Tom Schaller > Quotes

“In 2020, the age-adjusted gun death rate in rural communities was 40 percent higher than that for large metropolitan areas. The same year, the murder rate in rural America surged 25 percent. Donald Trump was still president in 2020, yet somehow the same media that blamed liberals and Joe Biden for urban crime never held Trump to account for the rural crime surge during his presidency,”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“So, what do rural Whites get in return for all they bestow on the GOP? Almost nothing. The benefits they receive are nearly all emotional, not material.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“These perversions of power will worsen in the decades ahead. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will reside in the fifteen most-populous states and choose thirty of the one hundred U.S. senators. Concentrated in smaller and more rural states, the remaining 30% of the population will elect 70 per cent of senators. No matter how distorted these population ratios become, each state is guaranteed its two senators – past, present, and forever.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“So, like all right-wing parties that depend on rural voters, the Republican Party has an interest in maintaining, not alleviating, their struggles. Rural voters who are satisfied and optimistic might consider the entreaties of both parties, but the more dissatisfied and angrier they are, the more they'll stick with the GOP. Come Election Day, despair is a Republican candidate's chief asset, because that despair is easiest to convert into anger, and that anger into votes”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“The stores in your hometown are all shuttered? It must be because the Wall Street bank tweeted out an image of a Pride flag.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Rural White Americans assert a deep reverence for the Constitution and America’s democratic principles. Millions of them demonstrate this reverence daily. But the democratic commitments of too many rural Whites are weak, limited, or quickly abandoned. Poll after poll confirms that rural Whites are the vanguard for the xenophobic, reality-defying, undemocratic, and increasingly violent movements that currently threaten to undermine the world's oldest constitutional democracy and the pluralist society that democracy protects.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“The attitude of too many rural Whites may best be described as ‘I love my country but not our country.’ Their brand of exclusive patriotism appears conditioned upon maintaining or remaking the U.S. political system to their advantage at the expense of equality and opportunities for Americans different from them.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“If you've been persuaded that the greatest threat to your way of life is a trans girl on the other side of the state who wants to play on her middle school softball team, not only won't you ever consider voting for a Democrat, but you won't ask much of your Republican representatives, either. You won't hold them accountable for the condition of your streets or the lack of economic opportunities in your town.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Scientific skepticism proved especially lethal when rural Whites – the citizens most dubious of pandemic experts – refused safe COVID-19 vaccines at rates higher than urban and suburban citizens. That skepticism proved fatal for more rural Americans than would have died had heartland vaccination rates mirrored those nationwide percentages.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Since Donald Trump's rise, the national media have devoted tremendous attention to the political grievances of rural White voters. Reporters and pundits routinely descend upon rural communities, sit down with locals at diners and sports bleachers, and listen earnestly to what downscale rural White voters have to say, but the same national media hardly notice that rural minorities exist or are aware that they have legitimate complaints of their own.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“The increase in geographic polarization between the parties has become a regular topic for national news outlets, yet stories about Republicans’ inability to win in cities are far rarer than stories about Democratic struggles among rural voters. There is an implicit judgment at work, one that says that Democrats’ failure to win over rural voters is a kind of moral failing, one that can only be bred of insensitivity or contempt. Republicans’ struggles in cities, however, are seldom examined and less often judged; it's just how things are.

This double standard is reinforced by the fact that journalists are always ready to amplify those few cases in which a Democrat says something dismissive about rural areas and the people who live there.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Denigrating cities and the people who live in them doesn't come just from Trump. The supposed depravity and danger of American cities is hammered home again and again on conservative media, frequently with the implication that the more Black people a city contains, the more dangerous that city must be.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“When one looks to the places where Trump’s support was most intense, again and again one arrives in majority-White rural areas.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“The majority of the men who buy pickups – and they are overwhelmingly men – does not need them to cart hay to the back forty. In fact, the remarkable thing about pickup sales is that they rose steadily as the number of people who needed the vehicle for work declined. … Pickups symbolize a particular kind of masculinity rooted in the work rural people are supposed to do, and you can see it in ads like the ones Sam Elliott narrates, full of shots of trucks hauling and towing.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Whether Trump succeeds in returning to the White House in 2024, his curious appeal to rural Americans is the most important rural political story in decades. Whatever the future holds for Trump, he has left an indelible mark on rural America and, in the process, revealed fundamental truths about the people who find him so compelling.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Although Democrats support a national popular vote at higher rates than Republicans, the share of Republicans who prefer a national popular vote rule grew steadily from 40 percent in 2000 to a 54 percent majority by 2016.

