The economically anxious class is losing ground.
Rural counties, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast, are losing people at a drastic rate due to higher death rates than birth rates and more people moving away than moving in, Axios' Stef Kight writes.
- Another reason: Higher death rates for 18 to 64-year-olds in rural counties are often attributed at least in part to the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged many rural areas in the U.S.
Why it matters: Rural clout in Congress and the electoral college will be further diminished.
- 2016 was a "demographic anomaly," Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center, tells Axios: The rural areas that voted for Trump are not likely to have as much impact on future elections. Instead, "it will be demographic subgroups like racial minorities and women who will be more likely to sway things."
Good news. The electoral college, which favors thinly populated swaths of the US and gave us Trumplethinskin by the amount of people that fit into a football stadium, will lose some of that stranglehold on our politics.
The electoral college is designed to favor sparsely populated areas. It was created to strengthen the agrarian elite, offer more federal power to slaveholding states, and counterbalance factionalism and polarization.
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The bad news is this will only intensify the racist behaviors we are seeing now inflicted on migrant populations as they “infest” our country.