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      The Forces Tearing Us Apart Aren’t Quite What They Seem

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      A toxic combination of racial resentment and the sharp regional disparity in economic growth between urban and rural America is driving the class upheaval in American partisanship, with the Republican Party dominant in working class House districts and the Democratic Party winning a decisive majority of upscale House seats.Studies from across the left-right spectrum reveal these and other patterns: a nation politically divided by levels of diversity; the emergence of an ideologically consistent liberal Democratic Party matching the consistent conservatism of the Republican Party, for the first time in recent history; and a striking discrepancy in the median household income of white majority House districts held by Democrats and Republicans.Four scholars and political analysts have produced these studies: Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO, in “The Congressional Class Reversal,” “Socioeconomic Polarization” and “Education Polarization”; Oscar Pocasangre and Lee Drutman, of New America, in “Understanding the Partisan Divide: How Demographics and Policy Views Shape Party Coalitions”; and Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory, in “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left.”Podhorzer’s analyses produce provocative conclusions.“Throughout the first half of the 20th century,” he writes in his class reversal essay, “Democrats were solidly the party of the bottom of the income distribution and Republicans were solidly the party of the top half of the income distribution.” In 1958, Podhorzer points out, “more than half of the members of the Democratic caucus represented the two least affluent quintiles of districts. Today, that is nearly the case for members of the Republican caucus.”The result? “In terms of income,” Podhorzer writes. “the respective caucuses have become mirror images of each other and of who they were from Reconstruction into the 1960s.”The shift is especially glaring when looking at majority-white congressional districts:From 1994 through 2008, Democrats did about equally well with each income group. But, beginning with the 2010 election, Democrats began doing much better with the top two quintiles and much worse with the bottom two quintiles. In 2020, the gap between the top two and the bottom two quintiles was 50 points. Since 2016, Democrats have been doing worse than average with the middle quintile as well.The income shift coincided with a deepening of the urban-rural partisan schism.“As recently as 2008,” Podhorzer writes, “40 percent of the Democratic caucus represented either rural or sparse suburban districts, and about a fifth of the Republican caucus represented majority-minority, urban or dense suburban districts. Now, the caucuses are sorted nearly perfectly.”As if that were not enough, divergent economic trends are compounding the urban-rural split.In his socioeconomic polarization essay, Podhorzer shows how median household income in white majority districts has changed.From 1996 to 2008, in majority white districts, there was virtually no difference in household income between districts represented by Republicans and Democrats. Since then, the two have diverged sharply, with median household income rising to $80,725 in 2020 in majority white districts represented by Democrats, well above the $62,163 in districts represented by Republicans.Podhorzer ranks congressional districts on five measures:1) Districts in the lowest or second lowest quintile (the bottom 40 percent) of both income and education; 2) districts in the lowest or second lowest quintile of income but in the middle quintile or better for education; 3) districts that are not in the other four measures; 4) districts that are either in the fourth quintile on both dimensions or are in the fourth for one and the fifth for the other; and 5) districts that are in the fifth quintile for both dimensions.Using this classification system, how have majority white districts changed over the past three decades?“For the entire period from 1996 through 2008,” Podhorzer writes,none of the white socioeconomic groups was more than 10 points more or less than average, although we can see the highest socioeconomic group trending more Democratic through that period. But everything changed dramatically after 2008, as the two highest socioeconomic groups rapidly became more Democratic while the lowest socioeconomic group became much less Democratic.In 1996, Democrats represented 30 percent of the majority white districts in the most educated and most affluent category; by 2020, they represented 86 percent. At the other end, in 1996, Democrats represented 38 and 42 percent of the districts in the bottom two categories; by 2020, those percentages fell to 12 and 18 percent.In examining these trends, political analysts have cited a growing educational divide, with better educated — and thus more affluent — white voters moving in a liberal Democratic direction, while whites without college have moved toward the right.Podhorzer does not dispute the existence of this trend, but argues strenuously that limiting the analysis to education levels masks the true driving force: racial tolerance and racial resentment. “This factor, racial resentment,” Podhorzer writes in the education polarization essay, “does a much, much better job of explaining our current political divisions than education polarization.”In support of his argument, Podhorzer provides data showing that from 2000 to 2020, the Democratic margin among whites with and without college degrees who score high on racial resentment scales has fallen from minus 26 percent to minus 62 percent for racially resentful non-college whites and from minus 14 percent to minus 53 percent among racially resentful college- educated whites.At the same time, the Democratic margin rose from plus 12 to 70 percent over those twenty years among non-college whites low in racial resentment; and from 50 to 82 percent among college-educated whites low in racial resentment.In other words, in contradiction to the education divide thesis, non-college whites who are not racially resentful have become more Democratic, while college-educated whites who are racially resentful have become more Republican, in contradiction to the education divide thesis.Podhorzer makes the case that “the unequal distribution of recovery after the economy crashed in 2008 has been profoundly overlooked,” interacting with and compounding divisions based on racial attitudes:Educational attainment was among the important characteristics associated with those increasingly prosperous places. Add to that mix, first, the election of a Black president, which sparked a backlash movement of grievance in those places left behind in the recovery, and, second, the election of a racist president, Donald Trump — who stoked those grievances. We are suffering from a polarization which provides an even more comprehensive explanation than the urban-rural divide.Changing racial attitudes are also a crucial element in Abramowitz’s analysis, “Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left,” in which he argues that “Democrats are now as ideologically cohesive as Republicans, which is a big change from a decade ago, when Republicans were significantly more cohesive than Democrats.”Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn 1972, on a 1 to 7 scale used by American National Election Studies, Abramowitz writes,Supporters of the two parties were separated by an average of one unit. The mean score for Democratic voters was 3.7, just slightly to the left of center, while the mean score for Republican voters was 4.7, to the right. By 2020, the distance between supporters of the two parties had increased to an average of 2.6 units. The mean score for Democratic voters was 2.8 while the mean score for Republican voters was 5.5.The ideological gulf between Democrats and Republicans reached its highest point in 2020, Abramowitz observes, “since the ANES started asking the ideological identification question.”While the movement to the right among Republican voters has been relatively constant over this period, the Democratic shift in an increasingly liberal direction has been more recent and more rapid.“The divide between supporters of the two parties has increased considerably since 2012 and most of this increase was due to a sharp leftward shift among Democratic voters,” Abramowitz writes. “Between 2012 and 2020, the mean score for Democratic voters went from 3.3 to 2.9 while the mean score for Republican voters went from 5.4 to 5.5.”By far the most important shift to the left among Democrats, according to Abramowitz, was on the question “Should federal spending on aid to Blacks be increased, decreased or kept about the same?” From 2012 to 2020, the percentage of Democrats saying “increased” more than doubled, from 31.3 to 72.2 percent. The surge was higher among white Democrats, at 47.5 points, (from 24.6 to 72.1 percent), than among nonwhite Democrats, at 31.2 points, from 41.1 to 72.3 percent.The growing ideological congruence among Democrats has significant consequences for the strength of the party on Election Day. Abramowitz notes that “For many years, white Democrats have lagged behind nonwhite Democrats in loyalty to Democratic presidential candidates. In 2020, however, this gap almost disappeared with white Democratic identifiers almost as loyal as nonwhite Democratic identifiers.”The increase in loyalty among white Democratic identifiers, he continues, “is due largely to their increased liberalism because defections” to the right “among white Democrats”have been heavily concentrated among those with relatively conservative ideological orientations. This increased loyalty has also been apparent in other types of elections, including those for U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. In 2022, according to data from the American National Election Studies Pilot Survey, 96 percent of Democratic identifiers, including leaning independents, voted for Democratic candidates for U.S. House and U.S. Senate.In their paper, “Understanding the Partisan Divide,” Pocasangre and Drutman of New America focus on race and ethnicity from the vantage point of an analysis of voting patterns based on the level of diversity in a district or community.