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The Only Thing Worse Than Taking Rural Voters for Granted

By May 21, 2024No Comments

“Is dismissing them out of reach for Democrats.”

This is the headline of a new Op-Ed in The Nation.  In the article, authors Erica Etelson and Anthony Flaccavento cheer a new book:   The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.  A review by Jessica T. Mathews in Foreign Affairs magazine calls the divide between rural and urban so severe that the divide actually threatens our national security.

MY RURAL AMERICA is not in the book-selling business, but we believe the importance of uniting our country is so important that we offer three ways to buy the book:

  1. Columbia University Press  “The widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious political divide of our day.   Support for Democrats, up and down the ballot, has plummeted throughout the countryside, and the entire governing system is threatened by one-party dominance. After Donald Trump’s surprising victories throughout rural America, pundits and journalists went searching for answers, popping into roadside diners and opining from afar. Rural Americans are supposedly bigots, culturally backward, lazy, scared of the future, and radical. But is it that simple? Is the country splintering between two very different Americas—one rural, one urban? …”

2. Bookshop.  From Foreign Affairs:  “The widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious  political divide of our day. Support for Democrats, up and down the ballot, has plummeted throughout the countryside, and the entire governing system is threatened by one-party dominance. After Donald Trump’s surprising victories throughout rural America, pundits and journalists went searching for answers, popping into roadside diners and opining from afar. Rural Americans are supposedly bigots, culturally backward, lazy, scared of the future, and radical. But is it that simple? Is the country splintering between two very different Americas–one rural, one urban?”

3.  Amazon.  “…An unparalleled exploration of rural partisanship, this book offers a timely warning that the chasm separating urban and rural Americans cannot be papered over with policies or rhetoric. Instead, The Rural Voter shows how this division is the latest chapter in the enduring conflict over American identity. …”

Erica Etelson and Anthony Faccavento, The Nation: The Only Thing Worse Than Taking Rural Voters for Granted

Nicholas Jacobs and  Dan Shea:  The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America