The gap...

The gap between Trump’s America and Clinton’s is getting worse

By Danny Vinik

If Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton sometimes seem like they’re talking about two different Americas, there’s a reason: Their voting bases pretty much live in two different Americas. Clinton voters are concentrated in cities, in the nation’s denser and more diverse areas; Trump voters dominate rural areas and America’s wide-open landscapes.

As a lot of political observers have noted, Trump’s grim-sounding language about a downcast America makes more sense if you realize just what’s happening for his rural base. And buried in the Census Bureau’s new report on income, poverty and health insurance, released Tuesday, are two piece of further bad news for rural America—trends that could keep shaping politics well after November’s election.

For Americans living in metropolitan areas, inflation-adjusted household income rose by 6 percent from 2014 to 2015—a robust bounce back from the recession. But for those living outside those areas­—totaling more than 40 million Americans—household income actually fell by 2 percent. The numbers on poverty reveal a similar trend. The number of people in poverty in rural areas did fall by 800,000, but that doesn’t appear to be because people are escaping poverty: Instead, people are simply leaving. The rural population, in that span of time, declined by five million people. Taken in total, the rural poverty rate actually rose slightly, by 0.2 percentage points. In the rest of country, the poverty rate declined by 1.4 percentage points.

The Census numbers come atop other findings about the worsening plight of rural Americans: they also face increasing addiction rates and increasing suicide rates. But Tuesday’s Census reports reveals just how unevenly distributed the economic recovery has been. Cities have bounced back, but the gains haven’t spread to those Americans.

For most of the country, 2015 was a great economic year, according to the new Census figures. Inflation-adjusted median household income rose by 5.2 percent, the official poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points and the percentage of people without health insurance fell to 9.1 percent. Income gains were strong across the entire income distribution, with the household income of the bottom 10 percent growing 7.9 percent. Economists across the political spectrum celebrated the new report.

Political economists have spent much of the last year debating the cause of Trump’s success, and specifically about whether his supporters are really driven by economic anxiety, or is it more his appeals to strength and even racially-tinged nationalism. It’s a difficult question to answer because those two explanations are intricately related, but some skeptics of the “economy” argument have pointed out that his supporters’ incomes are relatively high.

A growing body of evidence, however, indicates that looking just at income levels masks a larger story about the economic state of Trump supporters. In August, Jonathan Rothwell, of Gallup, released a major new survey of 85,000 Trump supporters that found that they have relatively high household incomes but live in areas with lower mobility, lower health, and lower educational levels. They are no more likely to live in areas negatively affected by trade but at all income levels, Trump supporters report higher feelings of economic anxiety.

The new Census report may offer further proof that Trump supporters are, at least partially, driven by concerns about the economy. Rothwell did not examine whether low or negative real household income growth predicts support for Trump but he did find that Trump supporters live in areas with low population density—regions that may have seen low or negative income growth in the past year, according to the new Census data.

“It is possible that Trump supporters are more likely than others to have lost income or experienced low growth, even if their incomes are relatively high,” Rothwell said in an email.

Beyond Trump, the new Census report indicates that even as the recovery strengthens, it won’t necessarily lift every area of the country. That the vast majority of Americans are finally seeing strong income growth is great news. But rural America still needs significant help. The justified anxieties of people who live there are going to be an issue for whoever becomes president.