“Republican districts,” they write,are some of the least ethnically diverse districts. But voters within these districts have diverse policy views, particularly on economic issues. Democratic districts are some of the most ethnically diverse districts. But voters within these districts are mostly in agreement over their views of both social and economic issues.Pocasangre and Drutman’s study reinforces the widespread finding “That Republican districts are predominantly white and, for the most part, less affluent than the national average. In contrast, Democratic districts are less white than the average but tend to be more affluent than average.”Pocasangre and Drutman find that the household income differences between Democratic and Republican-held seats continues to widen. From 2020 to 2022, the income in Democratic districts rose from $95,000 to $100,000 while in Republican districts it grew from $77,000 to $80,000, so that the Democratic advantage rose from $18,000 to $20,000 in just two years.Republican districts, the two authors continue, are “conservative on both social and economic issues, with very few districts below the national average on either dimension.” Democratic districts, in contrast, areprogressive on both policy domains, but have quite a few districts that fall above the average on either the social or economic dimension. In particular, of the 229 Democratic districts in 2020, 14 percent were more conservative than the national average on social issues and 19 percent were more conservative than the national average on economic issues.On average, competitive districts tilt Republican, according to the authors:Very few competitive districts in 2020 were found on the progressive quadrants of social and economic issues. Instead, of the 27 competitive districts in 2020, 70 percent were more conservative than the national average on economic issues and 59 percent were more conservative than the national average on social issues.These battleground districtslean toward the progressive side when it comes to gun control, but they lean toward the conservative side on all the other social issues. Their views on structural discrimination — an index that captures responses to questions of whether Black people just need to try harder to get ahead and whether discrimination keeps them back — are the most conservative, followed by views toward abortion.In addition, a majority of competitive districts, 57 percent, are in Republican-leaning rural-suburban communities, along with another 13 percent in purely rural areas. Democratic districts, in contrast, are 17 percent in purely urban areas and 52 percent in urban-suburban communities, with 31 percent in rural-suburban or purely rural areas.I asked Pocasangre about this tilt, and he emailed back:For now, most swing districts go for Republicans. The challenge for Democrats right now is that most of these swing districts are in suburbs which demographically and ideologically look more like rural areas where Republicans have their strongholds. So, Democrats do face an uphill battle when trying to make inroads in these districts.But, Pocasangre continued, “majorities in Congress are so slim that control of the House could switch based on idiosyncratic factors, like exceptionally bad candidates on the other side, scandals, changes in turnout, etc. Democrats need to get lucky in the suburbs, but for Republicans, they are theirs to lose.”Pocasangre and Drutman classified districts as Democratic, Republican, or competitive, based on the ratings of the Cook Political Report in the 2020 and 2022 elections: “Competitive districts are those classified as toss ups for each cycle while the partisan districts are those rated as solid, likely, or lean Democratic or Republican.”The Cook Report analysis of 2024 House races lists 20 tossup seats, 11 held by Democrats, 9 by Republicans, one of which is held by the serial fabulist George Santos, whose threatened New York seat is classified as “lean Democratic.” Eight of the 11 Democratic toss-ups are in three states, four in North Carolina and two each in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Four of the nine Republican tossups are in New York, along with two in Arizona.The changing composition of both Democratic and Republican electorates and the demographics of the districts they represent is one of the reasons that governing has become so difficult. One result of the changing composition of the parties has been a shift in focus to social and cultural issues. These are issues that government is often not well equipped to address, but that propel political competition and escalate partisan hostility.Perhaps most important, however, is that there now is no economic cohesion holding either party together. Instead, both have conflicting wings. For the Republicans it’s a pro-business elite combined with a working class, largely white, often racially resentful base; for the Democrats, it’s a party dependent on the support of disproportionately low-income minorities, combined with a largely white, college-educated elite.One might question why all these cultural and social issues have come so much to the fore and what it might take for the dam to give.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Resentment Fueling the Republican Party Is Not Coming From the Suburbs

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      Rural America has become the Republican Party’s life preserver.Less densely settled regions of the country, crucial to the creation of congressional and legislative districts favorable to conservatives, are a pillar of the party’s strength in the House and the Senate and a decisive factor in the rightward tilt of the Electoral College. Republican gains in such sparsely populated areas are compensating for setbacks in increasingly diverse suburbs where growing numbers of well-educated voters have renounced a party led by Donald Trump and his loyalists.The anger and resentment felt by rural voters toward the Democratic Party is driving a regional realignment similar to the upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Even so, Republicans are grasping at a weak reed. In a 2022 article, “Rural America Lost Population Over the Past Decade for the First Time in History,” Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy and a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire, notes that “Between 2010 and 2020, rural America lost population for the first time in history as economic turbulence had a significant demographic impact. The rural population loss was due to fewer births, more deaths, and more people leaving than moving in.”The shift to the right in rural counties is one side of a two-part geographic transformation of the electorate, according to “The Increase in Partisan Segregation in the United States,” a 2022 paper by Jacob R. Brown, of Princeton; Enrico Cantoni, of the University of Bologna; Ryan D. Enos, of Harvard; Vincent Pons, of Harvard Business School; and Emilie Sartre, of Brown.In an email, Brown described one of the central findings of the study:In terms of major factors driving the urban-rural split, our analysis shows that rural Republican areas are becoming more Republican predominantly due to voters in these places switching their partisanship to Republican. This is in contrast to urban areas becoming increasingly more Democratic largely due to the high levels of Democratic partisanship in these areas among new voters entering the electorate. These new voters include young voters registering once they become eligible, and other new voters registering for the first time.There are few, if any, better case studies of rural realignment and the role it plays in elections than the 2022 Senate race in Wisconsin. The basic question, there, is how Ron Johnson — a Trump acolyte who derided climate change with an epithet, who described the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement” and who proposed turning Social Security and Medicare into discretionary programs subject to annual congressional budget cutting —- got re-elected in Wisconsin.In 2016, Johnson rode Trump’s coattails and the Republican trail blazed by the former governor Scott Walker to a 3.4 point (50.2 to 46.8) victory, and swept into office, in large part by running up huge margins in Milwaukee’s predominately white suburbs. That changed in 2022.Craig Gilbert, a fellow at Marquette Law School and a former Washington bureau chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, conducted a detailed analysis of Wisconsin voting patterns and found that Johnsonperformed much worse in the red and blue suburbs of Milwaukee than he did six years earlier in 2016. Johnson lost Wauwatosa by 7 points in 2016, then by 37 points in 2022. He won Mequon in Ozaukee County by 28 points in 2016 but only by 6 in 2022. His victory margin in Menomonee Falls in Waukesha County declined from 32 points six years ago to 14 points.So again, how did Johnson win? The simple answer: white rural Wisconsin.As recently as 17 years ago, rural Wisconsin was a battleground. In 2006, Jim Doyle, the Democratic candidate for governor, won rural Wisconsin, about 30 percent of the electorate, by 5.5 points, “Then came the rural red wave,” Gilbert writes. “Walker carried Wisconsin’s towns by 23 points in 2010 and by 25 points in 2014.” In 2016, Johnson won the rural vote by 25 points, but in 2022, he pushed his margin there to 29 points.In her groundbreaking study of Wisconsin voters, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prompted a surge of interest in this declining segment of the electorate. She summed up the basis for the discontent among these voters in a single sentence: “First, a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers, second, a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources, and third a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, described how the urban-rural partisan divide was driven by a conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s in his book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.”These controversies included two Supreme Court abortion decisions, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (in 1989) and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (in 1992); the 1989 appointment of Ralph Reed as executive director of the Christian Coalition; the fire-breathing speeches of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention (Buchanan: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war for the soul of America”); and the 1993 “gays in the miliary” debate, to name just a few.