As American as Apple Pie? The Rural Vote’s Disproportionate Slice of Power


In 1920, for the first time, the Census Bureau counted more people living in urbanized America than in the countryside. This hasn’t been a rural nation ever since.

Yet the idea of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian America has receded slowly despite demographic change. We still romanticize the family farm, though few of them exist anymore. We view even suburbia in pastoral terms — the “crabgrass frontier,” as the historian Kenneth T. Jackson put it. And, as the recent Electoral College results make clear, we still live with political institutions that have baked in a distinctly pro-rural bias, by design.

The Democratic candidate for president has now won the popular vote in six of the last seven elections. But in part because the system empowers rural states, for the second time in that span, the candidate who garnered the most votes will not be president.

Rural America, even as it laments its economic weakness, retains vastly disproportionate electoral strength. Rural voters were able to nudge Donald J. Trump to power despite Hillary Clinton’s large margins in cities like New York. In a House of Representatives that structurally disadvantages Democrats because of their tight urban clustering, rural voters helped Republicans hold their cushion. In the Senate, the least populous states are now more overrepresented than ever before. And the growing unity of rural Americans as a voting bloc has converted the rural bias in national politics into a potent Republican advantage.

“If you’re talking about a political system that skews rural, that’s not as important if there isn’t a major cleavage between rural and urban voting behavior,” said Frances Lee, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. “But urban and rural voting behavior is so starkly different now so that this has major political consequences for who has power.

“And it’s not just in terms of policy outcomes,” she continued. “This pervasively advantages Republicans in maintaining control of the U.S. national government.”

The Electoral College is just one example of how an increasingly urban country has inherited the political structures of a rural past. Today, states containing just 17 percent of the American population, a historic low, can theoretically elect a Senate majority, Dr. Lee said. The bias also shapes the House of Representatives.

It exists, as a result, in the formulas that determine where highway funds are spent or who gets Homeland Security dollars. It exists in state capitols, where bills preferred by urban delegations have been much more likely to be rejected.

Today, the influence of rural voters also evokes deeply rooted ideals about who should have power in America. Jefferson and James Madison argued that the strength of the nation would always derive from its agrarian soil.


“They had this vision of what they called the ‘yeoman farmer’: this independent, free-standing person who owed nothing to anybody, who didn’t receive any payments from the government, who didn’t live by a wage, but who could support himself and his family on a farm growing everything they needed — and that these were the people who were going to be the backbone of democracy,” said Gerald Gamm, a political scientist at the University of Rochester, describing what could be the forefathers of the rural voters who tilted this year’s election.



When the framers of the Constitution were still debating the shape of institutions we have today, 95 percent of America was rural, as the 1790 census classified the population. The Connecticut Compromise at the time created the Senate: one chamber granting equal voice to every state to counterbalance the House, where more populous states spoke louder.

And they made sure the compromise stuck. Today, equal state representation in the Senate is the only provision in the Constitution that cannot be amended. But even as a deliberately undemocratic body, the Senate has slipped further out of alignment with the American population over time.

The Senate hasn’t simply favored sparsely populated states; politicians in Washington created sparsely populated states to leverage the Senate’s skewed power.

“When we talk about small-state bias, all of that was an intentional policy choice,” said Jowei Chen, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. Republicans in Congress passed the 1862 Homestead Act, offering free land to settlers who would move to territories that would eventually become states — creating more Senate seats and Electoral College votes for a Republican Party eager to keep government control away from Southern Democrats. They even managed to divide the Dakota Territory into two states, worth twice the political power.

As the Plains later depopulated and American cities, then suburbs, swelled, the Senate became even more unrepresentative.

Jeffersonian suspicion of big cities also appears in the sites of state capitals: Albany and not New York; Jefferson City and not St. Louis; Springfield and not Chicago. Political scientists at the University of California, Davis, have found that most state capitals were located near what was then the population centroid of each state — typically closer to the geographical center of the state, and not the place where the most people already lived, breaking with how much of the world sited its capitals.

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Last edited by Goose (11/21/2016 5:59 am)