![]() Meanwhile, in states where it is not prohibited, private equity firms, insurance companies and other large corporations buy up huge swaths of farmland and import low-paid labor to work the land. Mega-corporations control most markets for agricultural goods and often fix prices at levels below the cost of production. Most of these assets are absentee owned, and the vast majority of the wealth created with them goes to urban- centered corporations and the stockholders that control them.Įven seemingly more prosperous families, such as those that own large farms across the Midwest, have little control over their economic future. Nor do they have leverage to ensure that they receive reasonable compensation for their roles in supporting metropolitan America. Rural people also know they have little or no control over these assets that support American cities and undergird the rural economy. So too are most of the prisoners incarcerated by America’s ultra-punitive criminal justice system. Metropolitan garbage is shipped to rural areas for disposal, often contaminating rural water supplies. A majority of the personnel in the military that protects us all is drawn from rural America. Metropolitan areas rely on their rural neighbors for their food, energy, building materials, clean water supply, raw materials and most American-made manufactured goods. Rural people are profoundly aware that America’s cities could not exist without the resources, goods and services they produce. Instead, we will briefly introduce three of the most significant. ![]() We could write volumes on the interconnected issues that underlie rural disaffection and that have influenced so many rural voters to abandon the Democratic Party and centrist Republicans in favor of elected leaders that promise radical change. Very few published articles explored the depths of rural disaffection, its root causes, or the complexity of the interrelated issues that have led so many rural voters to embrace a profoundly flawed presidential candidate through two election cycles. They generally wrote shallow snapshot pieces portraying rural voters as unsophisticated yokels duped by Trump’s false promises. Rural places were written off as irrelevant “fly-over country.” After the 2016 election demonstrated that rural America still had some clout and could tip an election in favor of an otherwise unpopular candidate, reporters descended on rural places. THE GENESIS OF RURAL DISAFFECTION AND CURRENT RURAL VOTING PATTERNSīefore the election of Donald Trump, it was nearly impossible to get media attention for the plight of rural places across America. However, before we get into the question about whether steps should be taken to limit the disproportionate Electoral College influence of rural voters, we think it is pertinent to examine how we got here, and just how many rural voters there truly are. We question the wisdom and potential efficacy of this proposed quick fix for what ails us. Some have proposed elimination of the Electoral College as a solution to this perceived problem. But this is achieved at the cost of introducing distortions to the actual shape of each state and their positioning in relation to each other.In the last two election cycles, much has been written and said about the disproportionate influence that rural voters and rural states have on the outcome of national elections. The cartogram approach of this image eliminates that problem by presenting the area of each state in an exact one-to-one correspondence with its number of electoral votes. ![]() Because of that huge variation, a regular map of the US that is typically used to present electoral vote results can convey a very skewed impression of the outcome where sparsely populated states appear overrepresented and densely populated states appear underrepresented. The population density of the 50 states varies by three orders of magnitude (from NJ with nearly 1,200 people per square mile, to AK with roughly 1 1/4 people per sq mi). The data depicted is the results of the vote by the electoral college on December 19, 2016. English: Cartogram of the 2016 Electoral Vote for US President, with each square representing one electoral vote. ![]()
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