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The Not-That-Red-Rural Upper Midwest [1]

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Date: 2023-04-05  

Democrats need to study, capitalize and expand upon the area outlined in blue. 2020 presidential election map by county

Today’s stories elsewhere on Daily Kos (namely, this and this) on the Wisconsin Supreme Court election reminded me of something I’ve been observing ever since maps of the 2020 presidential election came out: There is a sizeable swath of the upper Midwest that has not bought into the GOP’s propaganda as much as other parts of Red America.

On the map, ignore the big cities and even the suburban counties. And ignore the tribal reservations and college towns. I’m talking about the rural areas.

Yes, this area is red, but is not deeply red. It’s the area I’ve enclosed in the blue line on the map. It includes all of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, most of Iowa, northern Illinois and even — interestingly — into eastern North and South Dakota.

I got the accompanying map from here. It’s a really interesting interactive map, if you haven’t seen it before.

There is clearly an ideological and cultural difference in this area compared to the rural areas of the High Plains, Lower Midwest and the South (not counting the so-called “Black Belt” down there, which is rural but strongly democratic). It seems to me democrats should study this area and see what they can learn from it. The precise reason seems hard to pin down: I’ve compared the area to maps of distribution of Roman Catholics by county and college education levels by county, and at a glance those don’t seem to explain much, if any. If you combine maps of Swedish-Americans and Norwegian-Americans, and maybe throw in Finnish-Americans for good measure, it seems to explain some of what we see, but not all. If it explained a majority of it, we’d see more of the Dakotas in this Not-That-Red Belt. But there does appear to be something to it, even if just a moderate amount, and thus, would indicate this not-so-redness is at least in part a cultural phenomenon.

If it’s at least partly a cultural phenomenon, I think the phenomenon could be expanded to the surrounding areas, because the surrounding areas are similar culturally. In contrast, whatever is causing this probably can’t be exported to, say, rural northern Alabama. I’d say there are probably pretty big differences culturally and otherwise between white rural Alabama and, say, white rural Minnesota.

It reminds me of, back 20+ years ago, you could look at maps of rural areas in presidential elections elsewhere in the Midwest and discern clear patterns. For example, eastern Kansas used to be a lot less republican than western Kansas, even though both were still republican. The explanation there was, corn and wheat farmers in eastern Kansas tended to support more democrats, while in western Kansas was mostly cattle ranchers, who tended to be more strongly republican. Why wheat and corn farmers would be more sympathetic to democrats than ranchers is probably a complicated question, and is something I find pretty arbitrary. But, at least back then I’d say there was some sort of cultural difference between the two which no longer exists.

But, in the Upper Midwest of today, there does appear to be some such difference that still exists.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/5/2162345/-The-Not-That-Red-Rural-Upper-Midwest

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