Rural voters cool on Republicans as economic-political divide begins to shift

Lutnick, Warsh, DOJ-California suit among WSJ newsletter briefs

A Wall Street Journal analysis documents an economic split that has come to define American politics — Democrats winning dense, high-output cities and inner suburbs, Republicans carrying land-rich, lower-output rural counties — and finds signs that map may be shifting ahead of November’s midterms.

The 2020 presidential race illustrated the divide in stark numbers. Donald Trump won 83% of America’s counties, but those counties accounted for only 29% of U.S. gross domestic product, according to GDP data produced by Mark Muro and colleagues at the Brookings Institution. Joe Biden, by contrast, won 17% of U.S. counties, but those places produced more than 70% of the nation’s economic output.

The geographic split reflects two different economies. Democrats dominate in cities and populous inner suburbs, where the nation’s professional class is clustered. Republicans hold sway in nonmetropolitan areas, where jobs in agriculture, mining, and basic manufacturing are more common. The party’s footprint covers a lot of land, but a smaller share of the national economy.

Rural voters are now among those showing less enthusiasm for the Republican Party, the most recent Wall Street Journal poll shows, favoring a Republican for Congress over a Democrat by 18 points. In the 2024 House races, by comparison, rural voters backed Republicans by 34 points in the national popular vote, according to the AP VoteCast survey.

The shift is one reason Democrats see rising prospects in House races in Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin — states with significant rural communities and small towns — and in Senate races in North Carolina, Ohio, Kansas, and Nebraska.

If Democrats win those races and manage to dent the GOP’s traditional lead in rural and small-town communities into the future, the party’s Electoral College opportunities in the 2028 presidential election could expand. The change could also diversify the representation rural and small-town industries have in Congress.

The 2020 race was a recent high-water mark in the nation’s economic divide, the Brookings data show. Trump-supporting counties accounted for 36% of GDP in 2016 and 38% in 2024 — both greater shares than the 29% recorded in the 2020 Biden-Trump election.

The Wall Street Journal’s analysis combined its own polling with county-level GDP figures from the Brookings Institution and AP VoteCast survey data, offering a quantitative measure of how the political and economic geographies of the United States have diverged — and where the lines may be starting to bend.

The same edition of the Politics newsletter carried several other items. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has thrown the future of U.S.-Mexico trade talks into further doubt by objecting to significant tariff reductions, according to people familiar with the talks. Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh declined to signal whether the central bank will raise rates at its meeting this month, saying, “We’re not in that business anymore.”

President Trump on Friday will travel to Dalton, Ga., to hold a midterm rally this afternoon, then head to Palm Beach, Fla., to attend a Republican National Committee event in the evening.

The Justice Department sued California to block mail-in ballots from 20,000 people, with the Trump administration arguing the voters might not be U.S. citizens and extending its efforts to expand federal control over elections. California’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber said a circulating list of names “lacks both the detail and function to be of any investigative use,” and that the federal government has never explained its basis for suspecting that people on the list are noncitizens.

Trump scrubbed the planned livestream of a military execution. The former officer who admitted to killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting at Fort Hood Army base in Texas will still die by firing squad, but Trump expressed concerns about a bloody spectacle on live television. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had advanced the livestream plan, but some U.S. officials worried the approach would hand a propaganda victory to adversaries.

A Journal analysis of thousands of TikTok videos, podcast episodes and political-news programs published or aired since Sept. 1 found Florida’s Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon gets more attention on TikTok than big-name Democrats, while Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer draws more criticism. The party itself is taking heat from both the right and left, according to the analysis.

The newsletter also marked the Oct. 16 anniversary of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy was informed on Oct. 16 of spy-plane photographs showing Soviet nuclear-missile sites being built on Cuba. Over the ensuing days, Kennedy ordered a naval “quarantine” of Cuba as Soviet ships sailed toward the country, and a U.S. reconnaissance plane was shot down. The incident was resolved 13 days later when the two nations agreed that the Soviets would dismantle the weapon sites in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba.