This article in Governing is mostly about what urban and rural voters do not have in common, why rural voters have a disproportionate share of politic power relative to their numbers, and why politicians therefore cater to them and tend to downplay urban issues, which are the issues that affect the vast majority of citizens. However, the article included a couple of paragraphs on what urban and rural voters have in common, which I thought were insightful.

Low-income residents of urban neighborhoods who know they’ll never be able to afford to live in the glitzy new apartment building that’s going up are, economically speaking, in a similar boat as rural residents who’ve seen the factory shut down and the area left behind by the global economy. “Urban neighborhoods that are dealing with population loss are dealing with the same issues of abandonment as low-income rural counties,” says Hill, the Ohio State professor. “The problems are the same: drug abuse, abandoned factories, losing kids to places with rising opportunity.”

Governing

I can actually attest to this, originally being from an Appalachian factory town, then from a former Pennsylvania coal town, and now living in central Philadelphia. The problems of poor people, and the problems of middle class working people, and the problems of working parents, and the problems of the disabled and the retired, etc. are pretty much the same everywhere. The difference is that urban areas are where most of the productive economic activity that can be taxed come from. And investments in infrastructure and programs in relatively dense population centers can just serve a lot more people for the money spent compared to less dense areas. And finally, denser areas with universities and startup companies and corporate R&D centers are where people come together to learn and solve problems.

Of course, one party in particular is good at playing to the emotions of rural voters and convincing them that they are the only real Americans, that people in the cities are not like them, are a threat to them and are draining resources away from them, when in fact the opposite is true. Sometimes they even convince suburban voters that their interests do not lie with other voters in the metropolitan areas they are a part of.