The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3607 - The Rural Vs. Urban Threat To Democracy w/ Suzanne Mettler

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

It's News Day Tuesday on The Majority Report   On today's program:   As airports remain in chaos due to the DHS shutdown, Trump has deployed ICE agents to assist TSA agents (stand around aimlessly).   Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) says that the Senate had agreed on a deal to fund everything but ICE, which can be funded through reconciliation, but Trump shut it down. Trump has been very forceful in his opposition to any deal that doesn't include the SAVE Act which of course has nothing to do with DHS funding.   Suzanne Mettler, Political Science Professor at Cornell University, joins the program for a conversation about her book co-authored with Trevor E. Brown, Urban Versus Rural: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy.   In the Fun Half:   The X account Call to Activism has leaked a video of Zoom meeting between Chip Roy, who introduced the SAVE Act, admitting that his chief of staff has had an extremely difficult time getting a real ID.   Trump pits Stephen Miller and Kash Patel against each other in an ass kissing competition.     all that and more   Check out longtime MR listener Jim Di Bartolo's new graphic novel F*ck Billionaires    To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: SELECT QUOTE: Get the right life insurance for you and save more than 50% on term life insurance at SelectQuote.com/MAJORITY COZYEARTH: Go to Leesa.com for the SPRING SALE 20%OFF MATTRESS PLUS get an extra $50 off with promo code MAJORITY, SUNSET LAKE: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order at SunsetLakeCBD.com  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com

It is Tuesday, March 24th, 2025. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Suzanne Metler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions at the Government Department of, Department at Cornell University, co-author with Trevor Brown of the book Rural versus Urban, The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy. Also on the program today, Iran Wary of Fake Negotiations as the bombing rages on.

The fact that there's still about 2,500 of an expeditionary force, or Rangers, I think, headed towards that region may be part of their weariness. TSA wait times explode at airports all around the country. Trump deploys ice to the airports to presumably just watch. After killing the DHS funding deal, Trump reverses. Republicans seem to think a deal may be imminent and seeing as how they're all supposed to go on vacation soon, it very well may be. Speaking to the Senate, Mark Wayne, Mullen confirmed as the new DHS head, the Oklahoma governor appoints a natural gas executive to be the no senator. Supreme Court primed to limit mail-in voting as Trump mails in his Florida special election

ballot. Trump White House gives a billion dollars to cancel a wind farm and funnel that money to to oil drilling. Conservative Fifth Circuit throws out an FTC order directing into it to stop using deceptive ads for turbotax.

Georgia woman charged with murder after allegedly taking an abortion pill. All this and more on today's majority report. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us. It is Well, Newsday, Tuesday, but a little bit, you know, our format's been a little goosey,

lucy-goosey, frankly, over the past year. So, but it's still a Newsday, Tuesday. It's just that we have an interview today. Unless news. Yes. Emma Viglin out today. She did one of the Pod Save episodes. That is available now.

And did she end up? Yeah, higher learnings coming up today. Okay, great. She did the Van Lathen show, or higher learning, I should say. And of course, if you're a Patreon member of the Bituation Room, you can see her live show that she did on Sunday. So all of that's going on. Let's get right into this. We're on week five now of the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. Democrats have reforms to ICE. that they want before they sign off on funding that agency, increasingly TSA agents who have gone without pay are calling in sick. And so delays are exploding. Atlanta, I saw some images in New Orleans of lines in the parking lot all across the country. larger airports lines are incredibly extended. And Trump sent ice there, presumably I don't know what to do what, just to stand around, I guess,

just as a way of saying like, I'm going to still deploy ice. And I would imagine, I would imagine a lot of these ice guys are nervous about people taking pictures of them capturing both their face, maybe their footwear, their uniforms, because then later, when they're out there kidnapping people wearing masks, people would be able to identify them. For instance, if people were to take those photos and keep them for, you know, perhaps down the road, some type of site that hosted these things and identified them. I would imagine They're nervous about that. And I don't blame them.

I mean, there's a reason why they go around wearing masks because they don't want to be identified. And so it's not hard to find video of people going up to them, ice, and these ice guys literally running away because they don't want their face to be seen and to be pegged as ice guys. So just keep that in mind when you're at the airport. If you're taking a picture of an ice person,

they may be upset. So just keep that in mind because it may be, you know, from their perspective, valuable to other people later. So keep that in mind. All right, let's go to this. And so here is Donald Trump yesterday at the Memphis Safe Task Force Roundtable in Memphis, Tennessee. We have some clips of that will play. later in the program of Stephen Miller and Cash Patel, engaging in a competition to see which one of them can crawl up Donald Trump's derrier more deeply.

But we'll save that for later when we get to the sports part of the program. Here is Donald Trump telling Republicans not to make a deal. And we've got to do something about it all. and it's part of Homeland Security. And I'm suggesting strongly to the Republican Party, don't make any deal on anything. The most important thing we can have is what's called the Save America Act.

