Though rural Republican support increased in many areas, small blue shifts added up to help Biden win

Republican support increased in many areas in the Nov. 2020 election, but small shifts helped Joe Biden take the presidency from Donald Trump. 

Stacey Abrams, who lost the race for Georgia governor in 2018, arguably helped swing Georgia to Biden, Ryan Lizza reports for Politico. She created a non-profit dedicated to increasing voter turnout in the state and though most of her efforts netted urban and suburban voters, rural Black voters in the southeastern part of the state may have been listening.

Trump won rural voters 2 to 1 in Georgia, but Biden performed slightly better in rural areas than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. That helped him take the state, Tim Marema, Tim Murphy, and Bill Bishop report for The Daily Yonder.

"In the three 'Northern battlegrounds' that Biden flipped — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — Trump boosted rural turnout, while Biden amped up his performance in the cities. But in many of those areas, each side managed to limit the other’s margins, canceling out any gains," Griff Witte reports for The Washington Post.

In Iowa, "the alignment of Democratic voters to Iowa’s urban centers and Republican voters to the state’s rural areas continued to sharpen in the 2020 election," Erin Murphy reports for the Sioux City Journal. "Iowa’s urban-rural divide has been in the works for a decade now, and it’s no longer a growing trend: It’s the new normal. Democrats own the five counties with the largest populations; Republicans own all but one of the rest."

In North Carolina, which Trump will win, the rural-urban political divide also persisted, Andrew Carter reports for the Raleigh News & Observer. Part of the divide falls along lines of poverty and education, but part of it is less easily quantifiable and more about conflicting worldviews.