It's official for the first time in history: The GOP has become
the party of rural white voters
History News Network November 19, 2018, 5:33 AM GMT
If there was one demographic group that blunted the force of the
"blue wave" in this month's midterm elections, it was rural white
voters. Even as Republicans lost control of the suburban areas
that had been their strongholds in the 1980s and 1990s,
Republicans extended their hold over rural America. The GOP is
now on the verge of uniting nearly all rural white voters into a
single party - which has never happened before.
For most of the Republican Party's history, the notion that the
GOP would become the party of rural whites was unimaginable.
Rural whites were the last voter group in the South to leave the
Democratic Party; they did not begin consistently voting
Republican until the 1990s, nearly a generation after suburban
white southerners entered the GOP. But now rural whites in both
North and South are the stronghold of the GOP and the key to the
party's future.
Why have rural whites throughout the country started voting
Republican? And why have Democrats been unable to win them back,
despite making an effort to do so in 2018?
The rural white vote has historically been shaped by opposition
to a perceived threat - but the threat has, until now, varied
according to region, which is why the rural vote has never before
united behind a single party. In much of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, Midwestern rural voters supported
Republicans because they considered Democratic Catholic immigrant
voters in the city a threat. Rural voters in the Great Plains
and South who supported the People's Party of the 1890s were
motivated by the perceived threat of Eastern banking interests.
After the late 1930s, farmers in the Great Plains began voting
Republican in opposition to the New Deal, which they believed
threatened their image of self-reliance. And in the South, rural
white voters opposed Republicans for well over a century because
of lingering memories of the Civil War and racist fears of
northern Republican collusion with black voters.
Rural southern white Democratic voting patterns were so deeply
entrenched that when Republicans attempted to crack the "solid
South" in the early postwar years, they had to rely almost
entirely on suburban, not rural, votes. The suburban strategy
was successful, enabling Republicans to win presidential
elections in the South and pick up congressional seats in the
suburbs. In 1966, George Bush became the first Republican ever
to win an election to Congress from Texas's seventh congressional
district in suburban Houston. In 1978, Newt Gingrich pulled off
the same feat in Cobb County, Georgia, an upwardly mobile
suburban region of metro Atlanta. The rural South remained
Democratic for much longer. Rural white counties in the South
supported Jimmy Carter by landslide margins in 1976, and as late
as 1992 many rural whites were still willing to support Bill
Clinton. But much of the rural South began voting consistently
Republican in the mid-1990s.
The Republican suburban strategy is now over, and the rural
strategy has fully emerged. After forty years of political
success in the suburbs, Republicans are now losing their
longstanding suburban bases of support, even in the South and the
Mountain West. This month, Gingrich's former district in Cobb
County sent a Democrat to Congress for the first time in nearly
forty years, as did other erstwhile Republican suburban
districts. Bush's former congressional district in Houston,
which has voted Republican in every congressional election since
1966, ousted an eight-term Republican incumbent and sent its
first Democrat to the House of Representatives in more than fifty
years.
As the suburbs have turned against the Republican Party of
President Donald Trump, rural whites have embraced the Party's
new message of economic protectionism, immigration restrictions,
and an "America First" foreign policy. In this month's midterm
elections, rural whites sent new Republicans to Congress from
Pennsylvania's southwestern coalmining region and the farming
regions of southern and northeastern Minnesota. Rural whites
were also the key to the Republican Party's Senate victories in
Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. And in Tennessee, rural
whites replaced a centrist conservative senator with a
self-described "hard-core" conservative who was so strongly
supportive of President Donald Trump that she wrote a letter
nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Republican Party's campaign messages targeting the rural
South suggest that rural whites are once again being mobilized by
fear. This time, the enemies include "liberal" politicians who
allegedly want to take their guns, along with "illegal"
immigrants who are allegedly invading the nation. It is perhaps
no accident that the full conversion of rural white southerners
to the Republican Party occurred in 1994, immediately after
President Bill Clinton signed into law the last gun control bill
passed at the federal level and after an emerging conservative
talk radio network, with Rush Limbaugh in the vanguard, succeeded
in branding Clinton and his party as incompatible with white
rural values.
But today the problem that the Democratic Party has with white
rural voters goes far beyond specific policy differences. After
decades of denunciations of "liberal" Democrats from conservative
media and evangelical churches, many rural whites in both North
and South have equated loyalty to the Republican Party with their
own values and self-identity. In nearly every region of the
country - even northern California and the northeastern corner of
Vermont - rural whites are voting Republican, while suburban and
urban voters in both the North and the South lean Democratic. In
2016, rural white voters in Rust Belt states that had not voted
Republican in decades cast their ballots for Donald Trump and
moved their states into the Republican column. Republicans
maintained their hold over most of these areas in this year's
midterms - which suggests that the national unification of rural
white voters under the GOP that occurred in 2016 is poised to
continue.
What does this mean for the future? Because a national culture
of rural white Republican voting has already emerged, Democrats
will not be able to make inroads into the rural white vote merely
through policy proposals or appeals to economic self-interest.
Instead, they will need to connect their party to the values,
self-identity, and anxieties of rural whites. If they fail to do
this - as seems likely - the country will probably experience an
unprecedented political polarization between rural areas and
metropolitan counties.
Few people of the preceding generation ever imagined that the
Republican Party - which for decades represented Wall Street
interests - would become the first party to unify white rural
Americans and become their national mouthpiece. And fewer still
of the preceding generation would have ever predicted that it
would be a New York City billionaire who would take the final
steps to make rural whites Republican. But regardless of the
ironies involved in the process, the GOP is now the party of
rural white Americans, and for better or worse, it is now poised
to give them a larger influence in national politics than they
have had in decades.