Don't make any deal on anything unless you include voter ID and you have to be a citizen to vote. You have to show citizenship to vote. Very easy to do. It's very insulting when they say people can't do it because they don't know how to do it. Anybody that can't do it,

I think it's a very insulting thing to say. The Democrats are fully to blame with the struggle of the great American public is going through at the airports. They're going through a big struggle right now, and we just put ICE in charge, and they're helping TSA, the agents, and they're working together so far very well. You know he's sincere about what the American public is going through, because he's reading it from a reading it from a prepared statement for the first time. A great American public. It is a great American public.

We'll get into the SAVE Act, but the bottom line with the SAVE Act is it is so onerous in terms of what it's looking at that even Congress people's top advisors have trouble getting an ID that would be sufficient for the SAVE Act. We will talk about that later in the program. And I'm just hearing from Dorsey who's just flown today. and he said he can confirm the ice guys at O'Hare just standing around. One tried to help but didn't even know if laptops should be out of bags. So, but Trump is insisting on the Save Act go into the funding. Of course, it's a completely different thing, but he wants it to be a rider on the funding for DHS. The Democrats have their own list of things.

Let's listen to John Kennedy, Senator John Kennedy on Fox News as to who is responsible for this, it's becoming a hot potato. This is yesterday, and we have new news as of today, but it's becoming a hot potato because all of a sudden now, even like wealthy people who fly are starting to feel very inconvenienced. And in fact, I read that the investigators from the National Aviation Board who are coming to LaGuardia to find out what happened with the death yesterday, a collision between like a ground crew and a, and a, plane, I think it was. They were delayed because of wait times at the TSA. But here is Kennedy. Senator Cruz and I came up with a plan. We said, look, it's a two-step process. The Democrats have

offered to open up everything but ICE. Ted and I said, okay, let's accept their offer. And then at the same time, we would offer a bill for reconciliation where we don't need any Democratic votes to do whatever we wanted to do with ICE. And that way we're out of the shutdown and DHS is back open. We submitted that. Senator Griffin submitted that to President Trump, as is his right. He said no, no deals with the Democrats. So we're back to square one.

Back to square one, no deals with the Democrats. and look, there is a way where the Republican Party could put pressure on Trump. They could pass whatever they want, and then it could be on Trump's desk, and Trump doesn't sign the bill that would essentially make airplanes, airports functional again. Just hearing from Dorsey that flights are being canceled left and right at LaGuardia. And I imagine that's the case all across the... the country. And so Donald Trump, it feels sounds like by the end of the day yesterday, started getting a little bit nervous, and he okayed the idea that the Republicans could make a deal

on funding DHS without ICE. And they're going to try and move ICE into reconciliation, along with parts of the SAVE Act. It's unclear if Democrats will go along with, this because the whole idea about this was attempting to reform ICE operations and use the funding as leverage. But I suspect with vacation coming up, they're supposed to go on recess at the end of this week. Schumer's going to say, we won and leave. Shouldn't this situation where there's a split between actual senators and the president be like the perfect time for Chuck Schumer's type of politics to press an advantage? Or no. Did you say press an advantage?

I don't think you get what we're doing here. Press an advantage. No. When Trump is retreating in this, he's retreating because Republicans are being blamed for this. Because, you know, a Democratic Party would be jumping all over the fact that Kennedy said that on Fox News. And a Democratic party that wanted to be really aggressive would say, Republicans should just pass this bill and make Donald Trump own it. Now, the real question is whether they can get it together for a reconciliation bill.

We'll talk more about that in the coming days. But in the meantime, DHS may or may not get funded over the next couple of days. We will keep you abreast of that. And it may or may not be funded in a way that will provide better outcomes from Democrats. Remember, this goes back to the first bill that Chuck. Schumer and about six or seven other Democrats, maybe it was 10, ended up voting to allow to move forward because he was afraid of a government shutdown at that time. So this stuff that happens, you know, nearly a year ago comes back to haunt you.

In a moment, we're going to be talking to Suzanne Metler. She's the senior professor of American institutions at the government department of Cornell University, Pro author with Trevor Brown of the book Rural versus Urban, the growing divide that threatens democracy. But first, a couple of words from our sponsors. Are you numb to it? The insanity that's going on all around us. We have some geopolitical problems. I don't know if people have picked up on.

