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Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown, "Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Ursula Hackett
I was groomed to become one of his wives.
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Podcast Host (Disorder)
This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
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Ursula Hackett
I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now.
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Podcast Host (Disorder)
It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
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Trevor Brown
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Ursula Hackett
Hi, I'm Ursula Hackett of the New Books Network. Today I'm delighted to welcome Trevor Brown, one of the authors with Suzanne Mettler of Rural versus the Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Welcome to the show, Trevor.
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Trevor Brown
Yeah, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
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Ursula Hackett
Well, I'm delighted to talk to you today about some of the really pressing issues that you describe and discuss in the book around polarization, around inequality and the status of American democracy, questions that we're all thinking about to varying degrees now, and the question in particular of how it is that people in rural and urban areas started to see politics in terms of us versus them. So I wondered if I could ask you at the outset how it is that this project came about. How did you and Suzanne get working on Rural versus Urban?
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Trevor Brown
Sure. Yeah. So like many of the projects that I work on, this, this project starts from personal experience. I grew up in a rural area just outside of Springfield, Ohio, in a post industrial area. And over the course of my early childhood, throughout high school, I really started to see politics shift. Suzanne is also from a rural area. She still has family who lives in a rural area. And so this book in many ways is, is starts from a personal place for us. We started working on it during the pandemic while I was a graduate student at Cornell where Suzanne is a professor. We both showed interest in sort of the growing divide between rural and urban dwellers. And as many book projects start, started as a conference paper and then as we collected data, started to understand the breadth of the puzzle, it really took off from there.
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Ursula Hackett
So we all think a lot about the ways in which American politics is nationalizing and media markets are consol. So can you just give us a sense at the outset of how big the differences are in political attitudes and sort of social reality between rural and urban dwellers in the U.S. yeah, it's a fantastic question.
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Trevor Brown
So it's worth distinguishing sort of what we try to explain, what others have tried to explain, and, and what we, we what other scholars of polarization study. So you know, as early as the 1990s, rural and urban Americans actually voted quite similarly in presidential and congressional elections. That might come as a surprise to many. It came as a surprise to me. But Starting in the 1990s, rural and urban Americans really started to diverge. Democrats consolidated their support in urban, large metro areas, particularly among college educated voters. And rural areas began to shift in the 1990s to support, to supporting Republican candidates. This was accentuated by the rise of Donald Trump. So by 2024, rural and urban Americans diverged by something like 20 points. And at the county level, in terms of who they're voting for for president. There are other scholars who study affective polarization between rural and urban Americans. And we also sort of study this. So we also find that it's not just that rural and urban Americans are in different parties, but they also have a sort of resentment towards one another. Rural Americans see, urban Americans is. Another is a group of college educated, larger Democratic elites who are sort of foisting policies on them. There's a rich literature that argues that lots of rural Americans foster resentment. One thing I should note, and one thing we're somewhat surprised to find, but we did find is the, that the rural urban political divide, you know, as pervasive as is it runs up and down, you know, state and local ballots, shapes most of our elections. It actually can't be explained by public opinion. So we do a pretty exhaustive study of public opinion and find that on issues ranging from things like the size of government to, to things like funding the police, all the way to those sort of nasty culture war issues that lots of people seem divided over today, rural and urban Americans differ somewhat small or in somewhat small magnitudes, but not enough to explain the growing partisan divide that we see.
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Ursula Hackett
And you have this idea of sequential polarization, which is this central theoretical sort of framework for thinking about how it is that this polarization between rural and urban came about. Can you just talk us through, through what is sequential polarization and how does it unfold?
