According to a new NPR/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll, although a majority of rural Americans are optimistic about having an impact on improving their local communities (62%), a substantial share also experience problems in areas that carry major consequences, including financial insecurity, trouble accessing […] Read more »
Trump’s ‘great patriot’ farmers follow him into a trade war
Iowa farmer Tim Bardole survived years of low crop prices and rising costs by cutting back on fertilizer and herbicides and fixing broken-down equipment rather than buying new. When President Donald Trump’s trade war with China made a miserable situation worse, Bardole used up any equity his operation had and […] Read more »
Most of America’s rural areas are doomed to decline
Sunset over an Iowa farm. BJontzPhoto/shutterstock.com David Swenson, Iowa State University Since the Great Recession, most of the nation’s rural counties have struggled to recover lost jobs and retain their people. The story is markedly different in the nation’s largest urban communities. I’m writing from Iowa, where every four years […] Read more »
Red counties are doing better under Trump — but not as well as blue cities
Large, mostly Democratic-leaning, metropolitan centers are consolidating their dominance of the national economy even as smaller, mostly Republican-leaning communities at their periphery show clear signs of economic revival under President Donald Trump, according to an extensive new analysis of regional economic dynamics published Tuesday. These twin trends — consolidation at […] Read more »
A New Study Confirms (Again) That Race, Not Economics, Drove Former Democrats To Trump
… “Economic distress is not a significant factor in explaining the shift in Iowa voters from Democrat to Republican between 2008 and 2016,” write Iowa State University sociologists Ann Oberhauser, Daniel Krier, and Abdi Kusow. “The election outcomes do not signify [a revolt] among working-class voters left behind by globalization.” […] Read more »
Trump’s battle with sanctuary cities is the next phase of his confrontation with urban America
President Donald Trump’s threats to relocate undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers to “sanctuary cities” capture his determination to constantly press the boundaries of law and morality with hardline immigration policies. But it may reveal even more about his political posture toward the nation’s biggest population centers. … Trump’s confrontational relationship […] Read more »