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That is Lisa-L-E-E-E-S-A.com. Lisa.com promo code majority. We'll put a link in the podcast and YouTube descriptions. quick break. And when we come back, Suzanne Metler, John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions and the government department at Cornell University, co-author with Trevor Brown of the book Rural versus Urban, The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy. We are back, Sam Cedar, on the majority report. Emma Viglin is out today. It is a pleasure to welcome back to the program, Suzanne Metler. She is the John L. Senior Professor of American

institutions at the government department at Cornell University, co-author with Trevor Brown of the book Rural versus Urban, The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy. Suzanne, it's good to see you again. I have to tell you that for years, and I guess it's been now probably close to 15 years, I have been talking about your book, The Submerged State, which I think is just such an important concept for people to understand and have spent. many, many debates talking about people's government benefits that they get. They don't really recognize their government benefits because we do it either through like

a tax benefit on mortgages or whatever. So it's great to see you again. Yeah, great to see you again. All right. Let's talk about this new book that you've been working on for a while. And it is about a growing divide between. urban and rural areas in this country. Before we get to my misconception that there's always been a divide between urban and rural, what do we mean by rural in this context today? Oh, yeah. So there are

many ways that you can look at, you know, measuring rural. But rural Americans today, depending upon your measure are between 15 and 20% of the population. And as we look at it, we're measuring rural counties. So all counties in the United States are measured on this scale from urban to rural. And it takes into account not just population density, but also how close they are to a major city. So how integrated their economy is into that of a larger city. you know, it's only about one out of five Americans today at most who live in rural places. But it turns out they're very politically significant.

And, okay, how, just on that definition, like how disconnected from an urban center would one have to be to be, you know, defined as rural? So you're not taking, you're not going into the farmer's market and driving an hour and a half, let's say to go and sell your where is there on Sunday in the city. You're further out or is just like, is it geographic or is it just simply that's not, there's no room for you to sell that there? Right. It could be the year and an hour and a half. Like where I live in Syracuse, New York, this is an urban county, although there are

many parts of it that feel really rural. and that's because the census tract might be defined as rural, but the county as a whole is urban because you have the city of Syracuse inside of it, a lot of population. But then you just go out a little ways from Syracuse, and those are very rural counties, and people do what you say. They drive into the farmer's market and sell their goods.

So, you know, these are counties that don't have a city within them, and they're not densely populated suburbs either. So, you know, today, Most Americans live in either large cities or small cities or suburbs and all of that is urban. So, okay, so 20% at most of the U.S. population, but politically important. And why? Is that because of the way that our government is structured in many respects? Yeah, that's right. So the United States has always had institutional features that give extra clout to less populated places.

So if you just think of the U.S. Senate. Today, the population of California is almost 70 times that of Wyoming. But both California and Wyoming get two senators. And what that means is that Wyoming has an outsized voice in policymaking in the U.S. Senate. And then it also has an outsized voice in judicial nominations, in judicial confirmations, right, for that whole branch. What's unique today is that all of those special levers that give extra clout to less populated places are consolidated in one party. And that has not happened before in our history. And that gives that party, the Republican Party, extra leverage to really run the show, even if a minority of Americans are supporting it.

Okay. So, and this is the nub because I read one review that took exception to you saying, like, this is a threat to democracy and the idea that it's just because it's run by a party that you don't like. But in any other, I mean, we, it's possible to talk about, you know, 20% of the population, but the idea that it has this, I mean, I don't even know, like, have you, do you have a figure? I mean, like, when we look at the Supreme Court, the, because they control that 20%, they have a 6 to 3 majority. Yes. Because they control that 20%, they have a whatever it is, a 54, you know, like a eight point percentage point, I guess in the Senate advantage, even though they have that 20%. So from just a sheer one vote, one person, and the way that we conceptualize that, it is quite clear that it is anti-democratic small D. And if it wasn't for that case, we, you may.

might write the book, but it wouldn't be necessarily as relevant. Right? I mean, that's the point. No, that's absolutely right. So, yeah, to elaborate a little bit on the point you're making, when Republicans control the U.S. Senate today, they have typically won the states that have less than a majority of the U.S. population. They'll win states that contain something like 47 percent of the U.S. population, but they'll get 53 votes in the Senate. And what that means is not only do they, you know, they can do more through policymaking and based on minority rule, but they can also confirm justices. And so then you have a Supreme Court with at this point, you know, several members of the conservative majority who were actually appointed by a president in Donald Trump's first term, he had not won the popular vote. So the Electoral College is another one of these features.

It gives extra leverage to less populated places. And then he was able to nominate these justices that were confirmed by a Senate elected, where they were confirmed by senators who'd been elected by states with less than a majority of Americans in them. So that's minority governance. That's not small D Democratic. I mean, we should say it's also not just the Supreme Court. I mean, you know, I'm looking at some of these.

There's a whole judiciary that is. lifetime appointments, you know, ranging from questions about, you know, they can run the gamut from trans rights to just the Fifth Circuit the other day said the FTC does not have the right to say when Intuit says, our turbo attacks is free, free, free, they don't have the right to say that it's not free. And so we're not going to allow you to do that anymore. Okay, so that just gives a sense of like the minoritarian aspect of their power and that it comes. And your thesis is like more than anywhere else, we look at the American landscape and it's this divide that is creating minoritarian rule.