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Trevor Brown
Yeah, sure. So sequential polarization is really, it's a concept that is attempting to get scholars of polarization. Suzanne and I consider ourselves part of that group, to think about the way that timing matters in the production of polarization with the rural urban divide. We argue that polarization really happens in, in, in two or three steps. So like I said earlier, through the 1970s and 1980s, rural and urban Americans largely voted for at the presidential level at very similar rates. There was little divergence to be explained. But Starting in the 1990s, the first step of sequential polarization is the growth of what we call place based inequality where, where rural economies really start to falter out in part because of sort of deregulation, the consolidation of farming. We find empirically that the job loss and population loss in that period is associated with rural dwellers moving to the Republican Party. So that's step one, step two, starting in the, starting in 2008 through 2020, we see two things happen. So that place based inequality activates a feeling of resentment among rural dwellers. They feel, you know, that they're. The Democratic Party is no longer on the side of people like them. They'd be in the, to, to view the Democratic Party as party of college educated elites. That's foisting policies on them without their, without their input. Additionally, in that same period, conservative organizations play a really important role in cementing the divide. So we show that white evangelical churches on the, which are disproportionately located in rural areas are associated with Republican vote sharing. And throughout the book we draw on sort of, we triangulate and draw on other sorts of evidence to show that other conservative organizations have also played a role, including right to life organizations, again, white evangelical churches and gun groups associated with the National Rifle Association. These groups are really important because voters are not fools, but they also need help in understanding the political world. And organizations play an important role in terms of socializing and then mobilizing voters to act. On the Democratic side in rural areas, we show that labor unions used to play a role in socializing voters and getting them out to vote. And a number of factors have led to unions declining in both rural and urban areas. And that has helped facilitate polarization.
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Ursula Hackett
So is it a fair characterization to suggest that the Democratic Party is really coming in for a lot of blame in the account of how the rural urban divide appears, both for things like supporting things like NAFTA and the sort of trade deals that you were describing in that step one where there's all this, these, these job losses and also then in that step two about elite overreach for being kind of sneery about people who live in these areas. So, so is that, is that a fair characterization that it's, that it's, it's, it's. The Democratic Party is really in large part to blame, at least at the first and second stages of your, of your process?
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Trevor Brown
Well, so yes, this is a fantastic question. So I think both parties are certainly to blame, sort of at an empirical level. We know Republicans have supported NAFTA and supported deregulation Republicans have played some role. We don't show this in the book, but I would argue the Republicans have played some role in sort of facilitating the divide through the rhetoric. If you just sort of look at President Donald Trump's rhetoric about cities, it's certainly, certainly exacerbating divisions. But Democrats get blamed by rural voters, we argue, through the 1990s and 2000s, in part because of their support for policies like NAFTA and in part because they start to build up support in urban areas. So we did some interviews with, with lawmakers who, who told us that in part because President Clinton was in office when NAFTA was signed and because unions and many progressive Democrats ran a pretty, pretty pervasive campaign against nafta, that rural voters felt felt abandoned by some of the policy moves that Democrats made in the 1990s.
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Ursula Hackett
And it seems also that a lot of the opposition that you see in these rural areas arising at that second point in your sequential polarization sequence relates not just to the substance of the policy, but actually to policy process. So you cite, and there's a really interesting story in the book about Andrew Cuomo and the gun safety laws in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. And the suggestion is that because he failed to consult with gun owners owners, he was doing it in a very secretive way. These sort of gun control measures, no public debate, pushing things through very quickly, that that was the thing that people objected to, that this sort of, it's the, it's the lack of consultation, it's the fact that the process is, is less than ideal. And I'm just wondering how far that is what ordinary people really object to here. Whether for example, they don't mind bare knuckle tactics in the service of other goods. I'm thinking here about the ways in which Republicans sort of hardball with respect to Supreme Court hearings and nominations and so on. That's the one that springs to mind. But there are many other examples. So I'm just, I'm just wondering how far people really do care about process rather than, rather than the, the, the substance.
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Trevor Brown
Yeah, that's a, it's a great question. So we, we do find evidence of that. Not just the case of, of gun regulation, but also the case of environmental policies. So, you know, in order for the United States to transition, frankly, other advanced democracies to transition to a more sustainable economy, we will need rural buy in. And what we find is that many attempts to sort of advance renewable energy, like through wind and solar, those sorts of things in rural places have been, been Rejected, not necessarily because rural people have particularly conservative or views on the environment per se. There's great research by Emily diamond that shows that rural dwellers have a really complicated view of the land. They have a strong place based attachment and they see themselves as stewards of the land. But what often happens at the state and local level is developers behind closed doors might cut a deal with local lawmakers and local residents feel like they've been left out of the process. Now certainly a lot of people in American politics feel this way. To the extent to which the United States is still considered a democracy, a lot of people feel left out of decision making processes at the local level. And what we argue is that Republicans have been able to capitalize on this in rural areas in particular.
