We Can’t Ignore Rural Voter Resentment
Political scientist Katherine J. Cramer has studied the changing political attitudes of rural Wisconsinites — a group that helped put Donald Trump in the White House. “Rural resentment” may not get much attention, but it’s a real and powerful force in US politics.
Of the twenty-three pivot counties in Wisconsin, many of them in the rural north, eight voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election by a margin of over twenty percentage points. (Dan Keck / Flickr)
In the last presidential election, Wisconsin had the second-highest number of so-called pivot counties after Iowa. These were counties that had gone for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then for Trump in 2016. And Trump didn’t just eke out victories here: of the twenty-three pivot counties in Wisconsin, many of them in the rural north, eight went for Trump by a margin of over twenty percentage points.
This rural realignment didn’t come out of nowhere. While the incumbent Obama had managed to maintain support long enough for reelection, political polarization in Wisconsin had already reared its head in 2011, when newly elected Republican governor Scott Walker’s crusade against the state’s public-sector unions found support among rural working-class Wisconsinites as the cities erupted in protest.
In the months leading up to Trump’s 2016 victory, Katherine J. Cramer, professor of political science and Natalie C. Holton Chair of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, an ethnography of rural Wisconsinites and examination of their changing political attitudes.
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