And I was surprised. My assumption has always been like there's always been an urban, rural divide, but in our politics. But that's not the case. It started in the early 90s. Tell us about that. Yeah. No, this was really fascinating to us. So if you look at presidential voting through the middle into the late 20th century,

rural and urban counties moved together with just a tiny gap between them. So, you know, they both voted for whoever was winning the presidency. But then you get, and that was true, as you know, as recently as 1992, there was only a two percentage point gap between rural and urban counties in terms of the percentage of the vote that they gave. to Bill Clinton. Then a gap starts to grow. And the rural counties become more and more supportive of Republican candidates and urban counties

where big cities had long been supportive of Democrats. But now it comes to be the smaller cities and suburbs as well. So that gap begins to grow. And it's now in the 2024 election, it's a 20 percentage point gap. So it's gone from two points to 20 percentage points. And it is in every region. of the country. This gap has grown dramatically. It's really big. It's, in fact, largest in the Midwest, a little bit larger than in the south. The gap occurs in most all states, and it has grown over time just since the 90s. Oh, okay. I have two questions about this. One is why use just presidential elections as a measure of this divide?

Okay, we don't. But first of all, we want to understand what led to this divide. And so presidential elections are useful because we can look at all counties in the United States, all, you know, over 3,300 counties with the same thing that we're trying to explain how did they vote in presidential elections. But besides that, and we do that, looking at elections from 1976 to 2020. In addition to that, we look at the U.S. House of Representatives and what's changed over time. And this is really fascinating. If you go back to the 1980s and up through 1992, and you think of congressional districts as, you know, in five parts from the most urban to the most rural. The most urban places were, you know, far and away electing lots of Democrats as they long had been since the New Deal. But all of the other types of congressional districts were really split between the number of Republicans and a number of Democrats they were sending to Congress. And in fact, the most rural districts were more likely to be sending Democrats than Republicans by a little bit.

But then you get the 1994 wave election and a lot of those rural districts start electing Republicans. And then it increases all the more once you get to 2010, the Tea Party election. And now when you look at Congress, it's completely symmetrical. It is organized by place. So the more rural your district, the more likely they are to send a Republican to Congress and vice versa. The more urban, the more Democrats. So it's a really important source of our polarization today. And it's, you know, creating an us versus them politics, which I think is exacerbated by people living far away from each other.

And we could definitely see it in like in the idea of, you know, what kind of swing we can anticipate, even in what may be a historic year for, you know, an out of party midterm election. There's still just not as many in play because you have so many districts that are both that are that are that are safe essentially for lack of a better term districts for Republicans and Democrats. All right. Let's talk about the why, because I, this is where I have, I mean, the, I, I have the most sort of like questions about, about the thesis. The response on the, on the prescriptive side, I think, I'm there. But tell us why, what you guys found and what the theory is to why this happened. Yeah. So what we found is, you know, we looked at why did this divide begin to grow in the 1990s? And what we found was that economic change and the public policies underlying it were really driving it. So the counties that lost jobs and counties that lost population, either one, were moving toward Republican voting. And we think it's because of, you know, agricultural consolidation, the loss of family farms that had been really, really. been going on from the 1980s onward. And then deindustrialization, which really hit rural places

in the 1990s and early 2000s, as all sorts of jobs were lost because of increased global trade and changes in technology and the like. I was struck by how much rural counties had depended upon those kinds of jobs previously. And then the other is extract. industries which lost jobs due to technology and so on. So that's the beginnings of it. And that continues through the early 2000s. Then the next phase, which is 2008 to 2020, is what we call elite overreach. This is when people living in rural places start looking at Democrats and they see this

party with people who seem better off than themselves, more affluent because their economies, the rural economies have really disintegrated. Urban areas experience some of those things, but then often bounced back by developing the knowledge economy and jobs like that. So people start becoming resentful of the Democrats because they feel that they are creating policies that are foisted upon them,

but where the Democrats have not come to consult with them about the needs of their communities, and they don't seem to understand them or respect them. And so they resent it. And then the third prong is organizational changes, where labor unions had long really helped the Democratic Party to get out the vote.

That's no longer happening, as you have, you know, the loss of jobs that are union jobs in rural places. But by contrast, there is a growing connection between other kinds of organizations that are helping to connect the dots for voters toward the Republican Party. And here I mean evangelical churches and groups affiliated

with the National Rifle Association, like rod and gun clubs and shooting ranges and so on. And these are all, there are more of them per capita in rural counties. So they help to cement this rural urban divide because

they do some of that work that parties used to do of connecting the dots for voters. So there's like, So if I understand it, just to unpack this, there's essentially the economic woes of the rural areas. And then a sense that they have been left behind. And then a mechanism in which to sort of assign blame on a Democrats as opposed to Republicans because there's, you know, know, the vacuum that was created when they were left behind gets filled by other mechanisms

that point them to the villain. So where does race come into this? Yeah. Because, I mean, you know, like I feel like it commingles in a way that maybe in that third sort of bucket, like it becomes a mechanism in which to deflect blame and to obscure. some of the economic realities. Yeah. Yeah, so let me speak about this. So one thing to note is that one out of four people who live in rural areas is a person of color. And when we look at this rural urban political divide, we find that it is not among people of color. So black Americans, whether they live in urban or rural places, tend to

vote very similarly to each other. The same is true of Latinos. And this growing gap is among white people, rural versus urban. So, you know, many people assume that the, that the change in rural politics comes down to racism. And we find that it's not that simple. When we look at the period when it began in the late 90s to early 2000s, when you have the rise of place-based inequality, in fact, at that point in time, so we measure, we have a way of measuring racism. So here we're looking at individual attitudes in places. And we find that racism in that period of time was as prevalent among non-Hispanic whites in urban areas as it was in rural areas. So if you're a person of color, you're as likely to encounter racism in a city as you are in a rural

place. And it's not driving the rural urban political divide at that point. When you get to the next period, 2008 to 2020, racism does come into play because it becomes slightly more concentrated in rural areas than in urban areas. What's really happening in this period is that people in whites in both areas are starting to, you know, in the ways they answer these questions about racism, they are seeming somewhat less racist. But urban areas are changing. changing faster than rural areas. And so it's driving the divide a little bit then, but it's one of several factors.

And what is significant to us is that it follows from the rise of place-based inequality. So we think it's a way in which rural people are, again, looking at the Democratic Party and they're saying they don't seem to be aware of our needs. They seem to be paying attention to people of color, who live in cities, but they don't seem to be realizing that we're hurting over here as well. Right. That last part makes the most sense to me. The idea that, like, race is the first

sort of like easiest is the low-hanging fruit when you're starting to, I mean, because when we're talking about Republican voters, we're talking about white people. I mean, not, not 100%, but close, right? Like, I mean, I don't know, like 90% of Republicans are white. And that there is a, that there was as much racism amongst white people in cities as in rural areas. I'm not clear how that's necessarily dispositive that it becomes a, well, A, we know that even in those urban areas necessarily, I mean, in a presidential level, Democrats always lose the white, white vote. I mean, they just, they just do. And so it would have more impact in those, in, in the rural areas where you have a higher

concentration of white people, A, and B, I don't know, the, I, I, there was one statistic from, I can't remember if we, we interviewed him or it was cited in another book, but Michael Tesla had written a book about the 2008 election. And, you know, obviously Johnson had said, we're going to lose the South for a couple of generations. I actually think that, like, he overestimated how quickly the Voting Rights Act was absorbed into the American South, because in 2008, over 50% of non-college educated whites thought the Republican Party was to the left of the Democrats on race. And it wasn't until Obama gets elected at that time that people like, hey, wait a second. And I mean, and so like this all happened, I think much slower than we

thought. But it does make sense to me that racism becomes like, it's almost as if you have like a a weak immune system, something triggers it. It doesn't just, and that economic deprivation sort of like heightened the racism because that was the sort of like most, the least complicated way for that frustration to come out. Yes. Yeah, we do see it as a response to the rise of place-based inequality happening first. Yeah, that makes racism more salient, if you will. And so let's get to that notion of just sort of like the the blame game, as it were. There's a vacuum of, you know, of unions that weren't necessarily had the highest density in a lot of these rural areas.

But there's a vacuum of the exit of unions. And there is a sort of an explosion of evangelical religion and institutions. And so that just becomes, and I would imagine also, right-wing talk radio, we're talking about 1990, Limbaugh comes into the picture in 1988. And then, you know, ultimately Fox News, I would imagine too, because you travel in the South, you go to a diner. There's Fox News. There's no, they don't put MSNBC or CNN on there. So that, all of that mechanism helps exacerbate this, yes? I think you are probably right about the media factors.

Unfortunately, we are not able to measure those because we could only analyze things where we had data for every county from 1976 to 2020, and we didn't have good measures of that. In our new research that we're doing, we're trying to find other ways to examine those relationships. And, you know, what you mentioned about talk radio, it makes good sense that, you know, if you're out driving in the country, you're driving longer distances. and you're listening to Talk Radio. So that may well be a factor, but I can't say for sure. But you can see the data in terms of like the rise of evangelical institutions, I guess. Yes, no, absolutely. And what's interesting is that, again, if you go back to the 1980s, the evangelicals were not driving the vote for one party versus the other.

And then in the 1990s, in urban areas, the evangelical churches start becoming associated. with Republican voting. And then the rural areas follow that in the period 2008 onward, where they are starting to connect the dots for voters in a way that helps the Republican Party. So it's interesting. It's often the case with these various phenomena that we look at that urban areas start changing first and then rural areas come later. I want to move towards the – so we have this notion of why it happened. and this polarization. Let's talk just a little bit about that sort of like notion of elites.

