Keywords: Methodological challenges and improvements, including in the areas of sampling, measurement, survey design and survey response or non-response

Much has been made of the importance of rural White voters in electing Republican Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016. More generally, in recent U.S. elections a substantial dimension of cleavage has been based on geography, pitting rural Republican voters against urban Democratic voters. The present study, using nationally representative U.S. data gathered during the pre-primary period of 2015, examines the notion of physical geographic location and how it relates to geographic identity and aspiration, cultural indicators such as musical preferences, and political preferences.

We measured self-reported geography (rural, suburban, and urban) in four ways: (1) current location of residence; (2) the location where the respondent grew up (socialization); (3) identification with a geographic location regardless of residence; and (4) where the respondent would prefer to live (aspiration). These measures were all positively correlated, but the correlations were modest at best. Few people actively identified with their geographic location, and identification with suburban areas was particularly low. Also, there was a tendency for those who live in suburban areas to aspire to live in either urban or rural areas far more than those in rural and urban areas aspiring to live somewhere else. Therefore, these four indicators did not form conventionally reliable scales tapping rural, suburban, and urban geographic location. Rather, each indicator tapped considerable unique variation which we used to explain various cultural and political variables.

Analyses suggested that it was more often an aspiration or identification with rural or urban living than current or prior geographic residence that predicted cultural and political attributes commonly associated with geography in the U.S. For instance, preference for the rural “country” music genre was equally likely among (a) those who both aspire to and actually live in a rural area and (b) those who aspire to live in rural areas but do not. By contrast, those who live in rural areas but aspire to live elsewhere were considerably less likely to prefer country music. Similar findings applied to preferences for the urban hip-hop music form. Those who aspire to urban living preferred this genre, regardless of where they actually live. More directly relevant to politics, those who aspire to live in rural areas (even though they don’t) were just as likely to be Republican and just as likely to have highly Republican political discussion networks as those who actually live in rural areas (and wish to stay in a rural area). And, those two groups were more likely to have such political characteristics than those who live in rural areas but wish they could live elsewhere.

Our results demonstrate that actual geographic location is less important for culture and politics than the aspirational and identificational aspects of geography. Given that most research on political geography in the U.S. focuses on observed geographic location (based on postal code or county of residence) or self-reports of current residence location, our findings offer cautions and directions for further research.