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I personally think the biggest driving factor in the rural/city divide that causes rural populations to skew conservative is services.
Rural communities are criminally underserviced. It makes sense why from a logistical view. When people are gathered in small areas, they are easy to provide services to. It's much easier to provide quality power, plumbing, roads, essential services, and prettyich everything to high density areas. It's more effective to service cities.
It's hard to provide reliable services to rural areas. With everyone spread out so much, you need longer wires, longer roads, longer pipes, more people, more everything. So it makes sense to allocate less to these areas. But it's also horrific.
These are people. It makes perfect sense why rural communities distrust and resent government, and oppose increased spending on social services. They don't see the benefits. They see money being spent on things they can't use. Then manipulative politicians swoop in and tell them that these services are bad.
The solution is to suck it up and give everyone equal access to services. Spend more money on rural communities, even if it's less efficient. Because they are people and deserve roads and hospitals and internet equivalent to cities.
Public transit is cheaper and easier to build when the land is less developed.
It's easier to build, but much less efficient to operate
Seems like we could make life easier with policies encouraging increased population density even here. Sure, everyone spreads out in a rural area, but it shouldn’t take much to build up some sort of walkable town center. If you want services, you could drive into town to get them
People should be able to live where they want, and any government that demands participation must provide equal services to everyone.