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Ursula Hackett
So they've been able to mobilize through these various organizations that have really sort of activated some of these resentments and exacerbated them and have contributed to this divide. So one of the things I was thinking about actually when I was reading about, because about, about the farmers in particular within these rural areas and the agricultural interests, of course you're also talking here as a story about manufacturing because you're talking a lot, a lot of this is about rural manufacturing and the job losses in those sectors. But just thinking about the rural agricultural sector, it reminded me of Chloe Thurston and Emily Zakin's work on farmer debtors and the, the ways in which the disparities between kind of wage earner debtors and farmer debtors becomes politically significant and ways in which farmers are able to organize and win for themselves relatively generous treatment. And I suppose one of the things planks of your book is about the various supports that the federal government offered to those who are in rural areas and specifically farmers within rural areas. And I wondered if you could elaborate on that and tell us that story.
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Trevor Brown
Yeah, sure. So, I mean one, one thing we haven't talked much about, this is a great question, is sort of what happened? What were politics like before rural versus urban, before sort of the divide opened up. And what we argue is that the United States there was long sort of has been a potential for a rural urban divide in the United States. Running up to the Depression in particular, rural areas were hit hard. There were real instances where it looked like rural and urban Americans could be sort of baked into different political parties starting in the 1930s. What we show in chapter two of the book is that as part of the New Deal, President Roosevelt put rural areas in a sort of privileged position in the New Deal through the agricultural Adjustment Act. And we argue and show that this sort of coalition building and policy making in the 1930s had long running effects up until the divide and starting in the 1980s. Now during the 1980s, 1990s, rural areas and farms in particular hit hard times and the Democratic Party really didn't do a whole lot in response to that.
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Ursula Hackett
But it's interesting, I think, to just reflect on this idea of the benefits that some of these areas are able to, or have historically at least been able to accrue. But also today, of course, one of the things that you note at VAR in the book, in which I think we're often thinking about, is the ways in which rural areas are indeed advantaged institutionally, whether in the Senate, for example, where the malapportionment has become so much more extreme over time and more and more skewed towards rural states and of course also the Electoral College. And so I suppose the question is, you know, given the number of institutional advantages that these rural areas have, why do they feel so disempowered?
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Trevor Brown
It's a great question. It's a, it's a great irony of contemporary American politics. So, yeah, so we've mostly been talking about the causes of the rural urban divide, and I should spell out some of the consequences. One of the reasons, among others, that we think the rural urban divide is, is so consequential in the United States is, you know, and as, as listeners might know, the rural urban divide has opened up in several other Western democracies. Jonathan Rodden and Twanze Hujuman have done really great work to show that this divide has opened up in several other countries. We argue it's particularly consequential in the United States because of the unique electoral institutions in the United States. So as you mentioned, the Senate gives disproportionate power to sparsely populated areas. The Electoral College does so as well. The US House of Representatives also gives disproportionate power to rural areas through the way it allocates power through elections. And what we argue is that this is not a a big problem until one political party consolidates rural Americans and gets all of those voters into their party. And, and once, once a party does do that, they gain a, I would say a small but nevertheless significant electoral advantage. So to be, to be pretty nuanced about this, we're not arguing that rural Americans are necessarily democratic dominating American politics. I mean, after all, they're only 20% of the population. And in many cases, rural Americans do have good reason to feel like they're culturally disrespected and politically disempowered. Many rural areas are among the poorest, as work by Katherine Eden has shown. But at the same time, because of those electoral institutions, once a political party consolidates rural areas, they get a small but important electoral boost. And as we show, this boost has mattered across various elements of American government, including the U.S. senate, where the last several times the Republican Party has won power in the US Senate, they have come from states that do not represent a majority of the country. Four of the current Supreme Court justices on the court handing down very significant decisions were appointed and confirmed by senators who represent less than half of the US So there is a bit of a paradox here where on the one hand, rural Americans are slightly over advantaged in electoral institutions, but on the other hand, they do have good reason to feel somewhat disempowered.
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Ursula Hackett
So it leads very neatly onto a sort of broader question which I have for you and I was thinking about throughout reading your wonderful book, which was how far this rural urban divide, rural urban divides are intrinsically problematic. You talk about a pernicious divide or whether it's just this one that's problematic. So I wondered if you could reflect a bit more on the sort of, I suppose the, in placing the US rural urban divide in cross national context, but also specifically thinking about that mechanism whereby this divide is exacerbated by these various organizations.
