This article documents the diversity of political attitudes and voting patterns along the urban-rural continuum of the United States. We find that America’s rural and urban interface, in terms of political attitudes and voting patterns, is just beyond the outer edges of large urban areas and through the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton performed well in densely populated areas on the urban side of the interface, but they faced increasingly difficult political climates and sharply diminished voter support on the rural side of the interface. The reduction in support for Clinton in 2016 in rural areas was particularly pronounced. Even after controlling for demographic, social, and economic factors (including geographic region, education, income, age, race, and religious affiliation) in a spatial regression, we find that a county’s position in the urban-rural continuum remained statistically significant in the estimation of voting patterns in presidential elections.

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This study of the 2018 congressional midterms demonstrates how voting patterns and political attitudes vary across a spectrum of urban and rural areas in the United States. Rural America is no more a monolith than is urban America. The rural-urban gradient is better represented by a continuum than a dichotomy. This is evident in the voting results in 2018, just as it was in 2016. We found that the political tipping point lies beyond major metropolitan areas, in the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Democrats enjoyed even greater success in densely populated urban areas in 2018 than in 2016. Residents of these urban areas display distinctive and consistent social and political attitudes across a range of scales. At the other end of the continuum in remote rural areas, Republican candidates continued to command voter support despite the challenging national political environment. Voters in these rural regions expressed social and political attitudes diametrically opposed to their counterparts in large urban cores.

This article examines the origins of the unlikely alliance between Donald Trump and evangelicals, a relationship that defines the modern-day Republican Party. Using 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study data, I explain how Trump ultimately succeeded among this critical group of Republican primary voters in the contest for the 2016 presidential nomination by exploiting key internal divisions. Trump initially performed well among less educated evangelicals who were less devoted to their religion and less ideologically conservative. Contrary to previous research, I find that Texas senator Ted Cruz's core support among the traditional Christian Right-very conservative, churchgoing evangelicals-resisted Trump until the late stages of the nomination contest. However, Cruz was unable to expand his support among his co-religionists, despite his evangelical identity. Trump's success among evangelicals speaks not only to the oft-cited importance of momentum in presidential nomination contests, but also to the significance of candidate ideology to primary voters, especially when paired with religiosity.

The authors examine whether early state polls, particularly New Hampshire, have been more accurate in predicting the eventual presidential nominees. The authors conclude that New Hampshire poll results have become better bellwethers and propose that the more informed nature of the state’s electorate may be a reason for the accuracy of the results.