Key Votes or Ruralist Tropes?: An Analysis of Mediated Depictions of Rural Voter

• In Event: News Coverage and Its Effects

Abstract

For the last five years, post-election news coverage in the United States—regardless of outcome, from statewide to presidential races—has been awash in punditry about rural voters. Rural voters, communities, and areas are the subject of much electoral and journalistic attention because of their supposed electoral power. These voters are said to have “played a big part” in former President Trump’s 2016 victory amidst a growing “rural-urban divide” (Kurtzleben, 2016). It is fashionable to hold the rural voter as the inscrutable key to electoral victory. Opinion writers and journalists from across the country have tried to solve the Democrat’s “rural problem” (Balz, 2021; Kleeb, 2021). And though many are quick to say the Democrats simply do not understand or listen to rural voters (Georges, 2021), scholarship finds that mainstream media depictions of rural denizens of the United States persistently rely on cultural tropes that perpetuate harmful stereotypes (Eppley, 2010; Gaiillot, 2018, Park, 2009; Theobold & Wood, 2010). Unfortunately, this cultural marginalization remains normative while structural limitations that meaningfully diminish health, limit economic opportunities, and exacerbate inequality persist in rural areas (Canto et al., 2014; Farrigan & Parker, 2012 Meit et al, 2014).
Despite popular attention and practical importance, communication and political science scholars often eschew examination of discourses about rural voters, which further marginalizes a group already relegated to the outskirts of scholarly and cultural consideration. Taking Bassett’s (2003) dissection of the myth that rural voters hold disproportionate political power as a starting point, this paper adds a discursive analysis to her material one by examining whether ruralist myths continue to dominate mainstream press narratives of U.S. electoral politics. Thus, this project combines existing work on rural privation and the denigration of rural people and places (Bassett, 2003a, 2003b, 2006, 2009; Creed & Ching, 1997; Jerke, 2011; Jordan, 2019; Pruitt, 2009; Pruitt & Vanegas, 2015) with research on message-based demobilization and media denigration of voters (Jarvis & Han, 2018; Krupnikov, 2011; Lewis et al., 2004; Stout & Baker, 2021). In particular, Jarvis and Han (2018) warn of the demobilizing effects of press discourses that downplay the importance of voters or remove their agency. Given the persistence of cultural ruralism throughout social and political life in the U.S. (Gaiillot, 2018, Park, 2009; Theobold & Wood, 2010; Jordan, 2019) and the role media plays in shaping our discursively shared worlds (Hall, 1980/2004; Slack, 1996), there is reason to be concerned the press play a role in rural privation by disempowering some of the voters least served by current political systems. Thus, we ask: How do mainstream media outlets within the United States characterize rural voters - both as individuals and as a class of political actor?
To paint a clearer picture of elite depictions of voters in the rural United States, we conduct a quantitative content analysis of the ways three news outlets (ABC, CNN, The New York Times) have discussed rural voters across the last decade, 2011-2021. These outlets represent network news, cable television, and legacy print publications and each was—regardless of partisanship or news consumption—considered mainstream by a majority of U.S. adults (Shearer & Mitchell, 2021), providing a corpus reflective of dominant journalistic practice. Ultimately, this paper hopes to push scholars to rethink taken-for-granted assumptions about rural dwellers that permeate popular discourse, restructure analyses to identify differences in how voters are lauded or disparaged based on place of residence, and reconnect rural votes—and all of their potential electoral implications—with the people who cast them.

Authors

• Dakota Park-Ozee, University of Denver

• Jason Jordan