← The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show
The Rural Power Behind Trump’s Assault on Blue Cities
01:04:24
President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard from red states into blue cities isn’t just a partisan attack; it’s also a geographic one. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won rural areas by 40 percentage points. And you could see what’s been happening in Washington, D.C., and Chicago as a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers. The rural-urban divide in America has become so big it’s dangerous — for our politics, and for democracy. And yet, just a few decades ago, this divide didn’t exist. Urban and rural areas voted pretty much in lockstep. And for Democrats to gain power again, they’ll need to figure out how to win some of those voters back. So how did the Democratic Party lose rural voters? And what could they do to win their votes back? Suzanne Mettler is a political scientist at Cornell University and the co-author with Trevor E. Brown of the new book “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy.” Mentioned: Rural Versus Urba...
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- [00:00]
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- [01:05]
Ezra Klein
I think there's a particular lens worth using right now as we watch the Trump administration deploying the National Guard from red states into blue cities. We are watching a rural political coalition militarily occupying urban centers. It is moving armed troops in over the objections of their residents, of their mayors, and of their governors. Here's J.B. pritzker, the governor of Illinois.
- [01:29]
J.B. Pritzker
Let me be clear. Donald Trump is using our service members as political props and as pawns in.
- [01:38]
Ezra Klein
His illegal effort to militarize our nation's cities. The Trump administration is doing this while describing these cities as something like enemy territory. They need to be liberated, recaptured, taken back. Trump said this to a room of America's top military leaders.
- [01:55]
J.B. Pritzker
It seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places and we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war, too. It's a war from within.
- [02:15]
Ezra Klein
Trump also said that the people in these cities resisting this occupation, these deployments, that they should be understood as insurrectionists.
- [02:24]
J.B. Pritzker
We have an insurrection act for a reason. If I had to enact it, I'd do that. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I'd do that. I mean, I want to make sure that people aren't killed.
- [02:39]
Ezra Klein
For years I have been skeptical I of warnings that America was at risk of a renewed civil war. There were all kinds of reasons to not take that particularly seriously. But when I see troops being sent into cities over the objections of the people elected in those cities, of the people elected in those states, when I hear them talked about this way, I think you have to take those warnings more seriously.
- [03:04]
J.B. Pritzker
Now, I told Pete we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard.
- [03:11]
Ezra Klein
But military A massive rural urban divide has opened in our country's politics. Urban and rural voters used to vote pretty much in lockstep, but then in the 90s, that split urban voters became reliably Democratic and rural voters became overwhelmingly Republican. We treat this as an inevitability in our politics, but it is only a few decades old, and our political future and stability might rest on reversing it. Certainly for the Democratic Party, any durable political power rests on reversing it. Now, reversing it isn't going to be easy, but it begins with understanding it and taking seriously the resentments that fuel it. Rural versus Urban, a new book by the political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown, is the best place I've found to start. And so I asked Mettler to join me on the show to walk me through how we got here and whether we can get out. As always, my email Ezra kleinshoneytimes.com Suzanne Mettler, welcome to the show.
- [04:22]
Suzanne Mettler
Happy to be here.
- [04:23]
Ezra Klein
So I think a lot of people who have followed politics over the past 10, 20 years assume the big political divide between rural America and urban America is a constant, an inevitability, just a feature of our politics. Is that true?
- [04:44]
Suzanne Mettler
No. The rural urban divide did not exist nationwide in the past. In the United States, if we look at how people voted in presidential elections through the middle of the 20th century, right up to the early 90s, rural and urban Americans voted almost in lockstep, just a couple of percentage points dividing them. That's true as recently as 1992, 2 percentage point gap. Then it starts growing and growing and growing. And it was in 2024 a 20 percentage point gap. All regions of the country have moved in this way, have this big gap. Almost all states have a big rural urban divide. And you know, it's really driving polarization in a particularly pernicious way because it's place based. You know, rural and urban people don't encounter in ways that could soften the divide. And so it's creating an us versus them kind of politics that's really dangerous.
- [05:39]
Ezra Klein
Before we get into what created the divide beginning in the 90s, what kept urban and rural America politically united for so long?
- [05:49]
Suzanne Mettler
Well, you go back to say, you know, the late 19th, early 20th century, as industrialization is happening, rural areas really feel left behind. There's a big agricultural depression in the 1920s. Then the depression comes and rural people at that point are really upset and policymakers are worried there's about to be like a revolution in the countryside, as they call it. But what happens is that Franklin D. Roosevelt steps in and he creates this big rural urban coalition. And to an extent that I was unaware of until we wrote this book, he really put rural Americans front and center in his vision of what needed to happen for the country and created all of these policies that were really designed to lift up rural America.
- [06:37]
J.B. Pritzker
I cannot escape the conclusion that one of the essential parts of a national program of restoration must be to restore.
- [06:45]
Ezra Klein
Purchasing power to the farming half of the country.
- [06:48]
J.B. Pritzker
Without this, the wheels of the railroad and the wheels of the factories will not turn.
- [06:53]
Suzanne Mettler
Rural Americans really appreciated that and they felt the Democratic Party was there for them. And many of them remembered it for their lifetimes, and then their kids did as well, all the way up until the 1990s. In the 1980s and early 90s, rural places were more likely to send Democrats to Congress than Republicans. And to think that a few decades ago there was still really a coalition where there were rural politicians who were really at the forefront in Congress in brokering compromises on all sorts of important policies. When we study the Affordable Care act, for example, you have all of these rural lawmakers who were really playing an important role and influencing the policy right up till the end. And those lawmakers are gone. Bart Stupak, for example, who was a swing vote from Michigan, the Upper Peninsula, and he gets replaced by people who are like Marjorie Taylor Greene going forward.
