Exploring the Urban-Rural Divide After Redistricting
Our nation's most rural and most urban congressional districts provide clear caricatures of Red and Blue America.
America’s growing urban-rural divide is the engine driving our political system’s extreme partisanship. A quick visit to ‘Rural America’ shows a predominately White nation in decline. Low educational attainment and shrinking populations have led voters to embrace conservative rhetoric that promises to return Rural America to its glory days. Meanwhile a short stay in the downtown core of ‘Urban America’ gives the exact opposite image of our country: a diverse coalition of educated voters that’s focused on realizing the promises of equality and democracy at the core of the American Dream. If you listen to all of these voters closely there’s one thing both coalitions agree on: America is headed in the wrong direction but the solutions these two factions propose couldn’t be any more different. Today, we’ll be diving into the places that power this divide in Congress.
A Snapshot of Rural America
Following the most recent redistricting process, our nation has 20 truly rural congressional districts. These are districts that contain no metro or micropolitan areas and typically cover hundreds of square miles of undeveloped land. These are districts like Kansas’s First district or Washington’s Fourth where there’s no identifiable urban “anchor” to the district and voters are scattered far and wide across vast prairies or mountain ranges.
On average, these rural districts are incredibly White. Half of the districts in this group are more than 90% White and only three have nonwhite populations over 30%. These districts are also nearly all below average in higher educational attainment. It should be no surprise after reading this short demographic profile that 18 of these 20 districts are represented by House Republicans. (The two held by Democrats are both in New England: Maine’s Second and New Hampshire’s Second.)
A Snapshot of Urban America
Urban America is represented by 38 exclusively urban districts in the US House, following redistricting. These are districts that include the downtown core of an urban area and do NOT include any undeveloped areas lying outside of the city. (This definition disqualifies many gerrymandered districts that stretch from cities into the countryside like those representing Nashville, TN or Cincinnati, OH.)
Of these truly urban districts, all are currently represented by Democratic House incumbents and not a single one voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. 77% of these districts are majority-minority districts, meaning that only 9 urban House districts hold a majority of White voters. What may come as a surprise is that these urban districts are not at the top of the ladder when it comes to educational attainment. While many of those majority-White urban districts had an above-average amount of voters with a college degree, several majority-minority urban districts landed below the average US House district in educational attainment.