“The 1992 election represented a milestone,” Hopkins writes:For the first time in the history of the Democratic Party, its strongest electoral territory was located exclusively outside the South, including Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Maryland in the Northeast; Illinois in the metropolitan Midwest; and the Pacific Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California — all of which have supported the Democratic candidate in every subsequent presidential election.In retrospect it is clear, Hopkins goes on to say, that “the 1992 presidential election began to signal the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”Hopkins compares voter trends in large metro areas, small metro areas and rural areas. Through the three elections from 1980 to 1988, the urban, suburban and rural regions differed in their vote by a relatively modest five points. That begins to change in 1992, when the urban-rural difference grows to roughly 8 percentage points, and then keeps growing to reach nearly 24 points in 2016.“For the first time in American history, the Democratic Party now draws most of its popular support from the suburbs,” Hopkins writes, in a separate 2019 paper, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992—2018,” Democratic suburban growth, he continues, “has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”The same process took place in House elections, Hopkins observes:The proportion of House Democrats representing suburban districts rose from 41 percent after the 1992 election to 60 percent after 2018, while the share of Democratic-held seats located in urban areas remained fairly stable over time (varying between 33 percent and 41 percent of all party seats) and the share of rural districts declined from 24 percent to 5 percent of all Democratic seats.Hopkins pointedly notes that “The expanded presence of suburban voters and representatives in the Democratic Party since the 1980s was accompanied by a dramatic contraction of Democratic strength in rural areas.”Justin Gest, a political scientist at George Mason University whose research — presented in “The White Working Class” and “Majority Minority” — focuses on cultural and class tensions, has a different but complementary take, writing by email that the rising salience of cultural conflicts “was accelerated when the Clinton Administration embraced corporate neoliberalism, free trade, and moved Democrats toward the economic center. Many differences persisted, but the so-called ‘Third Way’ made it harder to distinguish between the economic approaches of Democrats and Republicans.”The diminution of partisan economic differences resulted in the accentuation ofthe very cultural differences that Gingrich-era Republicans sought to emphasize — on issues like homosexuality, immigration, public religion, gun rights, and minority politics. These issues are more galvanizing to the Upper Midwest regions adjacent to the South (West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana) — which are trending more conservative.The Upper Midwest, Gest continued, isa region unto itself — defined by manufacturing, unions, and social conservatism. As the manufacturing industry has moved offshore, union power declined and one of the richest, most stable parts of America became uniquely precarious inside a single generation. It is now subject to severe depopulation and aging, as younger people who have upskilled are more likely to move to cities like Chicago or New York. They have total whiplash. And Trump’s nostalgic populism has resonated with the white population that remains.Gest is outspoken in his criticism of the Democratic Party’s dealings with rural communities:Democrats have effectively redlined rural America. In some corners of the Democratic Party, activists don’t even want rural and white working class people in their coalition; they may even deride them. Rural and white working class Americans sense this.One of the dangers for Democrats, Gest continued, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and ‘white-adjacent’ members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”Nicholas Jacobs and Kal Munis, political scientists at Colby College and Utah Valley University, argue that mounting rural resentment over marginalization from the mainstream and urban disparagement is a driving force in the growing strength of the Republican Party in sparsely populated regions of America.In their 2022 paper, “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide,” Jacobs and Munis contend that an analysis of voting in 2018 and 2020 shows that while “place-based resentment” can be found in cities, suburbs and rural communities, it “was only consistently predictive of vote choice for rural voters.”In this respect, conditions in rural areas have worsened, with an exodus of jobs and educated young people, which in turn increases the vulnerability of the communities to adverse, negative resentment. Jacobs and Munis write:“Rural America,” Jacobs and Munis write,continues to grow older, poorer, and sicker — urban America wealthier and more diverse. These stark material divisions have contributed to partisan schisms, as individuals increasingly live in places that are politically homogeneous. A consequence of this is that, as Bill Bishop concludes, Americans “have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”In their 2022 paper “Symbolic versus material concerns of rural consciousness in the United States,” Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Zack Crowley, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Minnesota, sought to determine the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.Trujillo and Crowley conclude that “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” Stands on what Trujillo and Crowley call “symbolic” issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”While rural America has moved to the right, Trujillo and Crowley point out that there is considerable variation: “poorer and/or farming-dependent communities voted more conservative, while amenity- or recreation-based rural economies voted more liberal in 2012 and 2016” and the “local economies of Republican-leaning districts are declining in terms of income and gross domestic product, while Democratic-leaning districts are improving.”The Trujillo-Crowley analysis suggests that Democratic efforts to regain support in rural communities face the task of somehow ameliorating conflicts over values, religion and family structure, which is far more difficult than lessening economic tensions that can be addressed though legislation.The hurdle facing Democrats is reflected in a comment James Gimpel, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, emailed to me, describing the roots of rural discontent with Democratic urban America:The disrespect is felt most acutely by the fact that dominant cultural institutions, including mass media, are predominantly urban in location and orientation. Smaller towns and outlying areas see themselves as misunderstood and mischaracterized by these media, as well as dismissed as out-of-touch and retrograde by urban populations. There is a considerable amount of truth in their perceptions.A May 2018 Pew Research Center report, “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities,” found large differences in the views and partisanship in these three constituencies. Urban voters, according to Pew, were, for example, 62 percent Democratic, 31 percent Republican, the opposite of rural voters 54 percent Republican, 38 percent Democratic. 53 percent of those living in urban areas say rural residents have “different values,” while 58 percent of those living in rural communities say urban residents do not share their values. 61 percent of those living in rural communities say they have “a neighbor they would trust with a set of keys to their home” compared with 48 percent in urban areas.I asked Maria Kefalas, a sociologist at Saint Joseph’s University who wrote “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America” with her husband Patrick J. Carr, who died in 2020, to describe the state of mind in rural America. She wrote back by email:My best guess would be that it comes down to brain drain and college-educated voters. It has always been about the mobility of the college educated and the folks getting left behind without that college diploma. Not one high school dropout we encountered back when we wrote about Iowa managed to leave the county (unless they got sent to prison), and the kids with degrees were leaving in droves.Those whom Kefalas and Carr defined as “stayers” shaped “the political landscape in Ohio, Iowa etc. (states where the public university is just exporting their professional class).” The result: “You see a striking concentration/segregation of folks on both sides who are just immersed in MAGA world or not,” Kefalas wrote, noting that “people who live in rural America are surrounded by folks who play along with a particular worldview, yet my friends from Brooklyn and Boston will tell you they don’t know anyone who supports Trump or won’t get vaccinated. It’s not open warfare, it’s more like apartheid.”Urban rural “apartheid” further reinforces ideological and affective polarization. The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.Geographic barriers between Republicans and Democrats — of those holding traditional values and those choosing to reject or reinterpret those values — reinforce what scholars now call the “calcification” of difference. As conflict and hostility become embedded into the structure of where people live, the likelihood increases of seeing adversaries as less than fully human.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Want to Know Why Democrats Lose Rural America?

