By August Benzow
Donald Trump won 93 percent of rural counties in the 2024 election — not just the highest share of any Republican presidential candidate this century, but also an improvement on his own performance in the elections of 2016 and 2020, when 92 percent of rural counties went for him (in both elections).
Rural America has grown more economically and demographically diverse in the past two decades. Why, then, have its political preferences become so uniformly Republican?
The answers aren’t obvious. What is clear is that the traditional predictors of voting behavior, like economic status or racial and ethnic identity, appear to no longer affect voting patterns in rural areas.
In this analysis, I look at three indicators of economic performance in rural counties: population growth, GDP, and employment. A complex economic picture of rural America emerges that defies simple narratives of success or decline.
1) After more than a decade of stagnation or decline, rural counties have been growing their populations at faster rates since the pandemic — though they are still growing more slowly than the rest of the United States.
Year-over-year population growth for rural counties was 0.4 percent in 2023, compared to 0 percent in 2019. Last year, in fact, the population growth rate of the average rural county surpassed that of the average urban county. (Suburban counties are growing their populations at the fastest rates, a continuation of longstanding historical trends.)
The share of rural counties losing population has also declined significantly, dropping from two-thirds in 2012 to less than half in 2023.
The return of population growth is undoubtedly encouraging for many rural counties, but the trend remains highly concentrated in specific states and regions.
The recent population growth has been most pronounced in rural counties near major urban centers or in popular recreation and retirement destinations. Regions such as the upper Midwest, parts of New England, the Ozarks, the exurban South, and the Mountain West have experienced significant gains, driven by an influx of retirees and the rise of remote work, which enables working-age adults to settle farther from urban hubs. Liberty County, Texas, located on the edge of the Houston metro area, gained 19,000 residents from 2019 to 2023, a 21 percent increase.
Other regions tell a less optimistic story. High-poverty areas in the South and Appalachia, agricultural regions in the Midwest, and remote counties in the West continue to face population loss. The Great Plains have been hit particularly hard, including areas in Texas and Oklahoma that depend heavily on oil and gas industries. Lassen County, California, is among the hardest-hit counties, losing around 4,000 residents between 2019 and 2023, a 12.7 percent decrease.
2) The rural share of the national economy continues to shrink.
From 2019 to 2023, year-over-year real GDP growth in rural areas averaged 1.8 percent per year, weaker than the 2.4 percent annual growth across the whole country.
Consequently, rural counties’ share of national GDP fell to 7.8 percent in 2023, an extension of its gradual decline dating back to 2001, when it was 9 percent. (The share plateaued briefly in the years surrounding the Great Recession.) The most recent data point in 2023 does show a slight uptick, suggesting a potential stabilization, though it is too early to know.
Once again, the overall trend masks tremendous regional variation. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of rural counties with GDP growth above the national rate was the same as the number below.
Around 500 counties — a quarter of all rural counties — experienced an outright decline in GDP during those four years.
Rural areas with negative GDP growth were primarily concentrated in specific states. Notably, western Pennsylvania features a significant cluster, including less populous counties such as Bedford and Somerset.
Meanwhile, extraction industries drive many success stories. Rural counties in states like Kansas and South Dakota, which have thriving oil, gas, and mining sectors, largely outperformed national GDP growth rates. Geographically isolated and sparsely populated counties, like Coke County, Texas — known for its significant oil reserves — are also prime examples of high-GDP-growth rural areas.
It’s worth noting that many of these rural counties, whose economic growth is dependent on the energy sector, are simultaneously experiencing stagnant or declining populations. Therefore, they might struggle to sustain their healthy growth rates.
Healthy GDP growth is not limited, however, to resource-rich regions. More populous rural counties in Mountain West states like Idaho have also enjoyed fast GDP growth, at least in part because of an influx of new residents since the pandemic. For instance, GDP and population have surged in Latah County, Idaho, home to the University of Idaho. These regions have a stronger foundation for future economic growth than those reliant on oil, gas, and mining.
3) Employment growth still lags in most rural areas.
Year-over-year job growth in rural counties averaged 0.3 percent between 2019 and 2023, slower than the national average of 1 percent.
Nearly half of rural counties still had fewer jobs in 2023 than in 2019, although the number of rural counties losing jobs in the last few years was lower than in the prior two decades.
Rural counties adding jobs above the national rate are concentrated in a few key regions. These employment growth hotspots are primarily located in fast-growing exurban areas in Georgia and Texas, in addition to the Mountain West states of Utah and Idaho. The largest job growth from 2019 to 2023 was in Jackson County, Georgia, which added around 19,000 jobs, a 65 percent increase, mostly in trade, transportation and utilities, and manufacturing.
In stark contrast, entire states and regions have seen almost no rural counties outpace the national job growth rate. This pattern holds true for all of New England, plus much of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Mexico. Rural county job growth is often a patchwork even within economically successful states. For example, the steepest absolute job loss for a rural county since 2019 was in Burke County, Georgia, only about 100 miles from the booming Jackson County.
These trends further highlight the uneven nature of economic growth in rural America. While some high-growth hotspots are thriving, large swaths of the country’s rural communities continue to struggle with stagnant or declining employment.
4) Nearly all of rural America is Trump country, including most counties in which non-Hispanic White residents are a minority of the population (“majority-minority” counties).
Although economic success is inconsistent throughout the country’s rural communities, their political transformation into dependable Republican strongholds is more uniform.
Kamala Harris captured the smallest rural county vote share of any Democratic presidential candidate in the 21st century, with just 7 percent of rural counties voting for her. This is roughly one-third of the share Obama won in 2008, though consistent with the outcomes in the other two Trump-era elections.
Furthermore, the political shift away from Democrats in majority-minority rural counties — those in which non-Hispanic White residents are a minority of the population — has also accelerated in recent years.
Perhaps the most notable transformation has occurred in rural counties with a Hispanic majority, where Donald Trump’s average vote share surged from 54 percent in 2016 to 65 percent in 2024. Back in 2012, for instance, Barack Obama won 71 percent of the vote in Zapata County, Texas. Trump won the county in 2020 and then again in 2024, winning 61 percent of the vote.
Conclusion
No simple story can be told about rural counties’ economic performance. Looking at straightforward economic indicators like GDP and employment growth, these areas continue to trail behind the rest of the country. However, these indicators also mask the wide variation in the successes and failures of the disparate parts of rural America.
In recent years, the Biden administration has directed billions of dollars to rural communities through significant legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and Inflation Reduction Act, seeking to bolster the economic resilience of many of these areas. It is far too soon to know whether these investments will succeed. Meanwhile, rural America has become an increasingly solid Republican stronghold since Donald Trump entered the political scene.
Appendix
Rural counties are defined as counties where at least 75 percent of the population lives in a rural area based on Census definitions or where at least 50 percent of the population lives in a rural area and the county has a population of less than 50,000. Urban counties are defined as counties that contain the population-weighted center of a city with a population of at least 50,000, excluding those in the same metropolitan area of another large- or medium-sized city, which are classified as suburban. Suburban counties include all counties where at least half the population lives in an urban or suburban area based on NCES definitions and are in a metropolitan area containing a large- or mid-sized city but do not contain the population-weighted center of that city.