Then Donald Trump was elected. What happened next? On cue, Republican support for electing presidents based on the national popular vote dropped by half, from 54 percent to 27 percent.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Thanks to their twinned powers – their mathematically inflated electoral power and the mythology-based political deference they enjoy – rural White citizens are equipped to undermine our constitutional democracy, or at least wreak serious havoc on long-standing and widely accepted democratic norms and traditions.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Even if Trump fails in 2024 and becomes nothing more than the laughable two-bit grifter he always has been at heart, his effect on the politics of rural America will be felt for a generation, if not more. He showed every Republican what rural Whites, and the GOP base more broadly, really want and how to give it to them. The result is a politics saturated in bitterness and bile, and a party whose most loyal voters don't expect their leaders to offer them anything but the ugliest kind of emotional satisfaction. Even when Trump is gone, in rural America he will still be king. And the rest of the country will suffer for it.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Rural opposition to Obamacare and Medicaid expansion was the third and final act of a self-destructive political-electoral drama. First, rural Whites voted for national and state politicians who sided with the corporate interests that decimated their industries and healthcare infrastructure. Next, they rewarded those same politicians for opposing life-saving and life-changing healthcare reforms. In the final and fatal act, many got sick, and some even died from lack of care or coverage.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“This is what rural people mean when they say that Trump ‘speaks our language,’ something we were told more than once during our travels. It's not that he understands their culture in any substantive way; instead, it's more visceral. Trump stroked people’s darkest impulses and said: You deserve to feel this way. You have been wronged and cheated and mocked. Now I will be your wrath. Look at everyone you hate – those overeducated liberals and Hollywood elites and arrogant city people and social justice warriors trying to make you feel bad for being White and being a man and being American. They despise me just as much as they despise you. Let's show them who this country really belongs to.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“The excess coronavirus deaths in rural counties should be classified as suicides by scientific skepticism. By rejecting proven vaccines, conspiracy-addled rural Americans, though living in communities where social distancing was easier than in densely populated cities, squandered their geographic advantage.

All told, premature deaths from reduced healthcare access and facility closures, healthcare ignorance and scientific skepticism, and a fatal devotion to guns and drugs are killing rural white Americans—especially downscale rural whites.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“In the years following the Obamacare debate, multiple studies showed that racial resentments drove opposition to the ACA even when factors like party identification and political ideology are held constant. White voters’ knee-jerk opposition to Obamacare was always more about the "Obama" part than the "care" part.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Those elites are giving the base what they think it wants, and while they’re usually not wrong, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that much of the GOP elite views its base as a bunch of easily manipulated rubes.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Not every rural White American espouses xenophobic, conspiratorial, undemocratic, or violent attitudes. But rural Whites are overrepresented across all four of these threats.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Los Angeles County has more people than any of the forty smallest states, but its 10 million residents must share two senators with nearly 30 million other Californians. There are a remarkable 120 U.S. counties that have more people than the entire state of Wyoming. Yet the Cowboy State’s 581,000 citizens enjoy the same two votes in the Senate as the other forty-states do.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Try to see America through their eyes,’ read a November 2022 Associated Press report about people in rural Wisconsin who are increasingly convinced that dark conspiracies are bent on destroying everything they believe in and are gathering weapons in case a civil war comes. This instruction – you, reader, must make an effort to understand the perspective not just of people in rural areas but of the most politically radical and the most disconnected from reality among them – is one that news consumers have been given for years. We're encouraged to sympathize with even extremely dangerous people who are literally stockpiling weapons, but only if they come from the places where the ‘essential minority’ resides. There are no articles about radical Black nationalists preparing for civil war that begin, ‘Try to see America through their eyes.’ But rural Whites are given greater moral latitude. Their excesses may not quite be excused, but were called upon to understand these people – the implication being that whatever dangers they may present, it's only because the rest of us haven't given them the consideration they deserve.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Rural voters are overrepresented in the United States. They always have been and – barring the highly unlikely termination of the US Senate – always will be. For suburban and urban voters, the diluting of their votes is bad enough. Far worse are the apologists who try to gaslight the rest of the nation into believing that the inflated voting power of rural voters, especially rural Whites, is justified.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“Because it violates the ‘one person, one vote’ standard, malapportionment in the Electoral College and especially the U.S. Senate is the primary means by which White voters—and rural Whites most of all—retain electoral advantages at the national level.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy

“To understand Donald Trump, you have to start with Barack Obama. Trump’s successful candidacy would not have been possible in the wake of any other presidency; It was the backlash against America's first Black president that pushed Trump into the White House.”
― Tom Schaller, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy