As recently as the early 1990s, Americans living in rural and urban areas voted similarly in presidential elections, yet in the decades since, they have diverged sharply as rural people in all regions of the country have increasingly supported the Republican Party. We seek to explain the sources of this growing cleavage by examining two interrelated processes of change: political-economic transformation that elevated many urban areas and marginalized rural ones, and the nationalization of policy goals. Our analytical approach is developmental, probing the timing and sequencing of trends across more than four decades. It is also comprehensive, testing theories related to economic decline, the educational gap, organizational mobilization, and racism and racial and ethnic threat. Our analysis reveals that while rural and urban counties resembled each other in several respects in the 1970s, they have since moved apart. We examine how key trends relate to political change in presidential voting. We find that in the 1990s and early 2000s, rural dwellers in places experiencing population loss or economic stagnation began to support Republican candidates. Then from 2008 to 2020, those in areas with higher percentages of less-educated residents, a higher presence of evangelical congregations per capita, and higher levels of anti-Black racism, each more prevalent in rural areas than urban areas, shifted their support to Republicans. Through sequential processes of polarization, with political-economic forces leading the way and activating rural resistance to the nationalization of policy goals subsequently, the rural-urban political divide emerged as a major fault line in the nation’s politics.

How do political conditions influence whether public support develops for a new policy? Specifically, does the presence of partisan polarization and a viable threat to a policy’s continuation prevent the emergence of such support? We propose a theoretical framework that considers how policy feedback may be affected by the presence or absence of both policy threat and polarization. We argue that a threat is likely to increase policy salience and trigger loss aversion, expanding policy feedback even amid strong partisanship. We examine the threat to the Affordable Care Act after Republicans won control of Congress and the White House and stood poised to act on their long promise to repeal the law. Five waves of panel data permit analysis of how individuals’ responses to the law changed over time, affecting their support for it as well as their voting calculations. The results suggest that policy threat heightens the effect of policy feedback for some populations while depressing it for others, in some cases mitigating partisan polarization, and overall boosting program support.

To many observers across the political spectrum, American democracy appears under threat. What does the Trump presidency portend for American politics? How much confidence should we have in the capacity of American institutions to withstand this threat? We argue that understanding what is uniquely threatening to democracy requires looking beyond the particulars of Trump and his presidency. Instead, it demands a historical and comparative perspective on American politics. Drawing on insights from the fields of comparative politics and American political development, we argue that Trump’s election represents the intersection of three streams in American politics: polarized two-party presidentialism; a polity fundamentally divided over membership and status in the political community, in ways structured by race and economic inequality; and the erosion of democratic norms. The current political circumstance threatens the American democratic order because of the interactive effects of institutions, identity, and norm-breaking.