- [07:55]
Ezra Klein
So it moves from being these people who are functionally moderating polarization in America, who are building bridges. Stupak is a pro life Democrat, very famously, Ben Nelson from Nebraska. The same thing, to the most extreme members of the Republican coalition. Right. You have a thing towards the end of the book where you show that if you're looking at Republicans, who is likeliest to support the lies about the 2020 election, it is heavily overrepresented by Republicans who represent rural districts.
- [08:27]
Suzanne Mettler
Yeah. So, you know, on January 6, 2021, when Congress reconvenes, there's a large portion of the Republican caucus, about 138 members who vote against accepting the votes from all of the states. And they're heavily rural. It's not just that these folks who are being elected in rural areas now are more conservative on policy issues. It's also that they are more willing to go against basic Democratic norms and principles.
- [08:53]
Ezra Klein
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights act into law, and that kicks off this process of ideological polarization where the parties sort into liberal and conservative. The Dixiecrats die out. And I think the most commonly believed story about what happened in the urban rural divide is that they hated the Civil Rights Act. Right. I think if you look at a lot of Democratic accounts of this, you'll see something like that. You don't buy that account.
- [09:19]
Suzanne Mettler
Yeah, well, that's wrong. So for one thing, just look at when the rural urban divide emerged. It's not until the late 1990s. So the story that you're telling usually then the follow up is that the south left the Democratic Party. Well, in fact, it was a lot of urban Southerners who left the Democratic Party, but rural Southerners stuck with it up until the 1990s, and then they left. One of the most striking things that we find is that this rural urban divide is not a function of differences in views about public policy. And so we look exhaustively at public opinion polls and we find that on most issues, if you look at the views of non Hispanic white Americans, there's no difference, no significant difference in their opinions about how much we should be spending money on things like education, healthcare, policing and so on. There are a few issues like abortion and gun rights where there's a gap, but the gap is, is not that large and it hasn't been growing over time. So it doesn't explain this growing rural urban divide. So in other words, while we are divided by place in terms of which party people support, that's not because there's a difference in Americans actual views in those two places on major issues.
- [10:43]
Ezra Klein
So then why are people in rural America electing representatives who are so different on policy to the people they used to elect?
- [10:53]
Suzanne Mettler
So that's what we focus on in the book. What we find is that when the rural urban divide began to grow in the 1990s, it was economic factors that were driving it. And so you'd had economic decline that was happening starting in the 1980s, loss of family farms with agricultural consolidation, loss of jobs in extractive industries like mining and oil and the like, and then deindustrialization, which had already been hitting cities pretty hard. Then it hits with NAFTA and change in trade policies. It hits rural areas to an extent that really surprised me. I wouldn't have realized there was so much industry in rural places. So that's in the late 90s, early 2000s. And as all of that's happening, rural people start to feel that this party that they had long thought was, was there for them or they were at least willing to support on occasion, boat split ticket, whatever. They start to feel like it's abandoned them and that it's no longer there for them. I think it's a factor that Bill Clinton is president during that point in time. So even though most Democrats in Congress were opposed to NAFTA and opposed to a lot of deregulation that was happening, there were just enough Democrats endorsing it and then Bill Clinton signing it into law. And so rural people moved away from the Democratic Party and started supporting the Republican Party.
- [12:19]
Ezra Klein
So let me push on some parts of this story. One thing that your book really did convince me of is that if you look at the timing of different things, the political divergence and the economic divergence really do track each other. But as you say, a lot of the policies people often blame here, not just nafta, there were a lot of free trade policies. There was a lot of deregulation. Deregulation is a big focus of your book. They're heavily supported by Republicans, to say nothing of taxes that are, you know, cut for rich people. And then the spending cuts fall on programs that people in rural America use very heavily. Obamacare in very important ways, subsidizes a lot of healthcare in rural America, helps hospitals there, helps people who are uninsured. There are. The thing I was thinking as I was reading your book was that there is what happens and then there is who is blamed for what happens and where something happened that could plausibly be blamed on Democrats. You see it blamed on them. Why?
- [13:22]
Suzanne Mettler
Well, I think you're putting your finger on why this is so puzzling and paradoxical. So like I said, it starts with the economic stuff, but then the second phase is the development of resentment. You go back to, say, 2008 to 2020. At that point, rural Americans are looking at the Democratic Party and they start to think of it as having a center that is affluent people, wealthy people, people better off than themselves who are running the party and who don't seem to understand them or their communities. But they're creating policies that they're sort of foisting upon them in all sorts of different areas, and they resent it. So that's when grievance begins to grow. So there's this sense of anger and it has become channeled at the Democratic Party, even though that is in many ways unfair. But I think it is true now that much of the Democratic Party, because it's become so distant from rural voters, doesn't understand their situation and their communities. And so, you know, there is a basis in fact there.
- [14:31]
Ezra Klein
In 2008, when George W. Bush is incredibly unpopular, the Iraq war is understood to be a disaster, the financial crisis is in full swing, Obama and the Democrats do quite well in rural America. I mean, it's one of the last times on some of your charts when you see the cities and the rural areas swing together. Yes, but then there's. I mean, the first bailout passes under George W. Bush, but the Democrats support it. The recovery from the financial crisis is slow, and it is slower in rural America. There is a feeling that the banks got bailed out, the cities ended up doing fine, the stock market comes back, but the devastation in rural America really lingers.
