The rural-urban divide is one of the defining features of the American electorate: Democrats dominate in cities, while Republicans rule in rural areas. But as the presidential race has shown, the two parties are treating the voters in their opponents’ favored territory in very different ways.
Democrats are working to attract rural voters and promoting policy initiatives to improve life for rural Americans. Republicans are heaping contempt and calumny on cities and treating their residents as deluded.
Conservatives have long disdained urban areas and those who live in them. But as Election Day approaches, Donald Trump and JD Vance are deploying a particularly nasty anti-urban strategy, seemingly driven by the belief that if Americans who don’t live in cities — or ever go there — look upon them with disgust and fear, then they’ll vote Republican.
We’ve gotten used to Republicans describing our cities as repulsive and frightening for so long that it no longer strikes us as unusual.
In rural Pennsylvania last week, Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, unveiled a policy plan to address some of the challenges faced by rural Americans. It includes an effort to hire 10,000 desperately needed health care professionals to work in rural areas. The day before, Vance traveled to Minneapolis, but not to offer the Trump-Vance plan for urban America. Instead, Vance insulted and demeaned the city, falsely claiming that Walz let it “burn to the ground” in 2020 during protests against police violence and that the city “has now become overrun with crime.” Vance warned that “the story of Minneapolis is coming to every community across the United States of America if we promote Kamala Harris to president of the United States.” Never mind that Minneapolis was named the happiest city in America this year, just one of its absurdly long list of accolades.
Vance’s strategy of insulting the city he was in mirrored Trump’s approach last week in Detroit, where the former president told an audience that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Harris wins. In fact, Detroit is in the midst of a remarkable revival, with new economic development, plummeting crime rates and a population that is increasing for the first time in decades.
Imagine the thermonuclear freakout that would grip the entire political world if Harris or Walz went to, say, a rural Pennsylvania county, declared it a dystopia and its residents deranged, and warned darkly that the whole country would be gripped by that kind of rural horror if they didn’t win the election. They’d be pilloried for insulting the “heartland,” where “real Americans” supposedly live. Commentators of all ideological stripes would savage them for being so cruel to such a significant portion of the electorate. It would dominate coverage of the campaign for the rest of the election.
But we’ve gotten used to Republicans describing our cities as repulsive and frightening for so long that it no longer strikes us as unusual. When Trump says that in America’s cities, “you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped,” it’s easy to dismiss the ham-handed hyperbole, but we know that millions of Americans believe it.
That’s because conservative media’s efforts to regularly portray cities as chaotic and more dangerous amplify a long anti-urban tradition in America that dates back to the nation’s founding. Thomas Jefferson believed the countryside was where all good things could be found, while cities were as disgusting as the people who lived there. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue,” Jefferson wrote in 1785. “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”
In the picture Trump and Vance paint, every American city is in flames.
Conservatives have long portrayed cities as places of danger and corruption. Richard Nixon aired frightening ads focused on urban crime in his 1968 run for the White House. In 2016, Ted Cruz accused Trump of having “New York values” (he didn’t say exactly what those values were, but they had to be bad). Conservatives celebrated Jason Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town,” a warning to urbanites not to bring their crime and chaos to small towns.
As Republicans have secured their hold over rural areas in recent years, they have only increased the shade they throw at cities. Democrats, said Sen. Tom Cotton in 2022, “want to make you live in downtown areas, in high-rise buildings, and walk to work or take the subway.” (The horror!) “Serious question,” tweeted Vance the year before. “I have to go to New York soon and I’m trying to figure out where to stay. I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?”
For the record, New York is by some measures the safest big city in America. When he’s not in Washington, Vance lives in Cincinnati, a city of 300,000; he describes his posh neighborhood as “the perfect combo of proximity to the city and to nature.”
Yet in the picture Trump and Vance paint, every American city is in flames — and it’s no accident that they make constant reference to the protests against police brutality that swept the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Though 98% of those protests saw no injuries and there was no property damage in 97%, Republicans would have you believe that entire cities burned to the ground, as Vance falsely claimed about Minneapolis. You don’t have to be steeped in scholarship on race to grasp the racial subtext to the GOP attack on urban America and the people who live there.
It might be easier to assume goodwill on Republicans’ part if, like Democrats, they actually seemed interested in finding more votes in cities. Instead, they sneer at urban areas and the Americans who live there, hoping to generate anti-urban disdain and fear that will win them votes elsewhere. Given that Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, the evidence for this strategy’s success is thin at best. But whether it works this time or not, it’s one more iteration of Republicans’ larger strategy of winning through division. And it’s shameful.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture.