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Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy
How the urban-rural divide drives partisan polarization
Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” versus “them”? In Rural Versus Urban, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettler and Brown explain the evolution of this gulf across five decades, charting political trends in both places. Drawing on data on individuals, communities, and members of Congress, as well as interviews with local party leaders and former elected officials, they show how the divide emerged and why it poses a threat to democracy.
Until about thirty years ago, both political parties attracted support from rural and urban voters. But after place-based inequality grew due to deregulation and trade liberalization, rural dwellers began to view urban people and Democrats as affluent elites out of touch with their needs. Politically active evangelical churches, Right to Life organizations, and gun groups helped deepen the divide, encouraging rural white dwellers to become staunch supporters of the GOP. Now, regional one-party rule in rural America gives Republicans a systematic edge for gaining control of crucial political institutions, including the Senate, House of Representatives, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. This is helping enable an extremist political party and pushing democracy to the brink. Mettler and Brown argue that the divide can be repaired—but only if the Democrats build their own robust local organizations and offer citizens a meaningful choice.
Why have Americans living in different places come to experience politics as a battle between “us” versus “them”? In Rural Versus Urban, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown argue that political polarization is not just about red states and blue states, or coastal elites who alienate those in fly-over country. Instead, polarization permeates every region and every state—and has become organized through a pernicious rural-urban division. Mettler and Brown explain the evolution of this gulf across five decades, charting political trends in both places. Drawing on data on individuals, communities, and members of Congress, as well as interviews with local party leaders and former elected officials, they show how the divide emerged and why it poses a threat to democracy.
Until about thirty years ago, both political parties attracted support from rural and urban voters. But after place-based inequality grew due to deregulation and trade liberalization, rural dwellers began to view urban people and Democrats as affluent elites out of touch with their needs. Politically active evangelical churches, Right to Life organizations, and gun groups helped deepen the divide, encouraging rural white dwellers to become staunch supporters of the GOP. Now, regional one-party rule in rural America gives Republicans a systematic edge for gaining control of crucial political institutions, including the Senate, House of Representatives, the Presidency, and even the Supreme Court. This is helping enable an extremist political party and pushing democracy to the brink. Mettler and Brown argue that the divide can be repaired—but only if the Democrats build their own robust local organizations and offer citizens a meaningful choice.
328 pages, Hardcover
Published September 23, 2025
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486 people want to read
About the author
Suzanne Mettler
15 books34 followersSuzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. She is the author of several books, including The Government-Citizen Disconnect; Degrees of Inequality: How The Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream; and The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Programs Undermine American Democracy. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and several book awards. In 2017, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 17, 2026
An extremely frustrating book that tries to answer one of the central questions of modern politics—why are rural voters increasingly Republicans and urban voters increasingly Democrats?—and falls far short.
The first core problem of the book is how functionally one-sided it is. The vast majority of pages are devoted to explaining the rural worldview, why voters outside metropolitan areas have rushed to conservative politics, and castigating liberals generally and the Democratic Party specifically for losing rural voters. There is very little space devoted to the opposite, equally important question, of why voters in major cities have increasingly shunned the Republican Party over the last two decades. There is barely any discussion of the actual politics in urban areas, the policy shifts within the Republican party that have made it more anti-urban, or the international context in which cities are becoming increasingly liberal and rural areas increasingly conservative. In what I thought was a particularly egregious example, the discussion of the 2020 Georgia Senate election focuses on the rural organizers who worked to stem losses for the Democratic Party and not the objective political sea change in Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs that flipped the state blue for the first time in years.
The secondary problem is that the authors have a weak case for the shift in rural voting patterns. Their core thesis is that rural and urban voters have remarkably similar views on economic policy, racial animus is similarly prevalent in many of America's major cities as in its small towns, and the existing gap in social policy views is not large enough to explain the wide gap in voting patterns. Much of the blame for the rightward shift in rural politics is thus placed on the outcomes delivered by Democratic economic policy—NAFTA, airline deregulation, and the broader "neoliberal" turn of the Carter-Clinton-Obama era broke whatever remained of the "New Deal" rural coalition. Then the parties' institutional structure took over to accentuate this division. Yet there's little explanation for why it took until the mid-2000s for this urban-rural political divide to really materialize if it was firmly rooted in, e.g., NAFTA, or why rural voters now vociferously oppose many of the New Deal policies that supposedly kept them in the coalition. Likewise, the book seems to dance around the core non-economic policy divides—admitting that rural voters have more conservative social attitudes and exhibit more anti-Black racial animus, but mostly placing those explanations as tertiary drivers of the urban-rural voting gap.