- [15:16]
Suzanne Mettler
Yes.
- [15:17]
Ezra Klein
How much did you hear about that and how much do you think that soured people in these areas on the Democratic Party in a kind of final fashion?
- [15:27]
Suzanne Mettler
You know, one of the things we did for our research was interviewing political party county chairs, both Democrats and Republicans, in several states. I drove thousands of miles and talked to a lot of people. I remember one county chair saying to us, you know, we've been in a recession here for 30 years. So I think in a sense, it's all been kind of a blur, from the loss of jobs that was happening in the 1990s and early 2000s as plants closed and workforces downsized, to then what happens in 2008 and beyond with the Great Recession that things went from bad to worse.
- [16:04]
Ezra Klein
How much is this just educational polarization that what you're saying is the cities are much more highly educated, greater density of college graduates. How much is the urban rural language simply obscuring the main issue being the educational divide?
- [16:21]
Suzanne Mettler
Well, the educational divide certainly plays into it and is very important. It's fascinating. You go back to the 1980s, and the average person with a college degree or more in the United States voted for the Republican Party. And then that changes starting in the 90s that that group starts moving toward the Democratic Party. And these are urbanites with higher education. And it's not until 2008 and beyond that rural people start to emulate that same pattern. But there, the average rural person has less education, and then the switch that's happening is from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. So the educational divide is important, but in all of our analysis, we control for that, and rurality still matters. It matters over and above that there.
- [17:11]
Ezra Klein
Being a coalition that is more urban and a coalition that is more rural, and the rural coalition being practically more culturally conservative, more religious, more traditionalist. That's a pretty common structure for political systems. We see this same divergence in many countries. Does that imply there's something, if not inevitable, then heavily predetermined here, given that it's happening in different countries with different political parties who have passed different economic policies at different times.
- [17:46]
Suzanne Mettler
You know, typically other countries have more parties than we do. And the rural urban divide, while it has grown in lots of countries in the past few decades, it's grown most dramatically in the United States. And here I'm turning to the work of Jonathan Rodden at Stanford. He's done a lot of work on this. It's grown more quickly here during that time period. I would also add that it's more consequential in the United States because so many of our electoral institutions give extra political power to, to less populated places. So if you think of the US Senate, for example, every state gets two senators regardless of population. So California has more than 60 times as many residents as Wyoming, but they both have two senators. And you know, that gets replicated in all these other rural states. And that means that in the Senate, when it comes to policymaking, that rural places have extra clout. It also means that in choosing the judiciary in, you know, confirmations of judges, that the rural urban divide matters a lot and of course the electoral college. So right now, for the first time in our history, all of these advantages are consolidated in one party. And that hasn't been the case before.
- [19:02]
Ezra Klein
So I very much buy that point that it is more consequential here because of the somewhat distinctive place based structure of our political system. But I want to hold on this question of what the commonality across countries might teach us or might not teach us. I think a lot of Democrats believe something very similar to what Barack Obama said in the infamous bitter Klinger comments. And if you sort of wipe the argument he made of some of the more condescending language that was in it, I think very much to his regret, what he says is something like this rural America is seeing, and rural places in a much more globalized, digitized, knowledge based economy are seeing their economies weaken. That is true across countries. And the people who stay there, stay there for a number of different reasons. They want to be where they grew up, they are more traditionalist. And as both the people who can leave and want to leave do, and as the people who can stay and want to stay stay, you have less and less economic dynamism and you have more identification with the way things used to be with a better time from before. And that goes alongside more religiosity. It goes alongside more traditional ways of life, like hunting. And it comes with a resentment of the urban elites who you feel are doing this to you and who don't respect your way of life. I'm not saying this is true, but I'm presenting it as a thing I think Democrats believe is true.
- [20:53]
Suzanne Mettler
Right? Right. So there's a lot of stereotypes there. Right. And I grew up in a rural place, and I still spend a lot of time in rural places. So I think if a lot of rural Americans heard this, they would really want to push back and say, no, we're not part of some entirely different sect of people over here. There are lots and lots of rural Americans who do identify as Democrats. It tends to be about one third on average now in presidential elections. And then there are many other Americans in rural places whose ideas are in flux, just like those elsewhere. You're sort of suggesting there's a political sorting going on, that the people move away who have these different policy attitudes.
- [21:40]
Ezra Klein
I've heard it phrased as psychological attitudes. Right. People with more openness to experience, people who want to compete in the urban job markets, that there is a sorting happening.
- [21:52]
Suzanne Mettler
Now, there's other scholars than ourselves who've looked at this very carefully, and they find that that's not driving rural peoples moving to urban places and that in fact, you know, when people change their party, it tends to be after they've made a move. So it's not pulling them to urban places. So I don't think that holds.
- [22:36]
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- [23:15]
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- [24:20]
Ezra Klein
You've been talking a bit about the rise of grievance, politics and resentment. I think there's something upstream of that, which you talk about a bit in the book, but is affinity. And I just don't think there's a way to get around this. Right. I've been covering politics, and particularly Democratic politics since the early 2000s, and the Democratic Party is an urban coalition and it does in many ways feel distant from rural America. I mean, I remember in the George W. Bush years all the talk about losing touch with the heartland. Democrats were the party of John Kerry and coastal liberals and Republicans were the party of the heartland. And Democrats losing touch on God's guns and gays was the way it used to be talked about. And it seems for reasons that aren't primarily policy but might have to do with religiosity and other things, they're developed just more affinity. I mean, there are elites in both parties and the elites in both parties are educated and the elites in both parties are rich. And often the elites in both parties come from or live in cities. And yet the elites in the Democratic Party much more identify with urban America than the elites in the Republican Party. Even when the elites in the Republican Party, like Donald Trump, live in New York City.
- [25:44]
Suzanne Mettler
Yeah. Yeah.
- [25:45]
Ezra Klein
And that affinity feels very important in terms of everything that comes after.
- [25:51]
Suzanne Mettler
Yes. Well, I think that there, you know, you're really explaining the second dynamic that we identify, this sense that rural people have of elite overreach coming from the Democrats and that Democrats don't understand them. So I think that's a real thing and I agree with you. What I would say for the Democratic Party is that unless it can overcome that, it's going to be a minority party. It's not going to win back the Senate again until it can overcome the rural urban divide. It's going to have very challenging time getting a very big margin in the House. It's going to be challenged in presidential elections and in many state level elections. And that's problematic for the country. It means that for rural people that they're subjected to one party government in so many places, if the Democratic Party just decides to throw up our hands, we're not going to go organize in rural places. Which is what's been happening. It's really problematic for democracy at so many levels.
- [26:56]
Ezra Klein
The way your book is structured, you sort of say there's this economic divergence. And then layered on top of that very quickly is what you call elite overreach. And that's what we're talking about here. And the way you describe it is it quote, unquote. It was not any one issue that tipped the scales, but rather the persistent commonality that ran across him. From 2008 onward, rural Americans perceived an urban elite that sought to impose itself on far flung places, controlling residents lives through new rules and procedures in which they felt they had little voice. And you argue that the issue here was not the policy, but the sense of respect or disrespect, of listening or not listening, of representation or absence of representation, that there was something sort of beneath policy that drove this. Tell me about that. That sense of we are being ruled from afar.
- [27:55]
Suzanne Mettler
You know, we illustrate it in the book through a couple of different policy areas. And one is renewable energy, which actually you might find interesting because of the ideas that you explore in abundance. So there's a fascinating literature. Scholars have looked at many different parts of the country. And when wind and solar comes into rural places, which is of course where the land is and where you need to develop, so often happens without rural communities having a chance to have a voice. So there'll be a big developer that comes in, a company that cuts a deal with a big landowner, and all of this happens and agreements are made before the local community hears about it. And then people are upset. And what scholars have found who study very carefully public opinion on environmental issues, and we do as well, there's not a big difference between rural and urban Americans in their view on environmental issues. And in fact, a lot of rural people care very deeply about the environment because the land is so important to them. And yet they feel that the process is really problematic. There's a study that was about wind farms in Indiana, and to quote a person in that they quoted, they said, it's not that I'm against wind energy, I'm against how it was done here.
- [29:15]
Ezra Klein
I found this raised a lot of skepticism for me. I mean, first, I'm not against X, where X is clean energy, affordable housing, mass transit. I'm just against how it was done. Here is, I feel like the most common structure of I'm against X. But in abundance, as you know, I spend a lot of time talking about and researching and reporting on how clean energy projects in particular are cited in different parts of the country. And what I can say for sure is that red states cite different forms, all kinds of different forms of energy, much more easily than blue states do because they have much less complex and deliberative procedures for siting them. If you want to build a wind farm in Texas, in rural Texas, it is just much easier than building it in rural California or rural New York. And yet rural Americans are not turning against the government of Texas for the lack of deliberative, consultative and veto oriented citing. So something about that felt off to me because I would think that would then lead to much more anger in red states where it is much easier to just plow through a new development than it is in blue states, which have, again, much more veto oriented structures.
- [30:38]
Suzanne Mettler
Here it's very interesting that it's been easier for Republican governors to roll out these policies, and I would love to look under the hood and find out the dynamics that are happening there, but we don't do that in our book. But I would say it's problematic to have people in cities who accuse rural people of NIMBYism when renewable energy is needed, particularly by urban people. And so this can be a really extractive kind of industry that just is one more thing where rural people are taken advantage of and where their needs are not taken into account.
- [31:19]
Ezra Klein
I'm getting at something even a little bit larger here than clean energy. One thing that your book just seems to accept and even talk about is that the attribution of blame for policy is very, very muddy. And it relies a lot on how people get their information and whether they get their information. You talk about a particular study where Republican policies close rural hospitals and people are mad and Republican vote share goes up in the next election because people blame the party they already don't like. I could tell a story where people don't like the renewable energy coming in. And even though it's coming in more aggressively in red states because of their procedures, nobody knows that much about citing rules. So they're still blaming the party they see as connected to renewable and energy. But there's something here about how many of the policies that you describe as particularly painful or destructive or irritating to rural America are not promulgated by Democrats, but Democrats get blamed anyway.
- [32:31]
Suzanne Mettler
Yes, no, that's true. And politics is full of paradox. What's going on there, we argue, is that there's another component of our explanation that I haven't gotten to talk about yet, and that is the organizational component. So here the question is, who is on the ground in a place connecting the dots for voters, saying to them, here's what's happening in public policy and here's how it matters for our community. Here's the party that is best representing your interests and values, you know, doing that connecting of the dots. So political parties need to do this for people. And so in rural places, the Democratic Party has become very weak. And so it's much harder for them to really be there making the case. And then the Republican Party, for the same kinds of reasons that all civic organizations have suffered over time, has had challenging times as well. And yet it has been helped by other organizations that are prevalent in rural places. So we find that evangelical churches occur on a greater per capita basis in rural places, and so do gun groups affiliated with the National Rifle Association. And so those groups have been playing a supportive role to the Republican Party in helping to connect the dots for voters and to get out the vote. Essentially, Democrats used to be aided by labor unions in rural places, and that's really been decimated very much with deindustrialization.