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      STORM LAKE, Iowa — Democrats are getting their derrières handed to them by the kickers and the Busch Light drinkers from out here on the edge of the Great Plains all the way to Appalachia, where the Republicans roam.So what do the Democrats do?Dump the Iowa caucuses into the ditch. At the hand of President Biden, no less. He decreed that South Carolina’s primary should go first on the presidential nominating calendar, displacing Iowa. The Democratic National Committee seems happy to oblige.We get it. Let someone else take a turn up front. But discarding Iowa is not a great way to mend fences in rural America — where the Democratic brand has become virtually unmarketable. The Democratic big shots hated Iowa’s pride of place since the caucuses rose to prominence a half-century ago because money couldn’t control the outcome. Jimmy Carter broke through from Plains, Ga., with nothing but a toothy smile and an honest streak. Candidates were forced to meet actual voters in village diners across the state. We took our vetting role seriously — you had better be ready to analyze Social Security’s actuarial prospects.Candidates weren’t crazy about it. The media hated Storm Lake ice in January. We did a decent, if imperfect, job of winnowing the field. Along with New Hampshire, we set things up so South Carolina could often become definitive, which it will be no longer.Iowa has its problems. We are too white. The caucuses are complicated, confusing and clunky. The evening gatherings in homes, school gyms and libraries are not fully accessible and not as convenient as a primary for people with jobs and kids at home.But diversity did have a chance here. Barack Obama was vaulted to the White House. Iowa actively encouraged Black candidates to challenge the white establishment. Mr. Obama beat Hillary Clinton here. Iowa had no problem giving a gay man, Pete Buttigieg, and a Jewish democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, the two top tickets out to New Hampshire last cycle. Black, white or Latino, it’s organization that matters in Iowa. You have to herd your people to the caucus and keep them in your pen for an hour while other campaigns try to poach them. It’s town hall democracy. Mr. Obama won with it. Candidates who ran feeble campaigns have to blame something. Latinos in Storm Lake overwhelmingly caucused for Mr. Sanders. Julián Castro can complain all he wants.The talking heads say Iowa messed up by not reporting the results quickly. The problem was that a cellphone app suggested to the Iowa Democratic Party by the Democratic National Committee crashed. The democratic process worked — the app didn’t.Anyone looking for an excuse to excise Iowa and further alienate rural voters could find one. The time was ripe.Mr. Biden doesn’t owe Iowa a thing. He finished fourth in the caucuses. He did owe Representative James Clyburn, the dean of South Carolina Democrats, big time for an endorsement just ahead of the Palmetto State primary, where Black voters put Mr. Biden over the top. It was sweet payback. We get that, too.Actually, the caucuses haven’t been the best thing for Iowa. The TV ads never stop. It puts you in a bad mood to think everything is going wrong all the time. We asked good questions, and the candidates gave good answers, then forgot about it all. Despite all the attention, nothing really happened to stop the long decline as the state’s Main Streets withered, farmers disappeared, and the undocumented dwell in the shadows. Republican or Democrat, the outcome was pretty much the same. At least the Republicans will cut your taxes.So it’s OK that South Carolina goes first. Iowa can do without the bother. The Republicans are sticking with Iowa, the Democrats consider it a lost cause. No Democratic state senator lives in a sizable part of western Iowa. Republicans control the governor’s office, the Legislature and soon the entire congressional delegation. Nobody organized the thousands of registered Latino voters in meatpacking towns like Storm Lake. Democrats are barely trying. The results show it.The old brick factory haunts along the mighty Mississippi River are dark, thanks to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and everyone else who sold us out for “free trade.” Keokuk, the gate city to the river, was once a bustling industrial and shipping hub but recently lost its hospital. Your best hope in rural Jefferson was to land a casino to save the town. You essentially can’t haul a load of hogs to the packinghouse in a pickup anymore — you need a contract and a semi. The sale barn and open markets are quaint memories. John Deere tractor cabs will be made in Mexico, not Waterloo. Our rivers are rank with manure. It tends to frustrate those left behind, and the resentment builds to the point of insurrection when it is apparent that the government is not here to help you.It’s hard to feel from 30,000 feet. So Donald Trump landed in Sioux City on the eve of the midterm election to claim his stake before a large crowd buffeted by the gales out of Nebraska. “The Iowa way of life is under siege,” Mr. Trump bellowed. “We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation.”They loved him. The Democrats view the crowd as deplorable, and told Iowa to get lost.Art Cullen is the editor of The Storm Lake Times and author of “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Crime: Red Delusions About Purple Reality

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      During last week’s Oklahoma gubernatorial debate Joy Hofmeister, the surprisingly competitive Democratic candidate, addressed Kevin Stitt, the Republican incumbent, who — like many in his party — is running as a champion of law and order.“The fact is the rates of violent crime in Oklahoma are higher under your watch than New York and California,” she declared.Stitt responded by laughing, and turned to the audience: “Oklahomans, do you believe we have higher crime than New York or California?”But Hofmeister was completely correct. In fact, when it comes to homicide, the most reliably measured form of violent crime, it isn’t even close: In 2020 Oklahoma’s murder rate was almost 50 percent higher than California’s, almost double New York’s, and this ranking probably hasn’t changed.Was Stitt unaware of this fact? Or was he just counting on his audience’s ignorance? If it was the latter, he may, alas, have made the right call. Public perceptions about crime are often at odds with reality. And in this election year Republicans are trying to exploit one of the biggest misperceptions: that crime is a big-city, blue-state problem.Americans aren’t wrong to be concerned about crime. Nationwide, violent crime rose substantially in 2020; we don’t have complete data yet, but murders appear to have risen further in 2021, although they seem to be declining again.Nobody knows for sure what caused the surge — just as nobody knows for sure what caused the epic decline in crime from 1990 to the mid-2010s, about which more shortly. But given the timing, the social and psychological effects of the pandemic are the most likely culprit, with a possible secondary role for the damage to police-community relations caused by the murder of George Floyd.While the crime surge was real, however, the perception that it was all about big cities run by Democrats is false. This was a purple crime wave, with murder rates rising at roughly the same rate in Trump-voting red states and Biden-voting blue states. Homicides rose sharply in both urban and rural areas. And if we look at levels rather than rates of change, both homicides and violent crime as a whole are generally higher in red states.So why do so many people believe otherwise? Before we get to politically motivated disinformation, let’s talk about some other factors that might have skewed perceptions.One factor is visibility. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has pointed out, New York City is one of the safest places in America — but you’re more likely to see a crime, or know someone who has seen a crime, than elsewhere because the city has vastly higher population density than anyplace else, meaning that there are often many witnesses around when something bad happens.Another factor may be the human tendency to believe stories that confirm our preconceptions. Many people feel instinctively that getting tough on criminals is an effective anti-crime strategy, so they’re inclined to assume that places that are less tough — for example, those that don’t prosecute some nonviolent offenses — must suffer higher crime as a result. This doesn’t appear to be true, but you can see why people might believe it.Such misconceptions are made easier by the long-running disconnect between the reality of crime and public perceptions. Violent crime halved between 1991 and 2014, yet for almost that entire period a large majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising.However, only a minority believed that it was rising in their own area. This tendency to believe that crime is terrible, but mostly someplace else, was confirmed by an August poll showing a huge gap between the number of Americans who consider violent crime a serious problem nationally and the much smaller number who see it as a serious problem where they live.Which brings us to the efforts by right-wing media and Republicans to weaponize crime as an issue in the midterms — efforts that one has to admit are proving effective, even though the breadth of the crime wave, more or less equally affecting red and blue states, rural and urban areas and so on suggests that it’s nobody’s fault.It’s possible that these efforts would have gained traction no matter what Democrats did. It’s also true, however, that too few Democrats have responded effectively.In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul was very late to the party, apparently realizing only a few days ago that crime was a major issue she needed to address. On the other hand, Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor, has seemed to feed fear-mongering, declaring that he had “never seen crime at this level,” an assertion contradicted by his own Police Department’s data. Even after the 2020-21 surge, serious crime in New York remained far below its 1990 peak, and in fact was still lower than it was when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.I’m not a politician, but this doesn’t seem as if it should be hard. Why not acknowledge the validity of concerns over the recent crime surge, while also pointing out that right-wingers who talk tough on crime don’t seem to be any good at actually keeping crime low?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without

