The deeping rural-urban divide in U.S. Presidential politics: Presidential votes in Iowa, 2008–2020

In recent years, the electoral gap between urban and rural areas in American politics has intensified, with cities and suburbs tending more Democratic and rural areas tending more Republican. This gap was evident especially in the 2020 Presidential election. According to nationwide exit polls, Joe Biden got 60 percent of the popular vote in urban areas, 50 percent in suburban areas, and 42 percent in rural areas. Many of the states in which Biden did better than Obama, including Georgia, Arizona, and Texas, are experiencing substantial migration into their large cities and suburbs. In contrast, support for Democrats has eroded substantially in states with relatively large rural populations, including Iowa. Biden's percentage of Iowa's vote in 2020 was nine percentage points less than Obama's in 2008. On a percentage basis, the Republican shift in Iowa during this period was the fourth largest of any state in the country, after North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia. One could attribute these results to the "innate" conservatism of rural places. However, political alignments in rural places are seldom as static or monolithic as one might expect. Historically for instance, radical movements were active in America's rural areas, especially in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. Jn the 1890s, the People's Party (or Populists) gave voice to rural resentment of the dominance of cities in an increasingly urbanized country (Hicks, 1931).