Last week’s articles charted the broad decline of America’s rural population and the problems this has created for rural societies. They also looked at how those changes can affect individual communities, leading to economic collapse, population loss, and a so-called “brain drain,” as educated citizens often leave rural America behind and respond to the siren call of cities and suburbs.
There is a panoply of consequences stemming from population shifts 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.
Let me be clear about one thing from the outset. I do not mean to suggest that a drain brain has left rural America red/conservative/Republican because smart people are blue/liberal/Democrat. It is true that educated people are more likely to be liberal and/or Democrat, (though not at as high a rate as is often assumed). I don’t believe that being formally educated and being smart are the same thing. But beyond that, I don’t believe that voting habits and political stances are generally a sign of intelligence one way or the other.
To the contrary, I think political stances are typically a form of identity construction. 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. 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 they 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?
The British Royal Society first coined the term Brain Drain in the 1950s to describe the steady stream of highly skilled workers who had begun to leave Great Britain after the war, mostly for Canada and the United States. By the 1980s, it had taken on its more familiar definition, referring to the problem that developing nations confronted in retaining their 
educated classes, many of whom moved to the U.S. and Europe.
But the term “brain drain” is somewhat misleading in the way it emphasizes economic impact and suggests 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 the problem, not the cause. As much as anything, the real effects 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/Republican/red actions and philosophies.
Meanwhile, cities have also become poorer and have lost population since the 1950s. But different cultural identities are expressed through politics in cities because those populations possess a high percentage of minority, highly educated, and secular voters who each in their own way are likely to identify as liberal/Democrat/blue. Demographic studies of voters 
bear out this behavior and identity construction.
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.
However, the great irony is this. Despite the absolutely central roles that rural and urban America have played in the nation’s history thus far, in the years to come, the cultural battle between them will become less and less important.
In the long run, the ways in which rural Americans express themselves through country music, cheap beer, and red politics, or the ways in which urban Americans express themselves through hip hop, overpriced wine, and blue politics, will matter little. Rather, it is the strip malls, play dates, and drive-thrus of suburbia that now dominate America. But just how the culture of runaway sprawl will express itself politically remains to be seen.