WASHINGTON, Dec. 14, 2016 - New American Community Survey data
released by the Census Bureau last week shows why Democratic nominee Hillary
Clinton’s campaign could have concluded – erroneously, in retrospect – that she
could have won without appealing to voters in rural areas and small towns.
With more than eight out of every 10 Americans now living in
metropolitan areas and fewer than two in 10 who live rural areas, it may have
made sense for any campaign to put its resources into the largest concentration
of voters, even as it ignored a significant bloc.
President-elect Donald Trump got about two-thirds of the
votes in rural counties and counties with cities under 50,000, performing
several points higher than Republican nominee Mitt Romney did in 2012, says Tim
Marema of the Center for Rural Strategies in Knoxville, Tennessee.
A stunning example comes from a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel analysis
that found Trump won more than 500 Wisconsin towns and villages with a median
population of less than 800 that voted for President Obama in 2012, nearly half
of them by 20 percentage points or greater.
“One popular theory is that the results of the election came
as such a surprise because media, pundits, and pollsters were in an information
‘bubble’ and unaware of the depth of discontent outside major cities,” Marema
writes in the Daily
Yonder. Although the Census reports do not shed light on Trump’s rural
electoral popularity, Marema suggests that they may “create a leak, if not a
burst, in the information bubble.”
Rural areas may have 97 percent of the nation’s land area
but only 19.3 percent of its population, about 60 million people – a number
that has remained remarkably steady over a century even as the national
population has trebled – according to new Census data collected between 2011
and 2015 on more than 40 demographic topics, available on the Census
Bureau website.
Last week’s report also underscores the fact that “rural”
and “farm” are not synonymous. “The rural economy has diversified substantially
since the mid-20th century,” it says. “Jobs in the agricultural sector are on
the decline while jobs in manufacturing, retail sales and educational services
are on the rise.” In the 704 counties (there are 3,142 counties in the U.S.) in
which 100 percent of the population lives in a rural area, the economy is
diverse and not necessarily dependent on farming.
The largest share of the civilian workforce in the most
rural counties (22.3 percent) is employed in education, health care and social
assistance. Another 10.9 percent is in the retail trade, while less than 10
percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture and forestry. A higher
share of rural jobs is in manufacturing; 12.1 percent of the rural civilian
workforce is in this industry, performing duties as assemblers and fabricators,
production workers and managers.
The report says, “Employment by industry also varies in size
and by region. Landscape, access to natural resources and availability of labor
may shape the geography of rural industries and employment. Manufacturing is
less prominent in rural counties in the West compared with rural counties in
the Midwest, South and Northeast. In contrast, a larger percentage of the
civilian workforce in rural counties in the Midwest and West is employed in the
agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining industry compared with those
in the Northeast and the South.”
Adults in rural areas are older, with a median age of 51
compared to 45 in urban areas, are less likely to be college graduates, are
more likely to live in the state where they were born (65.4 percent compared
with 48.3 percent), and are more likely to have served in the military (10.4
percent of the population of adults in rural areas compared with 7.8 percent in
urban areas).
The Census researchers also compared residents in 704
completely rural counties with their counterparts in counties that were mostly
rural and with rural people in areas that were mostly urban. From 2011 to 2015,
some 9 percent of the rural population (5.3 million) lived in completely rural
counties, compared with about 41 percent (24.6 million) in 1,185 mostly rural
counties and about 50 percent (30.1 million) in the 1,253 mostly urban
counties. The data is on the web in the County
Look-Up Table.
Rural areas had lower rates of poverty (11.7 percent
compared with 14 percent) and were much less likely to have large immigrant
population. Rural communities had fewer adults born in other countries (4
percent) compared with those in urban areas (19 percent).
#30
For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com