In the wake of Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s loss in last week’s Virginia gubernatorial election, a lot of analysis focused on how McAuliffe got blown out in the more rural counties in the state. It’s not surprising that he would be; Democrats have seen rural voters shift against them to an increasing extent in recent years. A narrative quickly set in: Someone in the party needs to figure out how to stem the erosion.
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That’s probably a good idea in general, but Virginia may not be the best argument in support of doing so. The shifts across the state from both the 2017 gubernatorial election and last year’s presidential contest were pretty consistent. McAuliffe did worse than Joe Biden in rural counties — and in suburban counties and in urban counties. He did worse in counties Biden won and in counties Biden lost by about the same margin.
So let’s set McAuliffe aside. Again, it is the case that rural counties in the United States have shifted to the right over the past two decades. It is also the case, though, that large urban counties have shifted to the left. Here, for example, is how each county voted for president in 2000 and 2004 (averaging the two-party margin from those years) and in the 2016 and 2020 elections. (Circles are scaled to the total vote in the county; county types come from Pew Research Center.)
You can see that urban counties shift to the left — more Democratic — and that rural ones shift to the right.
On average, urban counties voted 15.6 points more Democratic in the 2016-2020 period then they did in 2000-2004. Rural counties voted 17.3 points more Republican.
If we look at the cumulative vote across county types, the shifts over the past 20 years are obvious. In 2000, rural counties backed Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore by about 15 points. In 2020, they backed Donald Trump by a 32-point margin. Meanwhile, urban counties shifted from backing Gore by 18 points to backing Joe Biden by 32.
Of course, rural counties also have far fewer residents. The shift in the margin of actual votes was different: Biden beat Trump by 9 million more votes in urban counties than Gore beat Bush, while in rural counties Trump beat Biden by only 4 million more votes than Bush had Gore. That’s a large part of why Bush and Gore were nearly evenly tied in the popular vote, while Biden won handily.
But Biden’s win in the electoral college was less overwhelming, a function of narrow wins in a handful of states. This gap between votes and power is where the rural-vote issue becomes important for Democrats. There are 25 states where more people live in rural counties than large urban ones and 23 where the opposite is true. That’s 50 senators from more-rural states and 46 from more-urban ones.
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Interestingly, the evolution of the urban and rural vote nationally isn’t reflected uniformly in states. In the Midwest, including in states that flipped to Trump in 2016, rural counties have often moved more than urban counties. In Arizona and Georgia, states that flipped to Biden in 2020, the opposite is true: Urban counties saw bigger shifts since 2000 and 2004.
We probably ought to avoid trying to divine too much meaning in this, given the various ways in which this analysis is limited. (Among those is that this doesn’t account for the distribution of the state’s population among county types.) We can look at Virginia as instructive, though. It is a state that used to be pretty middle-of-the-road in presidential contests and is now seen as safely Democratic, a function of Democratic gains in suburban areas outside of Washington, D.C.
That, of course, is another part of the story entirely.