Like where does that that come from? And is that, I mean, is it your sense that that is on some level? I mean, like you mentioned, they're taking care of their, you know, their black constituents in the cities more than they're taking care of us. You know, you could see it in the context of like during Obama, the phone, the Obama, the I don't know if you remember that right-wing talking point, but in fact, it was a program started by George W. Bush, but yet it becomes this sort of like notion that it's a giveaway essentially to black people. But talk about that sort of resentment before we get to sort of,

I want to talk about the interviews you did with the county chairs because that's really fascinating what you found there. But where did that like resentment come from? Well, one thing I should should mention is that the role of education changes dramatically over this time period. If you go back to the 1980s, the average American who had at least a four-year college degree or more was most likely to be supporting the Republican Party. And in the 1990s, this changes, particularly among non-Hispanic whites in urban areas, that they start moving over towards supporting the Democrats. And then this is one of these phenomena where rural areas then follow the pattern, but not until 2008 to 2020. And in rural areas, the majority of people have less than a college

degree, and they switch from being more likely to support the Democratic Party to supporting the Republican Party. So education resorts the population over this time period. And so now you have rural people who are looking at urbanites and they're like, you know, they have more comfortable lives than we do. They work in jobs that don't involve all the hard physical labor, what many of us are doing and so on. And so resentment comes into play. And, you know, we looked at various policy areas that exemplify this. So one is the development of renewable energies, wind and solar. So in many states around the country, there have been initiatives to try to, you know, develop more wind and solar. But the way it typically works is that some big company goes out to a rural area.

They find some big landowner and they cut a deal with that person that they'll use a lot of their land for a site for wind or solar. And only after that arrangement has been solidified, does the local community learn about it? And then people locally are saying, well, you know, we might have liked to have had a voice in this. We might have thought there should have been a different way the siting was done or the size of it or something else about, you know, the benefit to the local town or village or community. And none of that happens. And, you know, urbanites typically hear about this of rural communities that then will stand in

the way of finalizing these plans and say, oh, they're just ignorant. they don't understand the climate change is happening. But from a rural perspective, people really feel resentful of urbanites who are not allowing them to have a voice. And if I understand you correctly, Democrats get blamed for that, even though in many of those instances, it's a Republican apparatus maybe that is doing that. I mean, you know, because Democrats on a national level support the, things. Yeah, that is fair to say. Yeah, I mean, the parties, which on environmental issues used to be

so similar, if you go back to the early 90s now, the Democratic Party is thought of as the party that is pursuing environmental goals. But, you know, one thing I want to say is that when it comes to people's views about policy issues, there are very few differences between rural and urban Americans. On most issues that we looked at, there are no significant differences. When it comes to things like, you know, spending on certain government priorities and tax levels, et cetera, when you look at the so-called culture war issues like abortion and gun rights, et cetera, there's a gap and there's, you know, more conservative views among rural people. But the gap is not that large. It's, you know, it pales compared to the voting

gap. And unlike the voting gap, it's not growing. It's been pretty consistent. over time. So in other words, we are not divided by our policy views. This is not a place-based liberal versus conservative difference. Rather, people dislike each other's political party. And there's an us versus them politics that has developed as a result of it. And getting back to, okay, because I want to get to because that came from the county chairs as you interviewed them about, you know, what were the issues that people cared about there was across the board very similar health care uh jobs and whatnot but i want to get to that in a second but getting back to the citing of like the um of the renewable energy stuff like do we see the similar dynamic with fracking because fracking like when i was reading about the about the

wind farm like that's exactly what happened with fracking uh back in the day right the they'd come in they'd find a piece of property, they buy it, and then towns would get sort of like divided up as to whether you want the fracking. And fracking's far more obtrusive, right? Like, I mean, you know, you put up a wind farm, okay, it's there. The solar farm, it's there. There's no trucks going back and forth every day. There's no sort of like increase in depletion of, you know, the groundwater or something to that effect. Is there a similar dynamic in fracking? No, that's a good question. And we did not delve into fracking. So I'm really not sure. Okay. And then the, the, so that's citing issues. And then, and so the part of it is this

sense that we're being imposed upon us, these things from outside and nobody's really paying attention to us. And then there's all these apparatus to blame the Democrats. as opposed to Republicans. Because in a lot of those instances, it's Republicans who are making those deals. So getting to that question of issue sets being similar, are Republicans addressing those more? Or is it just that like people feel like nobody's addressing our issues?

