Place, Race, and the Geographic Politics of White Grievance

Rural resentment is a form of place-based grievance politics that scholars have used to explain the growing urban-rural divide in American politics. However, whereas extant theory assumes that rural resentment stems from rural identification, recently available data shows that beliefs about geographic inequity, which are central to rural resentment, are not held exclusively by those who embrace a rural identity. If geography is not the sole source of rural resentment, then what else explains this ostensibly place-based phenomenon? Among White Americans who do not identify as rural, we posit that belief in the existence of deliberate rural deprivation by government and media elites can be conceived as ‘place-based empathy’ toward rural Americans. Further, we argue that place empathy toward rural areas is partially an expression of White grievance politics stemming from the belief that the stereotypical rural resident is a White American suffering from relative deprivation at the hands of government officials who privilege non-white (and non-rural) constituents over them. Using the 2020 American National Election Time Series, as well as novel mTurk data, we show that White consciousness predicts beliefs about geographic inequity among non-rural identifiers but not rural identifiers. Instead, consistent with previous research, we show that racial prejudice is a better predictor of geographic attitudes for rural identifiers and White consciousness has little independent association. These findings provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of the ways race and place intersect to explain the grievance politics of White Americans in the Trump era.