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      The Republican Party has become crucially dependent on a segment of white voters suffering what analysts call a “mortality penalty.”This penalty encompasses not only disproportionately high levels of so-called deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse — but also across-the-board increases in several categories of disease, injury and emotional disorder.“Red states are now less healthy than blue states, a reversal of what was once the case,” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, argue in a paper they published in April, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death.”Case and Deaton write that the correlation between Republican voting and life expectancy “goes from plus-0.42 when Gerald Ford was the Republican candidate — healthier states voted for Ford and against Carter — to minus-0.69 in 2016 and –0.64 in 2020. States classified as the least healthy voted for Trump and against Biden.”Case and Deaton contend that the ballots cast for Donald Trump by members of the white working class “are surely not for a president who will dismantle safety nets but against a Democratic Party that represents an alliance between minorities — whom working-class whites see as displacing them and challenging their once solid if unperceived privilege — and an educated elite that has benefited from globalization and from a soaring stock market, which was fueled by the rising profitability of those same firms that were increasingly denying jobs to the working class.”Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, described the erosion of economic and social status for whites without college degrees in a 2021 paper:From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning). These deaths are concentrated among less than college educated middle-aged whites, with those out of the labor force disproportionately represented. Low-income minorities are significantly more optimistic than whites and much less likely to die of these deaths. This despair reflects the decline of the white working class. Counties with more respondents reporting lost hope in the years before 2016 were more likely to vote for Trump.Lack of hope, in Graham’s view, “is a central issue. The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”There are, Graham argues,long-term reasons for this. As blue-collar jobs began to decline from the late 1970s on, those displaced workers — and their communities — lost their purpose and identity and lack a narrative for going forward. For decades whites had privileged access to these jobs and the stable communities that came with them. Primarily white manufacturing and mining communities — in the suburbs and rural areas and often in the heartland — have the highest rates of despair and deaths. In contrast, more diverse urban communities have higher levels of optimism, better health indicators, and significantly lower rates of these deaths.In contrast to non-college whites, Graham continued,minorities, who had unequal access to those jobs and worse objective conditions to begin with, developed coping skills and supportive community ties in the absence of coherent public safety nets. Belief in education and strong communities have served them well in overcoming much adversity. African Americans remain more likely to believe in the value of a college education than are low-income whites. Minority communities based in part on having empathy for those who fall behind, meanwhile, have emerged from battling persistent discrimination.Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks. There is also a phenomenon among urban Black males that has to do with longer term despair: nothing to lose, weak problem-solving skills, drug gangs and more.The role of race and gender in deaths of despair, especially drug-related deaths, is complex. Case wrote in an email:Women have always been less likely to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol, or by suicide. However, from the mid-1990s into the 20-teens, for whites without a four-year college degree, death rates from all three causes rose in parallel between men and women. So the level has always been higher for men, but the trend (and so the increase) was very similar between less-educated white men and women. For Blacks and Hispanics the story is different. Deaths of Despair were falling for less educated Black and Hispanic men from the early 1990s to the 20-teens and were constant over that period (at a much lower rate) for Black and Hispanic women without a B.A. After the arrival of Fentanyl as a street drug in 2013, rates started rising for both Black and Hispanic men and women without a B.A., but at a much faster rate for men.In their October 2014 study, “Economic Strain and Children’s Behavior,” Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, found a striking difference in the pattern of behavioral problems among white and Black children from demographically similar families experiencing the financial strains of the 2008 Great Recession:Specifically, we found that economic strain exhibited a statistically significant and qualitatively large association with White children’s internalizing behavior problems and that this relationship was not due to potentially correlated influences of objective measures of adverse economic conditions or to mediating influences of psychosocial context. Furthermore, our data provide evidence that the relationship between economic strain and internalizing problems is meaningfully different across White and Black children. In marked contrast to the White sample, the regression-adjusted relationship between economic strain and internalizing behaviors among the Black sample was of small magnitude and was statistically insignificant.Kalil elaborated on this finding in an email: “The processes through which white and Black individuals experience stress from macroeconomic shocks are different,” she wrote, adding that the “white population, which is more resourced and less accustomed to being financially worried, is feeling threatened by economic shocks in a way that is not very much reflective of their actual economic circumstances. In our study, among Black parents, what we are seeing is basically that perceptions of economic strain are strongly correlated with actual income-to-needs.”This phenomenon has been in evidence for some time.A 2010 Pew Research Center study that examined the effects of the Great Recession on Black and white Americans reported that Black Americans consistently suffered more in terms of unemployment, work cutbacks and other measures, but remained far more optimistic about the future than whites. Twice as many Black as white Americans were forced during the 2008 recession to work fewer hours, to take unpaid leave or switch to part-time, and Black unemployment rose from 8.9 to 15.5 percent from April 2007 to April 2009, compared with an increase from 3.7 to 8 percent for whites.Despite experiencing more hardship, 81 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress,” compared with 59 percent of whites; 45 percent of Black Americans said the country was still in recession compared with 57 percent of whites. Pew found that 81 percent of the Black Americans it surveyed responded yes when asked “Is America still a land of prosperity?” compared with 59 percent of whites. Asked “will your children’s future standard of living be better or worse than yours?” 69 percent of Black Americans said better, and 17 percent said worse, while 38 percent of whites said better and 29 percent said worse.There are similar patterns for other measures of suffering.In “Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993-2019,” David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, economists at Dartmouth and the University of Warwick in Britain, note that “the proportion of the U.S. population in extreme distress rose from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. Among low-education midlife white persons, the percentage more than doubled, from 4.8 percent to 11.5 percent.”Blanchflower and Oswald point out that “something fundamental appears to have occurred among white, low-education, middle-aged citizens.”Employment prospects play a key role among those in extreme distress, according to Blanchflower and Oswald. A disproportionately large share of those falling into this extreme category agreed with the statement “I am unable to find work.”In her 2020 paper, “Trends in U.S. Working-Age non-Hispanic White Mortality: Rural-Urban and Within-Rural Differences,” Shannon M. Monnat, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, explained that “between 1990-92 and 2016-18, the mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites increased by 9.6 deaths per 100,000 population among metro males and 30.5 among metro females but increased by 70.1 and 65.0 among nonmetro (rural and exurban) males and females, respectively.”Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over this same 28-year period, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25-44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men saw 45-64 deaths rates per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45-64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6, while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.In a separate 2017 paper, “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue:Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.Three economists, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson of M.I.T., the University of Zurich and Harvard, reported in their 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” on the debilitating consequences for working-class men of the “China shock” — that is, of sharp increases in manufacturing competition with China:Shocks to manufacturing labor demand, measured at the commuting-zone level, exert large negative impacts on men’s relative employment and earnings. Although losses are visible throughout the earnings distribution, the relative declines in male earnings are largest at the bottom of the distribution.Such shocks “curtail the availability and desirability of potentially marriageable young men along multiple dimensions: reducing the share of men among young adults and increasing the prevalence of idleness — the state of being neither employed nor in school — among young men who remain.”These adverse trends, Autor, Dorn and Hanson report, “induce a differential and economically large rise in male mortality from drug and alcohol poisoning, H.I.V./AIDS, and homicide” and simultaneously “raise the fraction of mothers who are unwed, the fraction of children in single-headed households, and the fraction of children living in poverty.”I asked Autor for his thoughts on the implications of these developments for the Trump electorate. He replied by email:Many among the majority of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree feel, justifiably, that the last three decades of rapid globalization and automation have made their jobs more precarious, scarcer, less prestigious, and lower paid. Neither party has been successful in restoring the economic security and standing of non-college workers (and yes, especially non-college white males). The roots of these economic grievances are authentic, so I don’t think these voters should be denigrated for seeking a change in policy direction. That said, I don’t think the Trump/MAGA brand has much in the way of substantive policy to address these issues, and I believe that Democrats do far more to protect and improve economic prospects for blue-collar workers.There is some evidence that partisanship correlates with mortality rates.In their June 2022 paper, “The Association Between Covid-19 Mortality And The County-Level Partisan Divide In The United States,” Neil Jay Sehgal, Dahai Yue, Elle Pope, Ren Hao Wang and Dylan H. Roby, public health experts at the University of Maryland, found in their study of county-level Covid-19 mortality data from Jan. 1, 2020, through Oct. 31, 2021, that “majority Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people.”The authors cites studies showing that “counties with a greater proportion of Trump voters were less likely to search for information about Covid-19 and engage in physical distancing despite state-level mandates. Differences in Covid-19 mortality grew during the pandemic to create substantial variation in death rates in counties with higher levels of Trump support.”Sehgal and his colleagues conclude from their analysis that “voting behavior acts as a proxy for compliance with and support for public health measures, vaccine uptake, and the likelihood of engaging in riskier behaviors (for example, unmasked social events and in-person dining) that could affect disease spread and mortality.”In addition, the authors write:Local leaders may be hesitant to implement evidence-based policies to combat the pandemic because of pressure or oversight from state or local elected officials or constituents in more conservative areas. Even if they did institute protective policies, they may face challenges with compliance because of pressure from conservative constituents.For the past two decades, white working-class Americans have faced a series of economic dislocations similar to those that had a devastating impact on Black neighborhoods starting in the 1960s, as the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson described them in his 1987 book, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.”How easy would it be to apply Wilson’s description of “extraordinary rates of black joblessness,” disordered lives, family breakdown and substance abuse to the emergence of similar patterns of disorder in white exurban America? How easy to transpose Black with white or inner city and urban with rural and small town?It is very likely, as Anne Case wrote in her email, that the United States is fast approaching a point whereEducation divides everything, including connection to the labor market, marriage, connection to institutions (like organized religion), physical and mental health, and mortality. It does so for whites, Blacks and Hispanics. There has been a profound (not yet complete) convergence in life expectancy by education. There are two Americas now: one with a B.A. and one without.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Rules Fuel Populist Anger in Rural America

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      ROCK HALL, Md. — When Dave Harden decided to run for Congress as a Democrat on Maryland’s conservative Eastern Shore, a friend gave him a piece of free advice.“Democrats lose on three things: abortion, guns and regulations,” the friend said. “If you keep one, you have to give up the other two.”Abortion and gun rights have both inspired passionate activism and countless front-page news articles. Regulations — not so much. Yet nitpicky government rules remain a potent and underappreciated source of populist anger against Democrats, especially in rural areas.On the campaign trail, Mr. Harden has gotten an earful from voters about maddening and arbitrary restrictions: Why are wineries in Maryland limited to serving only 13 kinds of food? Why does a woman who sells her grandmother’s cobbler have to cough up tens of thousands of dollars to build a commercial kitchen? Why does a federal inspector have to be on hand to watch wild catfish get gutted — but not other kinds of seafood? The short answer is that restaurant associations tend to wield more political clout than wineries, and catfish farmers in Mississippi are more powerful than seafood harvesters in Maryland. Big businesses can afford to hire lawyers to help them cut through red tape and lobbyists to bend government rules to their will. Small businesses, especially in rural places, get slammed.Dave Harden campaigning during the annual fireman’s parade in Ocean City.“The claim of overregulation is especially animating on the political right,” Joshua Sewell of Taxpayers for Common Sense told me. He said misleading rumors that the Environmental Protection Agency planned to regulate farm dust or that President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would have taxed belching cows played right into the stereotype of Democrats as city folk who were infuriatingly eager to regulate almost anything in rural America.In 2006, Democrats and Republicans had similar views on government regulation of business: About 40 percent of Republicans said there was too much, compared to about 36 percent of Democrats. But the percentage of Republicans who felt that way climbed steadily under President Barack Obama, who enacted more economically significant rules than his predecessors. By the end of his first term, 84 percent of Republicans thought that government meddled too much in business, while only 22 percent of Democrats agreed, according to Gallup. Democrats were more likely to say that the government doesn’t regulate businesses enough.With business owners more likely to be Republicans and government workers more likely to be Democrats, you have the makings of a yawning partisan divide. Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to remove two rules for every new one that was put in place.Can Democrats flip the script and win over conservative districts, particularly small- business owners in those areas, by speaking out against government red tape? Mr. Harden, a 59-year-old former Foreign Service officer who is running for Congress in Maryland’s First District, is trying. He hopes to replace Andy Harris, the sole Republican in Maryland’s congressional delegation. (Mr. Harris voted to overturn the results of the presidential election in 2020 and reportedly once tried to bring a gun onto the House floor.)Mr. Harden greets Bobby Higgins, the owner of an all-you-can-eat crab house in Ocean City.Crabs are Maryland’s iconic cuisine.Mr. Harden must first win a July 19 primary against Heather Mizeur, a progressive herb farmer who once represented Montgomery County, a much more urban area, in the state legislature. Ms. Mizeur has more money and name recognition than Mr. Harden, but he believes he has a chance because she seems out of step with the conservative district, which is considered a safe Republican seat.Mr. Harden is trying to chart an alternative path for Democrats in rural areas. He’s no fan of Donald Trump. He left a 22-year career in the Foreign Service in 2018 because he didn’t want to serve the Trump administration. But when it comes to regulations, Mr. Harden doesn’t sound all that much different from Mr. Trump.“The regulations in rural economies are ridiculous,” he told me.Mr. Harden is trying to walk a difficult line, appealing to voters who are angry about government overreach without turning off the Democratic base. He says he doesn’t oppose reasonable environmental regulations, but he rails against rules that make it harder for small businesses to survive.It’s a message that comes naturally to him. He spent years trying to improve the business environments in Iraq and the Palestinian territories as a senior U.S.A.I.D. official. He led a program in the West Bank town of Jenin that opened up a border crossing with Israel and prevailed on the Israeli government to allow more Israeli cars into Jenin so that Israeli Arabs could shop there, helping to start an economic revival.Mr. Harden’s campaign manager, Marty Lostrom, on Chris Lingerman’s lawn. Lingerman’s shop, Chester River Seafood, is behind his house.Ford’s Seafood in Rock Hall, Md., is family-owned.Mr. Harden is now trying to bring those lessons home to Maryland, where he grew up. On a recent Saturday, he squinted out at Chesapeake Bay, riffing about how to promote local economic development with Capt. Rob Newberry, the head of the Delmarva Fisheries Association, which represents licensed watermen in the area. Captain Newberry is a Republican who once hung a sign cursing Joe Biden on his boat. But he supports Mr. Harden, who listens patiently to his complaints about regulations.Captain Newberry represents people who harvest crabs, Maryland’s iconic cuisine, from the Chesapeake Bay, and he complains that excessive regulations are putting watermen like him out of business. He contends that the roughly 1,800 fishermen, clammers, crabbers and oystermen in his association are among the most highly regulated workers in the state.Captain Newberry, right, listened as Mr. Harden spoke to Chris Lingerman, the owner of Chester River Seafood, about regulations that hurt watermen.A Maryland blue crab.“When you get halfway to work and you pull up at a stoplight, does a policeman pull you over?” he asked. “When you get into work, does he come in and bother you two or three times and ask you what are you doing, do you have a license? That happens to me every time I go out on the harbor.”Captain Newberry has grievances with people across the political spectrum: with the environmentalists who lobby for more restrictions on the watermen; with the cities and companies responsible for faulty wastewater treatment systems and runoff that pollutes the bay; and with Mr. Harris, the incumbent.He told me that Mr. Harris refused to speak out against a nonsensical regulation that stipulated that catfish had to be treated like meat under federal law. The rule, which advantages catfish farmers in states like Mississippi at the expense of foreign fish farmers and Maryland fishermen, requires federal inspectors to be on site when catfish get gutted, even though there’s little evidence of a risk to public health.The rule is so outrageous that the Government Accountability Office once called for it to be repealed. Yet it remains in place. When the watermen complained to their congressman, Mr. Harris arranged for the government to pay for the inspectors. But inspectors still have to be called in whenever a fisherman brings in catfish for processing. (Mr. Harris’s office said he’s still working on it.)Captain Newberry says he has become disillusioned with the political sausage-making behind government rules. But he still works within the system to try to change them. He testifies before lawmakers and serves on committees, hoping that it will make a difference.On the campaign trail, Mr. Harden has gotten an earful from voters about maddening and arbitrary restrictions.However, those same frustrations have led some other watermen to fall under the sway of the “sovereign citizens” movement, which preaches that the federal and state governments have no right to require licenses for hunting, driving or owning a gun. Some adherents believe that the local sheriff is the only legitimate authority under the Constitution. Beliefs about the illegitimacy of the federal government appeared to be at the root of an armed standoff between federal authorities and cattle ranchers in Nevada in 2014.Maryland’s Eastern Shore hasn’t seen anything like that, Somerset County’s sheriff, Ronald Howard, told me. But he said he has faced mounting pressure to defy state rules and allow watermen to harvest oysters from sanctuaries that have been declared off limits. He refused. “I said, ‘Look, if I interfere, that’s obstruction of my duties; I can be charged criminally,’” he told me. “I had one waterman tell me, ‘That’s a chance you’ve got to take.’”Sheriff Howard doesn’t blame the watermen; he blames the rigid rules made by politicians who rarely take the time to listen to rural people. That’s where Dave Harden sees an opening for himself, however slim.Democrats have to find a way to reconnect with rural America, Mr. Harden told me. Frank talk about regulations is a good place to start.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      What Democrats Don’t Understand About Rural America

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      NOBLEBORO, Maine — We say this with love to our fellow Democrats: Over the past decade, you willfully abandoned rural communities. As the party turned its focus to the cities and suburbs, its outreach became out of touch and impersonal. To rural voters, the message was clear: You don’t matter.Now, Republicans control dozens of state legislatures, and Democrats have only tenuous majorities in Congress at a time in history when we simply can’t afford to cede an inch. The party can’t wait to start correcting course. It may be too late to prevent a blowout in the fall, but the future of progressive politics — and indeed our democracy — demands that we revive our relationship with rural communities.As two young progressives raised in the country, we were dismayed as small towns like ours swung to the right. But we believed that Democrats could still win conservative rural districts if they took the time to drive down the long dirt roads where we grew up, have face-to-face conversations with moderate Republican and independent voters and speak a different language, one rooted in values rather than policy.It worked for us. As a 25-year-old climate activist with unabashedly progressive politics, Chloe was an unlikely choice to be competitive — let alone win — in a conservative district that falls mostly within the bounds of a rural Maine county that has the oldest population in the state. But in 2018, she won a State House seat there with almost 53 percent of the vote. Two years later, she ran for State Senate, challenging the highest-ranking Republican in state office, the Senate minority leader. And again, in one of the most rural districts in the state, voters chose the young, first-term Democrat who sponsored one of the first Green New Deal policies to pass a state legislature.To us, it was proof that the dogmas that have long governed American politics could and should be challenged. Over the past decade, many Democrats seem to have stopped trying to persuade people who disagreed with them, counting instead on demographic shifts they believed would carry them to victory — if only they could turn out their core supporters. The choice to prioritize turnout in Democratic strongholds over persuasion of moderate voters has cost the party election after election. But Democrats can run and win in communities that the party has written off — and they need not be Joe Manchin-like conservative Democrats to do so.This isn’t just a story about rural Maine. It’s about a nationwide pattern of neglect that goes back years. After the 2010 midterms, when the Democrats lost 63 House seats, Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, disbanded the House Democratic Rural Working Group. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada later eliminated the Senate’s rural outreach group. By 2016, according to Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich, the Clinton campaign had only a single staff person doing rural outreach from its headquarters, in Brooklyn; the staffer had been assigned to the role just weeks before the election. And in 2018, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, told MSNBC, “You can’t door-knock in rural America.”We saw this pattern for ourselves. In 2019, the Maine Senate Democratic Campaign Committee told us that it didn’t believe in talking to Republicans. (The group’s executive director did not respond to a request seeking comment by press time.)That blinkered strategy is holding the party back. When Democrats talk only to their own supporters, they see but a small fraction of the changes roiling this country. Since 2008, residents of small towns have fallen behind cities on many major economic benchmarks, and they watched helplessly as more and more power and wealth were consolidated in cities. We saw up close the loss, hopelessness and frustration that reality has instilled.The current Democratic strategy doesn’t just lead to bad policy but also to bad politics. Our democracy rewards the party that can win support over large geographic areas. Ceding rural America leaves a narrow path to victory even in the best circumstances. When the landscape is more difficult, Democrats set themselves up for catastrophic defeat. But we don’t have to cede these parts of the country. Democrats have to change the way they think about them and relate to the voters who live there.What much of the party establishment doesn’t understand is that rural life is rooted in shared values of independence, common sense, tradition, frugality, community and hard work. Democratic campaigns often seem to revolve around white papers and wonky policy. In our experience, politicians lose rural people when they regurgitate politically triangulated lines and talk about the vagaries of policy. Rural folks vote on what rings true and personal to them: Can this person be trusted? Is he authentic?While these defeats ought to prompt real soul-searching within the party, some political scientists and many mainstream Democrats have taken them as proof not that their own strategies must change, but rather that rural Republicans are too ignorant to vote in their own best interest. It’s a counterproductive, condescending story that serves only to drive the wedge between Democrats and rural communities deeper