One particular annoyance I have with the book is the constant need to say that rural voters are driven to the Republican party because they're talked down to by "overbearing urban elites," but then to believe it is the *attitudes* of urban voters & politicians driving this feeling. In other words, it is not so much that rural voters oppose gun control and environmental regulation, but that they disapprove of having gun control and environmental regulation "imposed on them" by liberal city-dwellers. Yet you could just as easily say urban voters resent having lax gun laws and environmental deregulation "imposed" on them, and the urban voters would at least have a stronger argument at a federal level because of the overrepresentation of rural interests in the Senate. The core problem is that this is obviously an actual, concrete policy disagreement where rural voters have more conservative social views than urban ones, and this is driving a gap in voting patterns! Yet the authors do not believe social policy drives the gap in voting patterns, so instead, they softly imply that upstate New Yorkers would come around to gun control or exurban Californians would drop their opposition to solar if politicians just switched up their tone. Once again, the feelings of rural voters are completely centered here, and the idea that urban voters in Austin might feel like state-level policy is being "imposed" on them in the same way rural Oregonians feel it's "imposed" on them is barely ever discussed.
The third problem is that the book feels exceptionally outdated, as if much of it was written in 2018-2020 and the shift in election and policy outcomes in 2024 was tacked on as an afterthought. The post-2020 shift in economic geography that occurred to the detriment of cities gets almost no discussion; urban areas like New York and San Francisco are still treated as nearly unstoppable economic hubs and suburban/rural areas are treated as drained of all opportunity. There's vanishingly little discussion of the 2024 election outcomes, where Donald Trump bucked the trend by doing much better in urban areas than the median Republican, and the entire discussion of the Biden administration's explicitly anti-neoliberal rural investment approach is quarantined to a couple of pages.
As with any wide-ranging political book, there were still parts I found interesting or novel. As descriptive empirical work on the political shift in rural areas, much of the book is informative. The data work on the growth of gun clubs and evangelical churches as rural institutions was a particularly great read, and I wish I could force most political pundits to read the sections on demographic change in rural and urban areas. Yet my disagreements with the core thesis and structure of the book are too massive for me to recommend this.
The first core problem of the book is how functionally one-sided it is. The vast majority of pages are devoted to explaining the rural worldview, why voters outside metropolitan areas have rushed to conservative politics, and castigating liberals generally and the Democratic Party specifically for losing rural voters. There is very little space devoted to the opposite, equally important question, of why voters in major cities have increasingly shunned the Republican Party over the last two decades. There is barely any discussion of the actual politics in urban areas, the policy shifts within the Republican party that have made it more anti-urban, or the international context in which cities are becoming increasingly liberal and rural areas increasingly conservative. In what I thought was a particularly egregious example, the discussion of the 2020 Georgia Senate election focuses on the rural organizers who worked to stem losses for the Democratic Party and not the objective political sea change in Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs that flipped the state blue for the first time in years.
The secondary problem is that the authors have a weak case for the shift in rural voting patterns. Their core thesis is that rural and urban voters have remarkably similar views on economic policy, racial animus is similarly prevalent in many of America's major cities as in its small towns, and the existing gap in social policy views is not large enough to explain the wide gap in voting patterns. Much of the blame for the rightward shift in rural politics is thus placed on the outcomes delivered by Democratic economic policy—NAFTA, airline deregulation, and the broader "neoliberal" turn of the Carter-Clinton-Obama era broke whatever remained of the "New Deal" rural coalition. Then the parties' institutional structure took over to accentuate this division. Yet there's little explanation for why it took until the mid-2000s for this urban-rural political divide to really materialize if it was firmly rooted in, e.g., NAFTA, or why rural voters now vociferously oppose many of the New Deal policies that supposedly kept them in the coalition. Likewise, the book seems to dance around the core non-economic policy divides—admitting that rural voters have more conservative social attitudes and exhibit more anti-Black racial animus, but mostly placing those explanations as tertiary drivers of the urban-rural voting gap.
