Will lagging rural job growth erode Trump base?

Rural employment lags behind metro areas. (Bloomberg chart)

Though the nationwide unemployment rate is at a near-record low, it's a different picture in rural areas, where many are "barely scraping by as their jobs drain away in the downturns and don’t come back in the booms," Sarah Foster reports for Bloomberg. "The economic divide maps onto a political one, which only deepened in this month’s midterm elections. President Donald Trump claims credit for a vibrant economy. Yet it’s in the least-vibrant rural areas that his Republicans picked up support -- the same trend that helped Trump get elected two years ago. Cities and suburbs, where the recovery is palpable, swung toward the Democrats."

The reasons for rural America's recovery lag are many and varied: lack of broadband and good roads for shipping, brain drain to urban areas, lack of educational options nearby, and more. Federal money to rural areas could help, as it did after the Great Depression in the 1930s, but the main source of federal money in rural areas these days is the Department of Agriculture, which administers food aid and farm programs, and issues grants for a wide array of projects under its Rural Development umbrella such as medical services, broadband buildout, telehealth and addiction treatment. "But the Trump administration plans to cut USDA funding by 16 percent in fiscal 2019, and revamp the food stamps it distributes," Foster reports.

That may not decrease Trump's popularity in rural areas, according to David Andersen, an assistant professor of political science at Iowa State University. Many of Trump's rural supporters "don’t sound as if they expect to get anything out of the administration," Andersen told Foster. But they feel abandoned by previous administrations and just want to "destroy the system overall." Trump, he said, was "the first candidate in a very long time" to explicitly encourage such resentments.