We'll elect another president in November 2008 (although it seems sooner, right?) and the question everyone ought to be asking is this: "How will rural Americans vote?"
Rural America elected George Bush in 2000, and again four years later. The DY will be carrying lots of information on the election of '08, but for now, we should consider a bit of history. Seth McKee [1], a political scientist at the University of South Florida, has studied the rural vote in presidential elections more than any other academic. In "Rural Voters and the Polarization of American Presidential Elections," he shows that the rural vote has been decisive in the last four presidential elections.
The evidence for or against a 'Culture War' has overshadowed the electoral significance of the rural vote in contemporary presidential elections. In the 1992 and 1996 elections, Democrat Bill Clinton was able to win the presidency in part because he neutralized the rural vote, winning 47% and 43%, respectively, in these contests. By contrast, in the 2000 and 2004 elections, Republican George W. Bush would not have won the presidency if not for the support he received among rural voters—53% and 64%, respectively, for these contests.
McKee presents voting statistics back to 1952, showing that the split between rural and urban voters has widened even as the older divide between Northern and Southern rural voters has narrowed. In fact, southern rural support of Republican presidential candidates in recent elections has surpassed the support offered by northern rural voters. And in the South, in the 2000 and 2004 elections, rural voters were substantially more Republican than urban voters—a remarkable development in American politics when one considers that southern rural voters were the most loyal Democrats during the history of the one-party Democratic Solid South. In the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, urban-rural polarization reached unprecedented levels because of a national surge in the rural Republican vote.
McKee writes that increased Republican voting in the rural North and South is behind the "unprecedented distance" in rural and urban voting patterns.
In the 1980s, the Republican candidacies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, garnered roughly equal support among rural and urban southerners. Given the general Republican trend in the South, Democrat Bill Clinton’s feat of substantially reducing both the rural and urban southern vote in 1992 and 1996, is nothing short of heroic. But the upward surge in the rural Republican vote in the 2000 and 2004 elections is unprecedented. The urban-rural gap in Republican presidential voting in the South reached an all-time high in 2004, at 22 percentage points (69.8% Republican for rural southerners, 47.4% for urban southerners).
Unlike in the North, where the Republican vote trended upward for both rural and urban voters in 2000 and 2004 (see Figure 4), in the South the urban Republican vote flat lined (47.1% in 2000 and 47.4% in 2004). In addition, consider that in the North the rural Republican vote was 67.5% in 1952 and in 2004 it was 61.3%. The overall downward trend in the rural Republican vote in the North provides a stark contrast to the pattern in the South. In 1952 the rural Republican vote in the South was 43.6% and in 2004 it was 69.8%. Finally, what makes the recent trend in the rural Republican vote in the South all the more impressive is that it now appears that future Republican presidential success may be heavily reliant on rural support—turning the traditional southern urban-rural cleavage on its head…..
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McKee writes that the last two presidential elections have been unlike any in America's past. Oddly, the rural vote has become both smaller and more critical for any candidate's victory. In Bush's capacity to bring small town voters together to support him polarized the country.
It is difficult to overstate the historical significance of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Despite the decline in the rural percentage of the American electorate, the rural vote has become more important because it is so decidedly Republican. Never before has the gap in the presidential vote choice of rural and urban voters been so wide. The closing of the North-South sectional cleavage among rural voters has opened up a chasm between rural and urban voters. The tandem movement of northern and southern rural voters in favor of Republican George W. Bush is the primary reason why political observers and the public writ-large are engaging in discussions of red versus blue America.
Because the overwhelming Republican vote cast by rural voters in 2000 and 2004, was of course given to one candidate, George W. Bush, it remains to be seen whether the same degree of rural support will transfer to the Republican nominee in 2008. The early Republican frontrunners, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, are more socially moderate than President Bush, and thus rural Republican support may decline. Of course, it also matters who the Democratic nominee is. At this nascent stage the early Democratic frontrunners, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, both lack the conservative credentials so enticing to rural voters. Putting aside 2008 presidential speculation, one thing is now clear. George W. Bush came to power averring that he was “a uniter, not a divider," but by uniting rural voters, President Bush greatly divided the nation.