- [34:02]
Ezra Klein
I want to actually spend a moment on the media side of this. I've talked to Democratic politicians, Barack Obama said this to me once, who say that they felt able to run in rural areas in 2000 or 2008 or 1996, but as depending on the place we're talking about as talk radio and Rush Limbaugh took hold, then later as Fox News rolled out. Now we have social media and all these other hyper partisan and hyperpolarized forms of information that they don't even feel they can get a hearing because the people who are interested in politics, what they are hearing is so angry at Democrats and so polarized that there's no way to get around it.
- [34:53]
Suzanne Mettler
Well, I have no doubt that the media matters. And so in our analysis unit, we do all this quantitative analysis, and we were limited to the things where we had data for all counties over these many decades, and we didn't have a way to measure the rise of talk radio. Rush Limbaugh, and where are people listening to it, and Fox News and the loss of local newspapers and all of these important changes in the media. And I'm sure they're important, but this is where Democratic Party organizing is so needed and crucial. I remember a county chair in southern Ohio saying, look, there's no one here shouting from the rooftops, you know, back against Fox News. They're lying to you. And so, you know, whether it's the media or organizations, that's the problem, that in rural places, people aren't hearing another message very strongly.
- [35:48]
Ezra Klein
Political scientists use, I always think, the slightly strange tool, the feelings thermometer, where they ask people to rate other groups on a 1 to 100 scale. And you have this data for white rural America. And on a scale of 1 to 100, they put black Americans at a 70, pretty good. Hispanic Americans at 67, gay men at 57, illegal immigrants at 39, pretty low, and Democrats at 14 points. So Democrats are rated well less than half as highly as illegal immigrants. By the way. This is not just a rural America. White urban Democrats put Republicans at 17 points. But the hatred is much more concentrated at the political outgroup, at least in these measures, than at any other group.
- [36:36]
Suzanne Mettler
Exactly. Yeah. So the way we sum this up, if you think of what I was saying earlier about public policy issues and how we don't differ very much, rural and urban Americans on these issues, we barely disagree, but we are bitterly divided and the divide is over partisanship. So in other words, it doesn't have to be this way. It's teamsmanship, it's tribalism, but it's not based in really different views about issues.
- [37:05]
Ezra Klein
But it does create then these self reinforcing dynamics, but it creates anger. I mean I think about, you know, the soft version is maybe Barack Obama's bitter clinger's comment. The harder version is Hillary Clinton's deplorables comment. It creates. I mean I remember this so strongly from the Bush era and I see it now. When Republicans are in power, urban liberals do feel threatened, do feel like that power is being deployed against them, do feel very angry at what is being done. And then it creates political strategy. Because parties work with limited resources, they have to choose where to put their energy and their attention. In 2016, Chuck Schumer famously says, for every blue collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin. Now whether you can repeat that is I guess, a reasonable question to ask. But you do see the Democratic Party begin to say to itself, we've lost rural America. Throwing good money after bad there is not worth doing. Let's try to pick up the suburbs. How do you think about that? Both as a matter of short term and long term political strategy, It's a losing strategy.
- [38:30]
Suzanne Mettler
Given what I was saying earlier about the electoral institutions in the United States. A party has to be able to win less populated places if it wants to have national power. You know, FDR really understood this and contemporary politicians don't. It's not the same to pick up those suburban voters, you need to be picking up rural voters. So it's crucial to build that bridge because otherwise you're not going to win the Senate. The Electoral College is an uphill battle. And then when it comes to House districts, we might think, oh well, that's not so much an issue. Well, it is because Democratic votes are wasted, in effect, because they're consolidated in densely populated places. And so Republican voters tend to be much more evenly distributed across the landscape. So it's much easier for Republicans to draw districts that favor the them than for Democrats to do so.
- [39:26]
Ezra Klein
It would be good if you could do that. But I guess the question, I don't want to put any words in Chuck Schumer's mouth, but that I would hear from Democrats is can you? One thing you have in the book is quite a few Democrats who used to win rural areas saying, I couldn't win that today. Bob Kerry, who was a very successful politician in Nebraska, runs again in Nebraska later on, loses easily. Bill Clinton says now quite a long time ago, I don't know that I could win in Arkansas anymore. There are a pretty small handful of Democrats, Jared Goldin in Maine, Maria Glissenkamp Perez in Washington, who now run in and win pretty rural areas. So while yes, you're right, of course, given the structure of the American political system that it would be better if you could have a mixed geographic coalition. Is it actually possible or do you just have to work from a place of futility?
- [40:31]
Suzanne Mettler
No, it's not futile. But what it takes is a long term strategy of deep, full time, year round organizing and listening to rural Americans. Parties like to put a focus on messaging. Messaging is very surface level and it does not have enduring effects. But organizing really matters. And an illustration of this, we were talking earlier about Congress and the basic pattern from 1994 to the present is that rural places have elected Republicans. But in the middle of that time things went in a different way. And that was when Howard Dean became the head of the Democratic National Committee 2005 through 2008. And his strategy was to work hard in all 50 states and particularly to organize in rural counties. Some of the county party chairs that I interviewed still remember how well organized they were at that time. And then Barack Obama comes along and uses similar kinds of organizing strategies and it really makes a difference. So 2006, Democrats take back Congress and then in 2008 Barack Obama wins and he does very well in rural places. And so with that kind of organizing you can Turn things around. But if you're just going to rely on messaging, it's not going to happen.
- [41:50]
Ezra Klein
So then how do you tell the story of what happens after 2008? And I'll say I respect Howard Dean's 50 state strategy and I don't think the Democratic Party did great organizing in the coming years. But there is a collapse in Democratic support after Barack Obama becomes president that I don't think is explicable by organizing right. It is a genuine collapse. 2010 is a wipeout for Democrats in much of rural America. And I think a lot of Democrats I know, they say that it's that Barack Obama was black. That is their basic view of what happened. I don't think it's your view of what happened, but what is your view of what happened?
- [42:31]
Suzanne Mettler
Let me speak about both things, about was it because Barack Obama was black? And then also what happened? So a lot of people think the rural urban divide is reducible to racism. We find that when it started in the 1990s, that was not the case. There was plenty of racism in the country among non Hispanic whites, but it was as prevalent among urban Americans as among rural Americans. Then you get to the period 2008 to 2020, and at that point we find that there is a slightly greater concentration of racist attitudes among rural Americans than urban. It's one factor among several that is driving the divide at that point. The way we understand it is part of the resentment of the Democratic Party because rural people feel that they're not understanding our communities, these Democratic leaders, but they're really working hard on behalf of urban communities, people of color and immigrants, but they don't really understand us. And so it's a factor, but it's not a sole cause. But what is really important is that then after you had all that organizing energy that gets mobilized in the period from 2005 to 2008, Barack Obama gets elected and there's a lot of rural people who've worked hard in the campaign and they're really excited and they want to do more. And then what happens is that the ball is dropped by the Democratic Party and it becomes just a mailing list of the dnc and it all goes into the ether. And then meanwhile, the Tea Party mobilizes among the Republicans and they claim the day. But it didn't have to be this way. It was not inevitable.
- [44:15]
Ezra Klein
I want to focus on the first point you made there. There's a quite big but also somewhat subtle distinction between anti black attitudes causing the anger and the sense that The Democratic Party is prioritizing other groups over you, causing anger. White rural America's sense of the Democratic Party sees all these other groups as in need of help and respect and is prioritizing them ahead of them. Right. Arlie Hochschild's idea about other groups are getting to cut in line. And then there's a real rise of discourse around white privilege. And this creates, I mean, we've seen this in our politics, a lot of anger. Right. You're telling me in a poor community that has very few jobs now, where life expectancy is going down, that I have white privilege and your urban coalition is what needs the help, or illegal immigrants need the help. I'd like you to talk a bit about that distinction between the divide being discriminatory and the divide being a feeling that that coalition doesn't prioritize me. So I'm going to go with a coalition that does.
- [45:27]
Suzanne Mettler
I think it's a really important issue in that I think a lot of urban Democrats assume that what's at play in this rural urban divide is that rural white people are racist. And what we find is that it's not reducible to that, but the way we understand it is. It's in the same period that, as we're saying, there's the sense of elite overreach on the part of Democrats and where rural Americans are looking at the Democratic Party and thinking they don't understand us, they don't care about our communities. And on this, they're viewing the Democratic Party as really prioritizing the needs of people of color in urban communities and immigrants, but not really understanding or caring about rural people who are struggling as well.
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- [48:09]
Ezra Klein
So into this moment of divide steps of all people, Donald Trump, who is, I would say, more associated with New York City than any human being alive, is almost himself an emblem of New York City. How does he become this vehicle for the channeling of rural rage?
- [48:34]
Suzanne Mettler
Well, I think about this Republican county chair that we interviewed in southern Ohio, and the area had voted for Bill Clinton twice and for Democrats for Congress. But then the economy really goes downhill, the loss of all these jobs, closing of all these plants. And what he said was people got tired of government. And then he said, along comes Donald Trump, and yeah, he's rich and he's done all these things, but he got people really excited here, he said. And he said, why are you kowtowing down to these elites? They're not like you. This is Trump referring to Democrats. And of course it's ironic because as you're saying, Trump himself is an elite. He's urban, et cetera. But people felt that there was an affinity, that Trump was hearing them, that they had been left behind, that they hadn't been listened to. And so he was channeling that grievance and resentment.
- [49:31]
Ezra Klein
Trump hates all the right people.
- [49:34]
Suzanne Mettler
That's a way of putting it.
- [49:35]
Ezra Klein
But that's a powerful force in politics. I mean, we were talking earlier about elites, and one of the things I was saying was that both parties have elites. And I mean, Hillary Clinton, who runs against Donald Trump in 2016, her political background is in Arkansas, right? She's first lady of Arkansas and has a lot of experience alongside her husband in a state with much more rural concerns than being a real estate developer in New York City and a guy who builds golf courses. But Trump in his campaign just hates the urban elites in the cities. And that is a stronger building of affinity, it seems to me, than more traditional identity. I think if Bill Clinton had run against Donald Trump In 2016, Bill Clinton, with all of his skill as a politician weaving together concerns of rural and urban residents. I don't think there's any doubt Donald Trump would have beat him in rural America. Whether he would have beat him, I don't know. But I think he would have beat him in rural America because Bill Clinton by that point, no longer hated, never did in fact, hate the right people. And I think that raises some really difficult questions for what builds or degrades affinity when you're trying to rebuild these relationships. I think Democrats want to believe they can do it all through positive sum policy. Obamacare can help rural hospitals and the inflation reduction act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill can try to do rural broadband and, you know, site factories in rural America. And it seems to me that so long as there is not a pre existing sense of affinity, it's all going to fall flat politically.
