The political divide between rural and urban Americans is much larger than official statistics suggest because of how we define 'urban.'
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Rurality Transitions Compress the Measured Nonmetro-metro Republican Vote Gap
SSRN · 6502878
The Takeaway
As rural counties grow and become more politically moderate, they are officially reclassified as 'urban' by the Census and USDA. This administrative shift removes the most moderate places from the rural category, making the remaining rural areas appear much more extreme and polarized than the category actually is.
From the abstract
Where Americans live increasingly lines up with how they vote, with consequences for representation and policy. Brown and Mettler (2025) and Brown and Mettler (2024) document a widening county-level divide in presidential elections after decades of relative similarity. This paper asks a measurement question that sits alongside that story: when the Census and USDA reclassify growing counties from nonmetro to metro, those counties are often politically in-between "stayers," so the usual time-varyi