( McKee and Teigen 2009 Morrill et al. Like Mitt Romney in 2012, Donald Trump garnered large vote shares throughout Appalachia, the rural South, Great Plains, and Mountain West. Instead, Trump’s combined rural and small city over-performance (and Clinton’s underperformance), particularly in the Industrial Midwest, was key to Trump’s unanticipated victory. Therefore, although Trump’s rural advantage certainly contributed to his victory, it was not sufficient to swing the election on its own or to support media rhetoric of a new “rural revolt”. population and a similar share of votes cast in 2016. Moreover, rural voters account for only about 15 percent of the total U.S. Republicans have long won larger rural vote shares, particularly in Appalachia, the Great Plains, and parts of the South ( McKee and Teigen 2009 Scala and Johnson 2017). 2 But Trump’s rural advantage in the 2016 election did not signal a new trend. 31.3%), and his vote share increased with increasing levels of rurality ( Figure 1). To be sure, Donald Trump received a much larger share of the rural 1 vote than Hillary Clinton (63.2 percent vs. In articles like Rural America and a Silent Majority Powered Trump to a Win ( Whitaker 2016), America’s Front-Porch Revolt ( Dreher 2016), and Revenge of the Rural Voter ( Evich 2016), journalists argued that Trump was victorious due to rural Americans’ frustrations with political insiders after years of neglect of rural economic and social problems. The role of the rural vote was a provocative storyline in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S.
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