At its founding, the United States was an overwhelmingly rural nation. The inaugural census of 1790 showed that 95% of all Americans either lived in isolated rural areas, on farms, or in tiny towns with fewer than 2,500 people. However, a steady national trend towards urbanization began immediately thereafter.
The rise of American cities during the 19th century was spurred on by the Industrial Revolution, which created a high demand for labor. Cities became population magnets, drawing workers from around the country and eventually around the world. One generation after another, people left the American countryside behind and headed for the nation’s new and growing cities. The scales slowly but inexorably tipped in the opposite direction, and today's census numbers are practically reversed from those of 1790.
Agricultural families typically had a higher birth rate than urban families because children provided valuable labor on the farm from an early age. At the same time, rural America received its fair share of foreign immigrants. While stereotypes of 19th and early 20th century immigration often focus on Irish, Italians, and Jews making new homes in American cities, waves of Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs, British, and many others passed right through those cities and continued on to the heartland.
Thus, both rural and urban America grew rapidly during the 150 years following the Declaration of Independence. Cities merely did so at a faster pace, gaining a majority of the nation’s populace by the early 20th century. But at the same time that urban Americans were finally eclipsing rural Americans in total numbers, several new factors conspired to severely temper rural growth, beginning its relegation to dwindling minority status.
The first was immigration restriction. It began with the targeted Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, evolved over the next few decades into more wide-ranging and comprehensive restrictions, and culminated with the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Many “non-white” immigrants were banned altogether, and immigration policy was defined by national quotas. Now only about only about 
At the same time the number of foreign immigrants dwindled, fewer domestic migrants found the countryside enticing for a number of reasons. The nation was no longer expanding, and so land prices were not as cheap as they had once been; the mechanization of farming had led to a decreased demand for labor; and tumbling commodity prices and rising debt for farmers made the occupation more tenuous and less appealing.
Just as fewer people were arriving in rural America, more were deciding to leave. The U.S. agricultural economy went into depression immediately following World War I, a full decade before the Great Depression. America’s traditional farming economy began to collapse. And in parts of the Great Plains, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s proved to be one of history’s major environmental calamities, further encouraging emigration from rural areas. Some states took decades to recover lost they population during the Depression. North Dakota still had fewer people in 2010 than it did in 1930.
My father is descended from people who had lived on farms and in small towns of western North Carolina since the 1700s. Several young men left the state to find work during the Depression. Many of them then left to fight in the war. Upon returning home, the Reinhardts decided to cast their lots elsewhere. My father was still a boy when his entire nuclear family left farm life behind. Some of his extended family joined them, and they all headed west for the San Joaquin Valley of central California. Today, I still have distant relatives in North Carolina, but so far as I know, there are no Reinhardts left in Catawba County.
As Americans deserted the countryside during and World War II, rural America began to sag. The trend has largely continued unabated down to the present day. Since 1990, over 700 rural counties have lost at least 10% of their population. Half of all rural counties in America now have more deaths than births each year.
In their book Hollowing Out the Middle, Carr and Kefalas point to several specific causes for economic collapse in rural America. They cite the rise of agribusiness and big box retail, the decline of unions and blue collar wages, a growing reliance on undocumented workers, and an under-investment in younger workers who enter the workforce without college degrees. The result has been a sharp drop in small business ownership (both farmers and retailers), quality wage jobs, and income. Economic decline has been followed by population loss and social decay, much as it has with many cities. For example, for the first time in history, rural Americans are now just as likely as their urban and suburban counterparts to be divorced.
Carr and Kefalas’s spent a year living in Ellis, Iowa and conducted an extensive study of that small town. They concluded that Ellis is in many ways emblematic of the problems afflicting rural America at large. In particular, the town suffers from an ongoing exodus of its most promising young people. As one high school guidance counselor put it: “The best kids go while the ones with the biggest problems stay, and then we have to deal with their kids in the schools in the next generation.” Instead of being encouraged to stay and build up the community, ironically many of the most promising kids are encouraged to leave because the town’s economy is in decline; opportunities simply aren’t there. Meanwhile, kids who feel alienated and/or do not develop marketable job skills are often trapped.
There is a panoply of consequences stemming from rural decline, depopulation, and the so-called brain drain. One with national implications is the role it plays in the partisan red/blue, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat divide that increasingly stains the United States.
To the contrary, I think political stances are typically a form of identity construction. I think political engagement in America is largely a cultural and social act. I reject the notion that most people vote based on rational choices about their own self-interest. Rather, I think most people take political stances and engage in political actions primarily as ways of defining and expressing themselves. That loyalties to political parties, ideologies, and philosophies are largely a way for Americans to understand and present themselves as the people they want to be, and as the way the want to be perceived by others.
Thus, when I offer the query about how the rural brain drain has shaped the red-blue divide, what I’m really asking is, how can we better understand the ways in which American culture and politics shape each other?
But the term “brain drain” is somewhat misleading in the way it emphasizes economic impact and the supposed dumbing down of a region. While the economic implications may be accurate, it must be noted that the exodus of skilled workers is merely the symptom of decline, not the cause. As much as anything, the real effect of so-called brain drains are about cultural shifts that come about from demographic changes.
Rural America’s ongoing depopulation, economic decline, and accompanying brain drain have had led to specific demographic changes. Those changes in turn have contributed to certain cultural shifts that express themselves politically. As the region, in comparison to the rest of the nation, becomes older, poorer, whiter, less educated, and remains religious, more and more rural Americans choose to identify themselves with cultural markers that are easily expressed through conservative/red/Republican actions and philosophies.
Two-thirds of the eligible voters from the so-called Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003) identify as Democrats. In the next national election, about one-quarter of all eligible voters will be from this group. Non-white voters identify Democratic at roughly the same rate. Specifically, over 80% of African Americans identify as Democrats. Among white voters, the less often one attends religious services, the more likely one is to vote Democratic. As noted earlier, more formal education also correlates somewhat with voting Democratic.