yet.Chloe has knocked on more than 20,000 doors over the last two cycles, listening to stories of loss and isolation. One man told her she was the first person to listen to him; most campaigns, he said, didn’t even bother to knock on his door — they judged him for what his house looked like. Another voter said she had been undecided between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump until Election Day but ultimately voted for Mr. Trump because, she said, at the Republican convention, he talked about regular American working people, and Ms. Clinton didn’t at her own convention.Something has to change. The Democrats need a profoundly different strategy if they are to restore their reputation as champions of working people, committed to improving their lives, undaunted by wealth and power. In our view, the only way for Democrats to regain traction in rural places is by running strong campaigns in districts that usually back Republicans. This change starts with having face-to-face conversations to rebuild trust and faith not only in Democrats but also in the democratic process. Even though it’s hard work with no guaranteed outcome, it is necessary — even if we don’t win.In our two campaigns, we turned down the party consultants and created our own canvassing universe — the targeted list of voters whom we talk to during the election season. In 2020, this universe was four times larger than what the state party recommended. It included thousands of Republicans and independents who had (literally) never been contacted by a Democratic campaign in their entire time voting.Our campaign signs? Hand-painted or made of scavenged wood pallets by volunteers, with images of loons, canoes and other hallmarks of the Maine countryside. Into the trash went consultant-created mailers. Instead, we designed and carried out our own direct mail program for half the price of what the party consultants wanted to charge while reaching 20 percent more voters.Volunteers wrote more than 5,000 personal postcards, handwritten and addressed to neighbors in their own community. And we defied traditional advice by refusing to say a negative word about our opponents, no matter how badly we wanted to fight back as the campaigns grew more heated.When we first embarked down this road, the path was rocky. Chloe came home from canvassing distraught one day and dictated a voice memo to herself: “I talked to a lot of people I’ve known my whole life, and they wouldn’t commit to vote for me.” They knew she was a good person; the only reason they refused to support her was that she was a Democrat.Another day she met a couple who thought people should be able to snowmobile and hunt and fish and ride ATVs on protected lands. Chloe told them she agreed; while she considers herself extremely progressive, there are some things she thinks the left is too rigid on. Then the conversation turned to immigration, and the couple told her that undocumented immigrants should be separated from their kids. “I literally have no idea what to say to that besides just not getting into it,” Chloe reflected. “But is that being disingenuous? Is that not fighting the fight?”We heard some rough stuff, and we didn’t tolerate hate. But through the simple act of listening, we discovered that we could almost always catch a glimpse of common ground if we focused on values, not party or even policy. If people said they were fed up with politics, we’d say: “Us, too! That’s why we’re here.” If they despised Democrats, we’d tell them how we had deep issues with the party as well, and we were trying to make it better. It was how we differentiated ourselves from the national party and forged a sense of collective purpose.Slowly but surely, we thought we might be able to turn things around. A young mom who opened her door said that she couldn’t afford to take her child to the emergency room. She had never voted for a Democrat, but she committed to vote for us. There was a man with a Trump bumper sticker on his truck who, after talking with Chloe, put a Chloe Maxmin bumper sticker on his tailgate, too. There was a preacher who had never put up a political sign in his life until our campaign.Perhaps the most memorable experience was in 2018 at the end of a winding driveway on a cold fall day. Several men were in the garage, working on their snowmobiles. Chloe stepped out to greet them. “Hi, I’m Chloe, and I’m running for state representative.” The owner immediately responded with a question: Did she support Medicaid expansion? Chloe answered honestly that she did. The man pointed an angry finger toward the road and told her to leave.Taken aback, Chloe asked: “Hold on a second. What just happened? I’m honestly just interested to hear your perspective, even if you don’t vote for me.”This gentleman went on to tell his story, how he grew up on that very property without any electricity or running water; how he had worked hard to build a life for himself and his family, which included paying for his own health care without any help from the government. This was his way of life and what he believed in. It was an honest conversation, and by the end, he said he would vote for Chloe.Gradually, our own volunteers learned from Chloe how to find common ground. Despite the many doors shut in their faces, they largely succeeded.“Talked with a 43-year-old guy who announced that he wasn’t voting, that he was so depressed at the quality of people in office,” an old-timer who was one of our volunteers recounted in an email. By the end of their conversation, he was going to vote just for Chloe. “The fact that an older person is optimistic and working to elect young people is a great thing,” the voter told him.Another volunteer once called these conversations “a connection with each other and with something bigger that each one of us craves.”When Covid hit in March 2020, we tried a new way of fostering these connections, pausing the campaign and pivoting all our resources to supporting seniors struggling with the isolation and upheaval of the pandemic. With some 200 volunteers, we made more than 13,500 calls to seniors in the district — regardless of their political affiliation — and offered them rides, pharmacy pickups, connections to food banks, and a buddy to call them every day or week to check in.A volunteer spoke with an elderly woman who depended on the library for large-print books, but the libraries were closed. We found a bookstore that delivered some. Another volunteer talked with a gentleman who had no internet and therefore no access to the news. She bought him a subscription to The New York Times.The Democratic campaign leadership was eager to replicate our success but also fundamentally unequipped to understand what we were doing. At the height of the pandemic, we told the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee about our approach. Almost immediately the committee’s staff was instructed to tell Democratic candidates to make similar calls, but only to seniors within their “persuasion universe” — people whose votes they thought they could win. Specifically, people over 60 who were likely Democratic voters. We read this in horror and immediately wrote back, imploring the leaders to not limit the scope of the calls. They brushed us off.It was far from the only time party leaders told us they knew better than we did. In the final stretch of the 2018 campaign, they insisted that as part of their turnout effort they would send their people to conservative households that had told us Chloe was the only Democrat they would support. We were terrified that volunteers reciting a generic script, pushing folks to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket, would alienate the disaffected Republican voters whom we had worked so hard to persuade to vote for Chloe.We begged the party officials to reconsider. They refused. It wasn’t until the afternoon of Election Day that they backed down, telling us they were unable to mobilize enough volunteers to send down the back roads to the district. That experience only reinforced our belief that candidates should be able to control the resources that the party puts into districts, so that they can iterate and improve on the one-size-fits-all strategies that the Democrats tend to employ.After both successful campaigns, we asked ourselves: Is our strategy something that can be replicated? We scaled up our approach in 2020 to solidify some of our tactics, such as focusing on canvassing voters whom the party had given up on, eschewing consultants and leaning into values-driven messaging. But, at the same time, we knew that the back roads of Maine were unique; the roads of Georgia, Wisconsin, Washington or Utah might require their own strategy. A state or local campaign is an easier ship to turn than a U.S. Senate campaign and better situated to buck consultants and bring a different politics to folks’ doorsteps. We certainly don’t have all the answers; all we can hope is that our example will help persuade candidates to try, to recommit themselves to rural places, to listen, to learn and to evolve.As Democrats, we feel every day the profound urgency of our times, the existential necessity of racial justice, the impending doom of the climate crisis, the imperative to reform our criminal justice system, and so much more. At the same time, as a party we’ve made some big mistakes as we walk down the road to a better world. Abandoning rural voters could be one of the costliest.But it’s not too late to make amends, to rebuild our relationship with the quiet roads of rural America. We have to hit the ground running, today, this cycle, and recommit ourselves to the kind of politics that reaches every corner of our country.Chloe Maxmin (@chloemaxmin) is a state senator in Maine. Canyon Woodward (@CanyonWoodward) was her campaign manager in 2018 and 2020. Their book, “Dirt Road Revival,” comes out on May 10.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More