Red Rural, Blue Rural: The Geography of Presidential Voting in Rural America

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NOTE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This report summarizes our research in D. J. Scala, K. M. Johnson, and L. T. Rogers, 2015, “Red rural, blue rural? Presidential voting patterns in a changing rural America,” Political Geography, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629815000207, and is adapted with permission from our Carsey School of Public Policy Brief, D. J. Scala and K. M. Johnson, 2015, “Red rural, blue rural: Rural does not always equal Republican,” Carsey Research, National Fact Sheet 30, Summer, 2015.

Notes

¹ We examine voting data for nearly 9,000 rural residents to identify how voting patterns differ across rural areas, comparing farm and recreational counties to those elsewhere in rural America. We also examine voting data from the presidential elections from 2000 to 2012 for each of the 2,023 rural counties. Alaska is excluded due to inconsistent county boundaries. Counties are defined as rural if they were delineated as nonmetropolitan by the Office of Management and Budget in 2006. Counties are defined as farm or recreational based on a typology developed by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dante J. Scala

Dante J. Scala is an associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. His research interests include campaign finance, political demography, and the presidential nomination process. His second book (co-authored with Henry Olsen), The Four Faces of the Republican Party, was published last year by Palgrave Macmillan.

Kenneth M. Johnson

Kenneth M. Johnson is senior demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy and professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. He is a nationally recognized expert on U.S. demographic trends. His research examines national and regional population redistribution trends, rural and urban demographic change, the growing racial diversity of the U.S. population, and the relationship between demographic and environmental change. In 2016, Dr. Johnson received an prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to study demographic change in rural America.