Far From Politics as Usual: A Case Study of Rural Voters in Montana

• In Event: Voter Attitudes and Participation

Abstract

The political divide between rural and urban America has grown increasingly contentious over the last two decades, with rural voters shifting sharply toward the Republican Party. What has driven this partisan realignment among rural voters? Are prevailing theories of partisan identity and political psychology sufficient to explain their political preferences and behaviors? Despite growing interest in rural politics and several thorough qualitative studies, the difficulties associated with recruiting rural survey participants has precluded systematic quantitative analyses of their political attitudes. This paper presents original panel data from 953 rural Montana voters and 1,126 urban Montana voters, collected before and after the 2018 midterm congressional elections. It explores the extent to which rural Montanans’ partisan identification, policy preferences, political values, and social attitudes are similar or different from their urban counterparts as well as the general population. This represents a first effort to systematically quantify the political attitudes of a large sample of rural voters. We evaluate whether rural voters think and behave in ways that are consistent with existing theories of public opinion derived from research on national or urban-biased samples. Rural voters in Montana exhibit a strong sense of politicized geographic identity, yet they eschew many of the markers associated with strong partisan identification and are more likely than their urban counterparts to split ticket vote. Additionally, the alignment between rural identity and Republican vote choice seems to be driven primarily by cultural factors rather than economic policy preferences, contrasting trends found in national samples. The results suggest that rural voters exhibit unexpected peculiarities in their political cognition and behavior, highlighting the need for more focused theorizing about precisely what makes rural American voters tick.

Authors

• Pavielle Haines, University of Denver

• Sara K Guenther, Montana State University

• Eric D. Raile, Montana State University, Bozeman

• David CW Parker, Montana State University, Bozeman

• Elizabeth Ann Shanahan, Montana State University