- [51:28]
Suzanne Mettler
Well, Donald Trump has been masterful at reinforcing and widening the divide that was already growing and creating this us versus them politics and demonizing people on the other side. And so that makes it harder and harder to build affinity. And yet it's the only hope. Now, most of my scholarship until a few years ago was all about public policy and what policy can do. But I think we're at a point now where these divides are so great that policy can't do it all by itself. Of course, rural places really need policies and all sorts of ways to help with the economy and with healthcare and education, et cetera. But it's really crucial to find ways to bridge the divide. And that's where deep long term organizing is so important.
- [52:22]
Ezra Klein
Is there a way right now with Trump in which you are seeing the rise in the most dangerous possible version of this divide, which is to say not a divide on policy, not different votes, but a move towards violence? I've heard a lot of people who study civil wars say it is a bad sign when the federal government is ordering armed troops from some states into other states over the objections of those states governors. And these are all cities. They're ordering them into those cities, mayors. And you can look at this, and I think I have been looking at this and say this sure looks like a rural coalition militarily occupying the cities whom it has come to see as the power centers of their enemies.
- [53:18]
Suzanne Mettler
Well, you know, it's unthinkable, it's so un American to be, you know, telling the military you can use cities as training grounds and to be sending in federal troops and federalized National Guard into cities. And this comes on top of Trump for the Past few years using a lot of rhetoric against cities, but now using actual violent force against cities. So how is this possible? It's possible because of the rural urban divide. It's possible because this us versus them politics has become so deep.
- [53:58]
Ezra Klein
Do you feel, as a political scientist, I mean, your last book was about threats to democracy and authoritarianism. I mean, do you think we are coming a lot closer to something that could spiral into civil war or something like that?
- [54:13]
Suzanne Mettler
That's a really horrifying, harrowing thought, obviously. But my colleagues who are scholars of comparative politics, who study democratic deterioration around the world have been very worried about because they see the things happening here that have happened elsewhere and led to such demise. My focus, as someone who is always hopeful about the future, is how do we avoid that? And it's going to take a lot of deep rebuilding and organizing.
- [54:48]
Ezra Klein
Let's talk about how we avoid that or begin to reverse some of the urban rural splits. Let's take as a premise what you say is right, that it would be good if the Democratic Party invested much more in organizing and contesting in rural areas. I was surprised as I read the end of the book, that you did not have more to say about who the Democratic Party runs, particularly nationally, and what they run on. I would assume you can tell me if you think this is wrong. It is going to be easier for an organizer in much of rural America if it's Andy Beshear on top of the ticket than if it's Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris. That it was in some ways easier when it was when the Democratic Party was led by Harry Reid and Tom Daschle in the Senate, that now both of the congressional leaders are from New York. The political scientist Steve Telles likes to talk about costly signals, the sending of costly signals. Things where you're doing something that show you're a different kind of Democrat or Republican than others are. Donald Trump sends lots of costly signals. He attacks urban America and urban elites in personal, vicious, vitriolic terms. He talks about sending the National Guard into their cities. He's talked about that for a long time. And he takes the conflict because it communicates to the people he wants to communicate to that he's on their side. If the Democratic Party really wanted to do this right, if it said this is a we have to figure something out here and that requires doing things that are different than what we have been doing, what can it do?
- [56:27]
Suzanne Mettler
Yeah. So at the moment, you know, Trump has done very well getting elected in rural places by bigger and bigger margins. Fueled by grievance. But grievance ultimately does not put food on the table. It doesn't bring you health care, affordable healthcare in your community, and it doesn't help you to, you know, your kids, to get a good education. Democrats need to be in rural places to say these issues are the priorities of our party, to help with the economy, health care, education, et cetera, and to be there to make those connections for people if they're not there, if they're not campaigning there, if statewide Democrats are not going to rural places to campaign, if the party is not putting full time organizers in rural, rural places, then people feel abandoned there and they feel this party doesn't care about us.
- [57:22]
Ezra Klein
I guess one place where I was skeptical of Yearbook's insistence that policy wasn't a big contributor here was that most of the modern politicians who you talked about who had been successful in rural America were known not just for their moderation, but for their the Democratic politicians, I mean, not just for moderation, but for often running against the Democratic Party. Joe Manchin, who in his first Senate campaign shoots the cap and trade bill Democrats are considering with a gun to show what a different kind of Democrat he is. Ben Nelson in Nebraska, who is such a thorn in the side of the Democrats during Obamacare. The same with Congressman Stupak. Bob Kerry, who is often very annoying to the Democratic Party when he was a representative from Nebraska. Similarly, John Bel Edwards, who was the governor of Louisiana until pretty recently, a Democrat, very, very, very pro life. And I mean, it looked to me, and it looks to me like the Democrats who have done well in rural areas actually do differ from other Democrats on policy. Jared Goldin is a supporter of tariffs. Marie Glusingham Paris is a very different kind of politics and policy than her colleagues. I don't know if what is happening here is that shifting on policy is a way of communicating you're not like the other Democrats or if it is actually the policy itself that matters. But it felt like a tension to me in your book that on the one hand, the Democratic politicians who succeeded in rural America and still succeed look on policy very different than the Democrats in urban America. And on the other hand, there's a real push at they don't need to do anything on policy, they just need more organizers.
