Despite heavily backing Trump, rural voters not entirely on board with GOP agenda

Despite claims by President-elect Donald Trump and other GOP officials that last November’s election is proof that the soon-to-be commander-in-chief has a national mandate, new polling analysis demonstrates that even Trump’s main base — rural voters — isn’t on board with every Republican policy. 

Take efforts by the party to privatize education in states with robust rural populations like Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska. 

Despite huge enthusiasm for Trump in Kentucky — where Trump won close to 65% of the vote — only a little over a third of voters backed efforts by state Republicans to implement a constitutional amendment that would have allowed public dollars to be funneled into private schools. 

Nebraska overwhelmingly supported a ballot measure that would overturn a “school choice” program. At the same time, some 78% of rural voters in the Cornhusker State punched a ticket for Trump and a mere 45% of that same voter pool sought to keep state funds funneling to a $10 million scholarship initiative that would send primary school children to private or parochial schools.   

And in Colorado, where another constitutional amendment took place, 52% of rural voters  endorsed including language in the state’s constitution which would proclaim that a “K-12 child has the right to school choice” and that “parents have the right to direct the education of their children.” That same constituency went for Trump at 55%. 

“Republicans at a national level sort of buy into a certain ideological way of thinking about school choice,” Nicholas Jacobs, an assistant professor of government at Colby College and co-author of “The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America,” told The Daily Yonder last month. 

“But at a local level, you’re sitting there thinking about how this is going to affect your community, your local school, maybe the school your children go to, and people will make a different choice.”

The same circumstances rang true for abortion. While abortion restrictions are a popular policy proposal for Heartland residents, there’s a gap between their backing of Trump and reducing abortion access: 73% of rural voters across nine states went to the polls for Trump, but only 61% wanted to limit reproductive care. 

Another example is Missouri: Wherein 30% of the state’s residents are considered rural, 57% of voters demanded an increase in the state’s minimum wage and a provision for mandatory paid sick leave. 

All of this data should be a point of reflection for Democrats. While the broader dog-and-pony Trump campaign proved effective at the polls, the movement's actual policy may not be as popular as imagined. Over the next four years, the party will need to hone in on these kinds of discrepancies if it wants to finally derail the far-right acolytes who have come into power.