One particular annoyance I have with the book is the constant need to say that rural voters are driven to the Republican party because they're talked down to by "overbearing urban elites," but then to believe it is the *attitudes* of urban voters & politicians driving this feeling. In other words, it is not so much that rural voters oppose gun control and environmental regulation, but that they disapprove of having gun control and environmental regulation "imposed on them" by liberal city-dwellers. Yet you could just as easily say urban voters resent having lax gun laws and environmental deregulation "imposed" on them, and the urban voters would at least have a stronger argument at a federal level because of the overrepresentation of rural interests in the Senate. The core problem is that this is obviously an actual, concrete policy disagreement where rural voters have more conservative social views than urban ones, and this is driving a gap in voting patterns! Yet the authors do not believe social policy drives the gap in voting patterns, so instead, they softly imply that upstate New Yorkers would come around to gun control or exurban Californians would drop their opposition to solar if politicians just switched up their tone. Once again, the feelings of rural voters are completely centered here, and the idea that urban voters in Austin might feel like state-level policy is being "imposed" on them in the same way rural Oregonians feel it's "imposed" on them is barely ever discussed.
The third problem is that the book feels exceptionally outdated, as if much of it was written in 2018-2020 and the shift in election and policy outcomes in 2024 was tacked on as an afterthought. The post-2020 shift in economic geography that occurred to the detriment of cities gets almost no discussion; urban areas like New York and San Francisco are still treated as nearly unstoppable economic hubs and suburban/rural areas are treated as drained of all opportunity. There's vanishingly little discussion of the 2024 election outcomes, where Donald Trump bucked the trend by doing much better in urban areas than the median Republican, and the entire discussion of the Biden administration's explicitly anti-neoliberal rural investment approach is quarantined to a couple of pages.
As with any wide-ranging political book, there were still parts I found interesting or novel. As descriptive empirical work on the political shift in rural areas, much of the book is informative. The data work on the growth of gun clubs and evangelical churches as rural institutions was a particularly great read, and I wish I could force most political pundits to read the sections on demographic change in rural and urban areas. Yet my disagreements with the core thesis and structure of the book are too massive for me to recommend this.
March 25, 2026
This was on my list after hearing about it on the Ezra Klein Show, and I have pretty mixed feelings about it. They do really important work in documenting when and why the urban-rural divide began to emerge, specifically:
"Counties that relied heavily on manufacturing witnessed the shuttering of factories or severe downsizing of the workforce. Meanwhile, urban places were subject to some of these same forces, but many more easily rebounded. Public officials aided them in doing so by promoting the knowledge economy, with its bevy of good-paying jobs for highly educated people. In combination, these changes led to place-based economic inequality. During the 1990s and early 2000s, counties that suffered most from these developments shifted away from supporting Democratic candidates and toward favoring Republicans. In the next phase, from 2008 onward, the rural-urban divide deepened, driven by a trend activated by the first phase. Rural Americans grew to resent what they perceived as overbearing Democratic elites—from urban places—advancing policies in which they felt they had little voice. This is especially striking because on most policy issues, rural and urban residents differ very little—if at all—in their views. What links numerous issues together, though, is that rural dwellers felt imposed on by outsiders, who happened to be benefiting far more from the contemporary economy. This sense of elite overreach pushed them more firmly toward the Republican Party."
Yet despite this, the authors themselves are guilty of the same elite overreach! They talk about how there's actual widespread support for e.g. carbon reduction, which is the sort of thing that only polls well if your approach to polling is slanted toward getting that outcome. Their description of recent Supreme Court decisions is slanted, and their "what to do about it" concluding section repeats liberal tropes about community organizing while eliding the need for moderating on cultural issues.
In the end, the book is I think a good descriptive work and a poor prescriptive one. Not too long, useful to have read it.
