The effect of the urban/rural divide on attitudes toward U.S. presidential candidates

This research seeks to understand the urban/rural political divide in the United States. The main focus is the extent this divide is manifested in attitudes toward presidential candidates. Are rural Americans, for example, more likely to vote for a ‘rural’ candidate over an ‘urban’ candidate? The main hypothesis was that there would be a positive relationship between voters’ geography and their attitudes toward candidates who had a similar geographic background. The urban/rural divide in the U.S. has a long history and is particularly expressed in politics. More recently, this divide has been exacerbated by growing political polarisation, which is felt in numerous ways, including geography. This geographic polarisation has been the subject of intense research, especially investigating the phenomenon of geographic ‘sorting’. Recent debate on the above issues has increased due to the 2016 presidential election. This election further highlighted the growing urban/rural political divide that exists, with rural and urban Americans moving in opposite directions politically. This research is conducted during the post-election period and start of Donald Trump’s presidency and takes the form of an experimental survey research design. To explore this topic, surveys were distributed via Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing marketplace, and hosted externally on Qualtrics, a survey design tool. Participants were asked to state how likely they were to vote for one of three hypothetical presidential candidates and to give personal demographic information. Through the statistical analysis of results based on a hybrid multilevel model for analysing geographic responses, the tendency for Americans to prefer candidates from equivalent geographic areas to themselves was investigated. It was found that, on average, the rural candidate was received more positively, but there was a statistically insignificant difference in responses between rural and urban people