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Trevor Brown
Yeah, sure. So divisions in politics are to some extent healthy, as political scientists are sort of insistent upon. And polarization is not necessarily a bad thing. It might reflect people simply disagree on issues. What is really sort of troubling in the American case is that rural and urban Americans have come to see themselves, particularly rural areas have come to see urban areas is largely an existential threat to them. So in addition to the sort of electoral consequences, there is a social consequence at the grassroots level. So we did interviews in several states, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio and Michigan, and there are still Democrats who exist in those rural counties. And what this polarization has done has really in many cases ripped apart the social fabric of communities. But it's also made many Democrats in rural areas feel scared to participate in politics. We heard one story of, of a, of a woman who was almost run off the road because of a bumper sticker on her car. We heard stories of, of Democrats who felt scared to, to identify themselves as Democrats other people because they were worried people would not shop with their business. So you know, there, there's the sort of like macro level institutional concern that this emboldens a really extreme party currently right now, the Republican Party that can sort of run on this grievance politics, but at the grassroots level in the, in the lives of day to day people, polarization also is, is really a problem.
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Ursula Hackett
Well, let's talk about grievances. Let's talk about race in particular because of course we haven't really mentioned it yet. And it's an important part of, important component of that distinction, racial attitudes between rural and urban areas. And it's interesting because as I was reading and by the way, the interviews are extraordinary. They're really very, very powerful, powerfully illustrate some of the processes and the experiences that you're describing here. But I was thinking about Acharya Blackwell and Sen's deep roots and the sort of dimension they describe of, you know, sort of behavioral path dependence and ways in which even within, you know, the white south, there are very substantial differences in racial attitudes between those counties that had been from a more slaveholding back in the 19th century in those counties that weren't, but which are otherwise very similar in terms of those characteristics. And one of the things that really came out of that project was that they weren't differing. These people in these places weren't differing in social attitudes on all those other culture war issues that you mentioned at the beginning there on gun rights and on abortion and so on. But they were differing on race and racial attitudes. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how racial attitudes inform the rural urban divide that you're, you're describing here.
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Trevor Brown
Yeah, it's a great question and it's unfortunate that we're just now getting around to it. That's on me. We should be clear up front that when we talk about the rural urban divide in the United States, we're largely referring to non Hispanic white people. From what we can tell by the data, this is largely driven by non Hispanic whites. So rural and urban African Americans, rural and urban Latinos, as far as we can tell, don't vote in different ways. And so this raises the question, like, what role does racism play? So we show through a few different ways that racism does matter, but it's only a part of a broader story. So we discussed sequential polarization earlier. Step one, sort of place based inequality opens up space for a sort of grievance politics about cities and Democrats who are highly educated. Another group that is associated with cities because they have historically clustered there are African Americans and racial minorities. And what we show is that in the second step of sequential polarization, anti black racism is activated and becomes associated with Republican vote share in rural areas. Now I will caution that, you know, the divide on racial attitudes between rural and urban non Hispanic whites is relatively small compared to other ways of thinking about it. Particularly if you look at divides by education, it's smaller compared to those. And as I said, there are multiple things sort of happening at this time. You know, organizations are organizing and getting people mobilized into politics. And the last thing I note here is that anti black racism only becomes associated with Republican vote share after sort of material issues sort of fall out or after the rural economy falls out. So to sum up, it's a complex process whereby economic inequality opens up space for anti black racism to become activated. And what we're arguing here is consistent with some other scholarship. Leonardo Buccini and his co author have shown that deindustrialization across the United States has activated white identity politics. And I think what sort of our book shows and what their research shows is that this sort of either orism that often happens in political science, like is it economic anxiety, is it racism? Is probably over simplistic and both are likely at work.
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Ursula Hackett
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean I think you paint a pretty compelling picture of this concatenation of forces that are serving to drive rural and urban America further apart. And you describe the various ways in which that is dangerous for democracy. Could you elaborate on those dangers for us?
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Trevor Brown
Yeah, sure. So as I mentioned at the beginning earlier, you know, the one real concern is that this small electoral advantage I mentioned isn't gives the Republican Party extra institutional advantage. So we know that the Republican Party is advantaged in the Senate in part because the Republican Party, when sparsely populated states, the Senate is on everyone's mind right now, the electoral College. You know, President Donald Trump won the presidential election, his first campaign, without winning the popular vote. So the combination of a really extreme Republican Party with institutional advantages we think pushes democracy to the brink. The, the second concern for democracy is, is really an us versus them sort of polarization at the grassroots that I sort of touched on before. But it's, you know, it's worth elaborating that, that rural Americans in particular view The Democratic Party, as is, is pretty toxic. And, you know, this set of forces, his, you know, produced a politics where both, both actors on both sides see the other as really an existential threat to, to one another. The third thing I would mention as it pertains to democracy is that at the local level, at the state and local level, this creates a sort of one party rule in both rural and urban areas. So when most people go to vote now, because of how high polarization is, the election has already been decided through the primaries. So in many counties where we talk to state party officials, they struggled to get, Democrats in particular, struggled to get candidates to run because it was simply a county that was not a county or a state that was not, or congressional seat that was simply not winnable, quote, unquote winnable because of how far right rural Americans have gone. And, you know, polarization is high across rural and urban areas, but still, 30% of rural Americans are Democrats, and they deserve some voice and representation in government because of the forces we've talked about. They currently do not have that.
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Ursula Hackett
And we've all been looking at some of the profiles that the Democratic Party has been offering in 2026, ahead of the midterms. Right. People want to take the fight to the, to the much redder areas and try to maybe go for Democratic candidates that are a little bit more unusual or that, you know, that maybe atypical candidates to try to take the fight to some of those redder areas. But I mean, I suppose in the context of this, really, in the run up to the 2026 midterms, and with a series of really bitter fights that we're seeing playing out in some of these primaries, and bitter fights also more broadly about the future of American democracy? Do you have any green shoots of hope that arise from your work about the prospects for remedying some of the damage that you see here that's being done to the fabric of American democracy?
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Trevor Brown
Yeah. So this is a great question. Political scientists and social scientists are really good at identifying problems. Are we good at offering solutions is another question. So I will say that one thing that gives me, and I think, Suzanne, a lot of hope is the work that a lot of local party activists and party leaders do at the local level. So we strategically selected a number of rural counties and interviewed local party leaders to sort of understand how politics were unfolding on the ground. And what we find is that, you know, as other research has shown, state and national parties are currently very weak in the United States organizationally and in their void, you know, local leaders have stepped up. They, as we argue in the book, they deserve far more help than they currently get. But the work they're doing now to try to engage people in politics is quite helpful. And that sort of brings us to the sort of, like, what is to be done part of the book and what we argue is that in order to curb or reduce the rural urban divide in the United States, the Democratic Party in particular needs to engage in and party building. You know, over the last several decades, the party has become especially weak as an organization. In the interviews we did, we found that local party leaders often struggle to make contact with the state party. The state party itself is often very weak, and that that bodes very poorly for electoral democracy. And in electoral democracy, you need political parties to help organize politics. Now, you might wonder, well, what about the Republican Party? The Republican Party is also fairly weak, I think, as President Donald J. Trump's ability to capture the Republican Party shows. But what's distinct about the Republican Party at the local level, when we think about the rural versus urban development divide, is that they've been aided by activist groups, evangelical churches in our NRA groups. And, you know, while these groups help mobilize people into politics, they often help mobilize people into politics around a set of issues that aren't necessarily representative of the proverbial median voter or even the median Republican. As we argue in the book, typical rural Republican has slightly more conservative views on guns, abortion, et cetera, relative to Democrat urban dwellers, but they're not that big. But the organizational infrastructure helps make the party more extreme.
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Ursula Hackett
Trevor, that's absolutely wonderful. I have one final question for you, and that is, what's next for you? What are you working on at the moment?
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Trevor Brown
It's a great question. So Suzanne and I are currently setting up some other projects on this. We're particularly interested in how local media and national media and state and national political actors have sowed this divide. So that's one area of research. In addition to that, I am writing a book on the politics of healthcare labor in the United States and how that's developed over the last two centuries. I've published one article of that in the Journal of Policy History. And the core question there is, given that, as we saw during COVID 19, we often consider care workers, health care workers, essential workers. But if you sort of look under the HUD and how hospitals, nursing homes, doctors offices operate, healthcare workers are often not treated as essential. Why is that the case? It turns out that on the structure of the American healthcare system, and social policy in particular has. Has a lot to do with that. So that's what I'm currently working on.
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Ursula Hackett
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been extraordinary reading your work and hearing about it for listeners. The book is Rural versus Urban the Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy. Trevor, thank you so much for speaking with me.
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Trevor Brown
Thank you so much for having me, Ursula. Appreciate it.