"Counties that relied heavily on manufacturing witnessed the shuttering of factories or severe downsizing of the workforce. Meanwhile, urban places were subject to some of these same forces, but many more easily rebounded. Public officials aided them in doing so by promoting the knowledge economy, with its bevy of good-paying jobs for highly educated people. In combination, these changes led to place-based economic inequality. During the 1990s and early 2000s, counties that suffered most from these developments shifted away from supporting Democratic candidates and toward favoring Republicans. In the next phase, from 2008 onward, the rural-urban divide deepened, driven by a trend activated by the first phase. Rural Americans grew to resent what they perceived as overbearing Democratic elites—from urban places—advancing policies in which they felt they had little voice. This is especially striking because on most policy issues, rural and urban residents differ very little—if at all—in their views. What links numerous issues together, though, is that rural dwellers felt imposed on by outsiders, who happened to be benefiting far more from the contemporary economy. This sense of elite overreach pushed them more firmly toward the Republican Party."
Yet despite this, the authors themselves are guilty of the same elite overreach! They talk about how there's actual widespread support for e.g. carbon reduction, which is the sort of thing that only polls well if your approach to polling is slanted toward getting that outcome. Their description of recent Supreme Court decisions is slanted, and their "what to do about it" concluding section repeats liberal tropes about community organizing while eliding the need for moderating on cultural issues.
In the end, the book is I think a good descriptive work and a poor prescriptive one. Not too long, useful to have read it.
February 19, 2026
I first got a peak at this book via the National Writers Series in Traverse City, Michigan. The conversation interested me, so I bought the book. It’s a useful book, but I agree with others here who also find it frustrating. It’s intriguing that the book suggests on a whole range of issues that the rural-urban divide is often based more on perception than on policy - although I wished the authors had parsed out the data demonstrating that a little more carefully (ie, year by year, rather than as an aggregate covering a 5 year interval, as the time period covered also saw an increasing divide over time year-by-year). There were a few assertions in the book I’m skeptical of: notably the bit on green energy simply concludes that people in rural areas only want to have a say in the process of siting wind and solar farms, an assertion that my own experience on the issue in two rural area - northern Michigan and rural Virginia. By my experience, it’s way more than that, and the factors include big money by polluting industries funding campaigns, and buy-in that green energy is “woke” and therefore bad, outright lies, and a perception that green energy is no more green than polluting energy sources, and finally, the slogan “don’t trade farmland for industrial solar.” Despite my issues with the book, I give it 4 stars because it’s got a wealth of information and is useful to the debate. I just wouldn’t treat it as the Bible or anything.
December 1, 2025
Amazing and timely book that should be read by anyone seeking to better understanding the hyperpolarization of politics and how it is tied to rural versus urban divide.
Admittedly, I am rooting for Democratic Party but more important democracy. Many lessons in this book will be bitter pill for fellow Democrats. Talking to our neighbors will not only help elections but help us all live in a more vibrant community.
Admittedly, I am rooting for Democratic Party but more important democracy. Many lessons in this book will be bitter pill for fellow Democrats. Talking to our neighbors will not only help elections but help us all live in a more vibrant community.
December 27, 2025
In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown provide a data-driven comparison of the political polarization between rural and urban residents. Although I have long lived in a liberal city, I frequently visit my mostly-rural hometown and can confirm the authors’ conclusions about the causes of this deep divide.
January 14, 2026
Excellent data-driven piece of writing, although I was surprised that Citizens United -- and everything that came from that -- was not discussed as a variable, nor was the role of outside influences. Perhaps the data is still not fully vetted on that. I was also surprised that the conclusions on solving the divide involved very high-touch, very old-school practices.
March 6, 2026
I really loved how Mettler and crew looked backwards in time, tracing the rural urban divide through NAFTA, the Obama years, and to today. As someone naturally geared towards experimentation a little more, I was hoping to see some of the findings experimentally tested for causation but perhaps that’s for another project. Great book all in all
November 24, 2025
This book goes a long way in explaining the political polarization found in the United States, its history and its dangers.
December 23, 2025
I wish there were books similar to this in Canadian politics, French politics, Italian politics, and other European nation politics.
December 27, 2025
Queen, timely finishing for TX
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews