Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
Happy 2024, Keep it Rural readers! In just under two weeks, presidential caucuses will begin in Iowa, followed up by New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and Michigan, promising a whirlwind start to this eventful year in politics.
Voter behavior in these elections will likely be determined by people’s perception of the economy, which polls show is negative despite an economy that is currently stronger than it’s been in years.
A new book finds rural voters in particular are weighed down by economic anxiety that could influence the way they vote. This disparity between economic perception and reality promises to affect the results of the 2024 presidential election.
People tend to measure the economy by looking at the price of consumer goods. New York Times reporting found that people referenced high gas, grocery, and housing prices as indicators of a poor economy. Yet, other indicators show that inflation is down, unemployment rates are low, and consumer spending is up.
So why do things still feel so bad? The current economic outlook is a marked change from one year ago when economists were predicting a recession. But for rural Americans, it could be that economic anxiety and a community’s well being are linked.
While it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how much rural America has shrunk or grown – and of course, growth differs depending on where you look – rural scholars generally accept that many small towns are still losing population. For the people who reside in them, depopulation is a direct reflection of community health. This connection could weigh more heavily on the psyche of rural residents for whom place-based identity is stronger than for any other demographic, as scholar Kal Munis noted in a Daily Yonder interview.
Rural people feel the struggles of their communities more viscerally because “in small towns and on their outskirts, the poor live among the wealthy,” wrote Daily Yonder reporter Olivia Weeks in a review of the recently published book The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.
In general, poverty in a small town is more evident because it’s easier to see than in a city, where rich and poor neighborhoods are often closed off from one another. This means that “the precarity of the [rural] neighbor, town, and county are transmuted into individual anxieties, even among those with sturdy financial foundations,” Weeks wrote.
In rural America, the current negative outlook on the economy could be because people can see one another’s struggles plainly.
So what does this mean for the presidential election? According to a Pew Research Center poll, the majority of Americans express low confidence in President Biden’s ability to “make good decisions on economic policy.”
And in rural America, where support for Democrats has plummeted since 2016, another red rural election cycle seems a likely – but not foregone – conclusion. Whether Democrats decide to show up for rural America in the coming 11 months will make all the difference.
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