And just in some ways, like Democrats are more agitating. Yes. This is one of the many ironies. You know, this whole story is full of paradox and irony. So from the New Deal, like back in the New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt built a rural urban coalition, and he really put rural people front and center and had all kinds of public policies

that were responsive to their needs. And rural people appreciated it and felt that the Democratic Party had saved them in the Great Depression. And then for decades to come, for a half century, continued in many rural places, not all, but in many rural places, they continued to support the Democratic Party because they felt like it was the party that was backing the average person and had been good to them. They lost faith in that in the 1990s and started gravitating toward the Republican Party. Now, you know, this is not something we looked at in depth and in our new research we're going to be looking at this more. But it seems to me that the Republican Party is not delivering for rural areas, that it's not

improving access to health care. We know that, that, you know, it's not improving situations in the schools in rural places or improving the economy. So I think, you know, what's driven by now is a grievance politics. And I think that can only take you so far. But in order to... It's taken them pretty far so far. Well, no, that's true.

And then here's the issue. There has to be someone there articulating a different message. And that hasn't been happening. The Democratic Party has not been there organizing. I mean, so we met with county chairs, Democrats and Republicans, and a bunch of rural counties that have changed dramatically since the 90s and how they vote. And these are volunteers. They tend to be older.

They find there's not many younger people involved. And they're working hard, but they need more support. They all told us this. They need more support from their state-level parties and from the national party. They need year-round full-time organizers, ideally from rural places and from those regions, who are there first listening to people and finding out what they're thinking. And, you know, if you're mad at the Democratic Party, why? and what what do you feel that government needs to be doing to help you out?

And then starting to rebuild trust, which is going to take a lot of time and effort. My sense is that there's a whole host of like sort of like cultural and racial grievances that exist, that flourish and become more prominent in terms of driving voting decisions and political disposition in the absence of material needs that are being met in some fashion. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

I think, you know, material needs are not being met, but instead you have, you know, politics that is being driven around highly symbolic issues that don't necessarily affect local people in those areas. And was there, I mean, I don't know if there's still sort of like institutional members. but like Howard Dean had a brief moment where he had a 50 state agenda and presumably there was more material brought to these counties, material help, I should say. How did that, what was your sense of that when you spoke to these folks? Yeah, you know, it was really interesting.

Some of the county chairs remembered Howard Dean and that organizing he did. And so, you know, this is going back to 2005 and those next few years. He had this strategy of organized everywhere, all 50 states, and he was particularly dedicated to rural counties and trying to get them organized, trying to get, you know, counties across a whole part of a state working together in a concerted fashion. And so, you know, what happened was this is when George W. Bush's president, after a couple of years of this kind of organizing, Democrats won back, Congress. And then two years later, Obama won the presidency. And of course, Obama had his own organizing apparatus, which also worked hard in rural areas and did a lot of listening to people in rural areas. So you added all of that up. And rural areas really helped to elect Obama. It's quite striking. So, you know, I've portrayed this period from the mid-90s to the present of being

like one basic trend, but there's this, these few years in the midst of it, when things seem to be going the other way back toward Democrats' favor. And it's when Howard Dean has that organizing strategy. And then sadly, it all falls apart after President Obama's elected, those organizing strategies are really abandoned. Yeah, I mean, it was dismantled, right? I mean, Obama himself wanted Obama for America to be brought in-house and Rahm Emanuel was almost explicitly against the 50 state strategy and they because they didn't want to have any outside sort of like political entities to challenge the Obama administration. And then we saw how well that worked out. We lost a thousand seats over the course, or Democrats did, I should say, over the course of

the next eight years under Obama. So when you look at like, you know, based upon sort of like this notion of both from an organizing standpoint, Democrats have to re-engage in these areas, but also address these material issues. Are there candidates that you see on the landscape that are doing that now? I mean, you know, a Dan Osborne, you know, we're looking for more rural areas, right? Dan Osborne, not a Democrat, but addressing this stuff. Graham Platner, we're yet to be seeing how he could do in a general election, but, you know, we can see the polling and just sort of like the general enthusiasm.

What's your sense of that? Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think that someone like Sherrod Brown is a Democrat who really stays in close touch with rural areas. And, you know, things have been challenging in Ohio. And, you know, the party hasn't done all of the kind of support for rural counties that could help things go better for Sherrod Brown. But as a candidate, I think, you know, he's very good at connecting in rural places.

But I think, you know, this ultimately doesn't come down to just candidates. What's missing, as you were saying, is that party building piece. that has to be their year in and year out. But I think, you know, if Democrats are going to hope to take back the Senate, they have to figure this out because it's the only way. It is really striking to go back even to 2008 and to look at all the places where Democrats were competitive, that now Democrats think of as totally off limits for them.

And that's a big mistake. You know, in order to reverse things, politically in this country, we have to get beyond the rural urban divide. Do you have a sense, and this may be outside your portfolio, but a sense as to why, like, what are the forces that have led the Democrats to disengage from an organizational structure and from a, you know, sort of like, I guess, you know, campaigns to structure from those areas? Yeah. Well, one thing to be said is that, both parties have become weaker organizationally over a century and for all sorts of reasons.

