“Stop Overlooking Us!”

As the election maps grew redder on the night of November 8, 2016, reflecting the rural landslide for Donald Trump, Chuck Todd of NBC News summed them up: “Rural America is basically screaming at us, ‘Stop overlooking us!’” The network’s gray eminence, Tom Brokaw, a son of rural South Dakota, chimed in: “What we underestimated was the depth of the anger.” Todd’s exclamation helped explain the result: There was a sense in rural America, borne out by statistics, of being left behind. Brokaw acknowledged that the presumed “enthusiasm gap” between supporters of Trump and Hillary Clinton in polls was bigger than the news media had reckoned – perhaps because relatively few reporters spent much time in rural areas, missing the depth of resentment against urban elites.