- [59:07]
Suzanne Mettler
I would say looking at the members of Congress for whom we took kind of a deep dive and the Affordable Care act, to look at all of these rural members, many of whom were swing votes on the Affordable Care act, but most of them ultimately voted for it. And Some of the rural Democrats ultimately voted against it, but some of them were very progressive on economic issues and they were trying very hard to be faithful to their communities in that some of them, as you say, were pro life and not pro choice. And so they had concerns until there was a deal cut on how the ACA would handle abortion. But I would say while incorporating rural districts and states may mean more moderates, it doesn't necessarily mean that because some rural places a politician will represent them in a way that's more progressive and that's being true to their constituents.
- [60:11]
Ezra Klein
Have we seen any of that in modern times? I mean, I would like that to be true. It would be, from my perspective, better if you could just go full economic populist and moderate on nothing else and win. And my leftist friends tell me that's true. And I just don't see the representatives, I mean, even somebody like Dan Osborne in Nebraska who runs not as a Democrat because the Democratic Party is just too toxic to run on in Nebraska, he is economically populist. And he also says, I will build the wall on the border with my own hands, he swings very far right from where Democrats are at that moment on immigration. I just don't see the examples of these Democrats winning back or even non Democrats independent somehow winning back rural areas without running against some parts of the Democratic Party's platform from the right. And I'm not saying this because I would like to see more Democrats move to the right, but I think that that seems to be what has worked.
- [61:26]
Suzanne Mettler
I think it's less moderating on issues than what issues you prioritize. I think that what, you know, the political party county chairs that we spoke to told us is that the issues that are most important to people are the economy, healthcare, education, et cetera. They were not mentioning gun rights and abortion and immigration as top issues. So it's a matter of the level of priority that you give those, but also different kinds of stances in different places could work.
- [62:02]
Ezra Klein
So I guess that raises the question of what happened to all those Democratic representatives who did run in exactly that way. I have watched some of the Democratic politicians doing that just not be able to survive. Sherrod Brown is a very effective economic populist. And despite how much he has emphasized that set of issues for his entire career, he has gone from being extremely competitive in Ohio's rural districts to completely destroyed in them when he was running against a car dealer who had had to settle a bunch of wage theft lawsuits. But the same is true for Jon Tester in Montana tester was again a very, very capable bread and butter, pocketbook issues politician. Something has happened where the politicians who are doing doing this strategy to a T cannot survive. Not even in the most conservative states. Montana and Ohio are far from the reddest states we have in the union now. And it just seems to me that we are seeing that the drag of the national Democratic Party is making the just talk about the popular stuff strategy no longer viable when maybe 10 years ago or 12 years ago, it was still viable.
- [63:27]
Suzanne Mettler
So, you know, what I've been describing is this historical process over several decades of how the rural urban divide emerged and it's now very deep and the causes for it are multilayered and entrenched. So you can't just overcome it with a particular race. There has to be this deep long term effort to rebuild bridges to rural America by the Democratic Party being there. And when we spoke with Democratic county chairs in all of these different states, they would say to us that they didn't feel supported by their state level party and they didn't think the DNC even knew about them. These are local organizations where in the past there were lots of people who'd come out for meetings. Now it's a handful of people and they're senior citizens and they need support. But they did feel that when Howard Dean was the head of the DNC they were getting that kind of support and they were able to make a real difference. So that's what's essential. It's also the case that while it can seem really daunting in a statewide election, giving some support to rural areas can make a big difference if you use the strategy of losing by less, which is something they all talk about. There were county chairs like when we went around Georgia and they'd had these very tight races, statewide Senate races where Senators Ossoff and Warnock got elected. And the Democratic county chairs would say, if I can get my margin here to not be just 34%, but get it up to 37% for the Democratic candidate. And if everybody does that in rural areas, we're going to win statewide. And they did it and they felt very proud of it and they felt they made a big difference in getting those candidates over the finish line in those very tight races. And that's exactly the kind of thing that can make a huge difference in statewide races for president and for governorships and for senators all across the country.
- [65:37]
Ezra Klein
We'll end it there. As our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?
- [65:41]
Suzanne Mettler
Yeah, I love this Question. So I want to recommend first another book about rural America by a political scientist, and that's Katherine Kramer's book, the Politics of Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scotland Walker. This book came out several years ago in 2016. It's based on years of her going to all sorts of conversation groups around rural Wisconsin and really listening to people and understanding how they were thinking about politics in the state. And so it's deeply insightful, and we really built upon her work. But then for my other choices, I decided we shouldn't just be reading nonfiction in this time. I feel strongly about that. So my second choice is going to be a novel, and that is Barbara Kingsolver's book, Demon Copperhead. And, you know, Barbara Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky, and she writes this book that's, you know, really based in Appalachia and just really helps people to understand much more the nuance and complexity of what's going on in one place in rural America. And then finally I found that this year, well, when I was a young person, I loved poetry a lot. And this year I decided I need more poetry back in my life. So I have been reading Mary Oliver's book Devotions, which is a collection of a lot of her best work. She grew up in rural Ohio, and then she lived a lot of her life on Cape Cod. And, you know, it's about the beauty of natural places, and I think it's also a great tribute to rural America.
- [67:14]
Ezra Klein
Suzanne Mettler, thank you very much.
- [67:16]
Suzanne Mettler
Great to be with you. Thank you.
- [67:34]
Ezra Klein
This episode of the Israel Clancho is Produced by Jack McCordick. Fact Checking by Will Peichel. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Roland Hu, Marina King, Kristin Lin, Emma Kelbeck and Jan Cobel. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carol Sabaro and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christine Semiliewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rhodes Strasser.