Fueled largely by rising oil prices, small town and rural America enjoyed an economic jolt in 2017 that could widen the political gap in November’s midterm election between those smaller places more friendly to President Donald Trump and the big metropolitan areas sharply recoiling from him and his policies, new data shows.
The new numbers, scheduled to be released Tuesday by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the center-left Brookings Institution, show that job growth in 2017 remained heavily concentrated in the largest cities benefiting the most from the transition to the information-age digital economy.
But smaller communities, lifted by higher prices for oil, gas and other commodities and some gains in manufacturing, last year clawed back a significantly larger share of new job creation than in the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the analysis found. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, CNN