And then some of that for the past half a century is driven by the same things that have affected civic organizations generally. But I think there's also a lack of understanding the importance of this at the leadership level, like the DNC and so on, of how much this matters. And, you know, Republicans really have been advantaged by their ability to have other kinds of organizations working with them. So they are much more organized. There were some places where I did interviews with county chairs in North Carolina, and there were no Republican county chairs. And I was surprised because, you know, the Republican Party seemed stronger locally in terms of how they did in elections. and I asked one of the Democratic County chairs about it, and she said, look, they don't even need to organize. They're so socially networked that election time comes and they know what to do, whereas the Democrats really have to start from square one, you know, with each election.

And it's hard work without having a year-in, year-out organization. It also sort of feels that there's no money in it in organizing. those areas. You have no big media buys for, so the consultants who are brought in, uh, that work with the DNC, they are motivated by the idea that if we buy a big, I mean, Texas is perennially, they talk about Texas, uh, in general, because it has such a huge media market. Um, and, uh, and they get 15% of every, uh, media buy. And so there's a huge, sort of like financial interest in doing some things and no financial interest in doing others. And it's almost like those have become orphaned, at least in the way the Democratic Party operates.

But here's the crazy thing is that organizing could make such a difference. And it doesn't have to be very expensive. Hiring some organizers for. But that's my point. It's not a question of cost. It's a question of, is there somebody to be made money? is someone could make money off of it. And there's no incentive structure.

And I think too much of the Democratic Party has, as of late, in the past whatever, 30, 40 years functioned on that incentive structure. Right. Yeah. Right. To the demise. Yeah. Indeed.

To the demise of a lot of things. Yeah. Susan Metler, the book is Rural versus Irons. urban, the growing divide that threatens democracy, co-written with Trevor Brown. Really appreciate your time today, and we'll put a link to that at Majority.fm. Thank you so much, Sam. I really enjoyed chatting with you again. I enjoyed it too. All right, thank you. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. All right, folks. That's it for the first half of the program. We'll head into the fun half of the program, the so-called fun half, the suspiciously called fun-half program. Reminder,

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use the coupon code majority, get 10% off, and also you can buy the Majority Report blind there. So there's a lot of stuff to get. Matt, what's happening in the Matt Lechian Media universe? Yeah, over on the left, reckoning at 2.30 right after the show today, we're having Max Alvarez of the Real News and the Working People pod on to talk about East Palestine, Ohio, and the environmental, I mean, crime

that was committed there on the residence. And we're also talking about this prairie land case a little bit and the Iran War. So check that out right after the show today on YouTube. You'll be rated over there. Rated? You can raid on YouTube now. Oh, raid.

Yeah. What do you think I said? R-A-T-E-D-A. R-A-I-T-E. No, it would be R-A-D. are rated. Everybody's going to be judged who listens to Left Reckoning. And we'll see if you're worthy.

10, 10. That's why I said to everyone who listens to Leffrakening. See you in the fun half. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now. But I think around 18 months out, we're going to look back. and go like, wow.

What? What is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on for, hold on for a second. Emma, welcome to the program. Hey. Fun pack. Matt.

Who. Fun pack. What is up, everyone? Fun pack. No, me. Keene. You did it. Fun pack. Let's go Brandon.

Let's go Brandon. Let's go Brandon. Bradley, you want to say hello? Sorry to disappoint. Everyone, I'm just a random guy. It's all the boys today. Fundamentally false. No, I'm sorry.

Women? Stop talking for a second. Let me finish. Where is this coming from, dude? But dude, you want to smoke this? Seven, eight. Yes. Yes?

It is you. Oh, it's me. I think it is you. Who is you? No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind? We can discuss free markets, and we can discuss capitalism.

Oh, God. I'm gonna just no way. Libertarians. They're so stupid, though. Common sense says, of course. Gobbled e gook. We fucking nailed him. So what's 79 plus 21?

Challenge met. I'm positively clovering. I believe 96, I want to say. 857. 210. 35. 501. One half.

Three-eighths. 9-11 for instance. $3,400. $1,900. $6.5.4. $3 trillion sold. It's a zero-sum game. Actually, you're making me think less.

But let me say this. Poop. You call it satire, Sam goes satire. On top of it all, my favorite part about you is just like every day, all day, like everything you do. Without a doubt. Hey, buddy, we've seen you. Folks. It's just the week being weeded out, obviously.

Yeah, sundown, guns out. But you should know. People just don't like to entertain ideas anymore. I have a question. Who cares? Is enabled, folks. I love it. I do love that.

Got a jump. I got to be quick. I get a jump. I'm losing it, bro. Two o'clock, we're already late, and the guy's being a dick. So screw him. Sent to a gulag. Outrage.

Like, what is wrong with you? Love you. Bye. Love you. Bye-bye.