Kaitlyn Hughes | editor-in-chief

Bryan Greenawalt’s day starts before dawn and ends after sundown on his farm in West Newton that’s been in his family since 1955. He used to take care of 48,000 chickens and sell eggs. Now, his wife has a dairy farm and they now grow and sell pumpkins and squash in the autumn months.

Shikhon Rahman starts her day in the heart of Downtown Pittsburgh working from her home. She can walk to restaurants, shops at the farmer’s market and often spends her free time at Pirates or Steelers games.

Greenawalt has been working on the farm since about the age of 12. He would go to high school for two days a week and work the other three on the farm and he went right into the labor force after graduating.

Rahman grew up in Meadville, went to Duquesne, was a part of Gamma Phi Beta and now works in business intelligence.

The two live in different environments — one in a rural setting, another in an urban area.

When it comes to showing up to the polls on Nov. 3, they have varying perspectives.

“Urban counties are much more likely to vote Democratic, while rural counties are much more likely to vote Republican,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University.

According to AP VoteCast, 62% of rural voters voted for Trump and 36% for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

Greenawalt is worried about how a candidate’s policies will affect his life on a farm. This includes economic issues because he said if people “don’t have money, they won’t buy anything.”

But he is very wary about the government’s role in agriculture.

“When they try and get involved with agriculture, they usually screw it up,” he said.

Steve Conn, history professor at Miami University in Ohio, said an example of this is former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz having the mantra “get big or get out,” while encouraging farmers to produce “fencerow to fencerow.” This eventually led to an uptick in large-scale farmers, which subsequently led to the decrease in family-owned farms like Greenawalt’s.

Rahman is more worried about immigration policies as someone who was born to foreign parents — her mother is from Germany and her father is from Bangladesh.

“There’s such a culture gap,” she said. “I think people should do a lot more research.”

As a student at Duquesne who is from Middlecreek Township, which is a rural community in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania, Elika Pletcher has experienced both sides of the coin.

She remembers going to vote with her parents growing up, and if someone was not a Republican they would be given dirty looks by the poll workers.

“It’s almost as if you’re not wanted to vote,” Pletcher.

But when she is in Pittsburgh, she said everyone just encourages each other to vote whether they sway red or blue.

She remembers a high school environment where people wouldn’t experience anything outside her town of 831 residents.

“There’s a lot less opportunities where I’m from,” she said, noting that she would like to find ways to bring different cultural perspectives she learned back to her home town.

Different communities make for differing votes

Demographic, economic and cultural circumstances define the political divide between rural and urban America, according to Schultz.

“We find that rural America is generally older, whiter, and less likely to have a college degree than urban America. These differences help explain why rural and urban communities increasingly support different political parties,” Schultz said.

This phenomenon reflects differences in how Americans live, work and operate in their communities, he said.

“Americans are not simply dividing into Republicans and Democrats. They are increasingly sorting themselves into communities with different educational backgrounds, economic opportunities, cultural preferences and political values,” he said.

Voting differences also come from myths about how rural America was once great but isn’t successful anymore, which “feeds a set of grievances” and people feel as if they’ve been wronged, Conn said.

“I’m not saying those feelings aren’t real, but historically speaking this isn’t really true,” Conn said, citing his research on how people have always thought rural America was in a crisis because they have been comparing it to the mystified version of the region. He wrote a book titled “The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is — and Isn’t” he compares how rural America is perceived with what he said is the reality of American society.

The Republican party and Trump have tapped into these grievances, Conn said.

“This is the grievance presidency,” he said.

Red and blue on the map

The rural-urban divide is not new. It has origins leading back to the Industrial Revolution. As Americans moved from farms to cityscapes, economic priorities, occupational structures and political interests began to shift, causing political rifts.

Rural legislators resisted redistricting, which culminated in the Supreme Court’s push to create fair voting districts.

“They feared that reapportionment would reduce rural political power and increase the influence of cities,” Schultz said.

Today, much of the country geographically appears Republican, according to Schultz. But this can be misleading.

“Republicans win much of the geographic territory of the United States, while Democrats win many of its most densely populated communities,” he said.

Conn said that rural voters are overrepresented statistically because of structural components of the U.S. government such as the Senate. Places like California and New York have larger populations than places like Wyoming, but each state still only gets two senators.

“Your rural vote counts more because of the way our political system is structured,” he said.

Conn also said that differences are exaggerated on color-coded maps.

“If you have a rural county and it votes Republican by 60%, that’s pretty overwhelming. But that still means 40% of the people are not voting Republican,” Conn said.

It’s not just rural and urban America

Schultz is skeptical of the rural-urban divide ever disappearing.

“It has become deeply embedded in American political life,” he said, citing the disparities in occupational opportunities, economic interests, cultural values and lifestyle preferences.

He thought the COVID-19 pandemic may alter this pattern. With more people working from home, he thought people would leave expensive urban areas and relocate to rural communities where there was more affordable housing.

“Such migration might have introduced new political preferences into rural communities and gradually weakened the geographic divide,” he said.

But the rural-urban political divide has yet to change.

Many House districts are safely Republican or safely Democratic because of the geographical concentration of voters with similar partisan preferences, Schultz said.

And in the Senate, a Democrat running statewide may win by a large margin in the major cities but lose if the Republican candidate dominates in rural communities.

“The political battle is often not simply between rural and urban America. It also concerns the suburban voters who increasingly occupy the political and geographic space between them,’ Schultz said.

There are about 30 miles between Greenawalt’s farm in West Newton and Rahman’s home in Downtown Pittsburgh.

“Country people have one political belief and city people have another,” Greenawalt said.

Rahman said this divide worries her.

“I hope people pay attention not because it’s entertaining but because they care,” Rahman said.

Kaitlyn Hughes can be reached at hughesk10@duq.edu