Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. She is the author of The Submerged State and Degrees of Inequality: How The Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, among other books, and the coauthor of Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy. Trevor E. Brown is assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon.

"A massive rural-urban divide has opened in our country’s politics. Urban and rural voters used to vote pretty much in lock step. But then in the 1990s, that split. Urban voters became reliably Democratic, and rural voters became overwhelmingly Republican. We treat this as an inevitability in our politics, but it is only a few decades old, and our political future and stability might rest on reversing it. Certainly for the Democratic Party, any durable political power rests on reversing it. Reversing it isn’t going to be easy. But it begins with understanding it and taking seriously the resentments that fuel it. Rural Versus Urban, a new book by the political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown, is the best place I’ve found to start."---Ezra Klein, New York Times

Suzanne Mettler is the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions in the Government Department at Cornell University. She is the author of The Submerged State and Degrees of Inequality: How The Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, among other books, and the coauthor of Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy. Trevor E. Brown is assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon.

"A massive rural-urban divide has opened in our country’s politics. Urban and rural voters used to vote pretty much in lock step. But then in the 1990s, that split. Urban voters became reliably Democratic, and rural voters became overwhelmingly Republican. We treat this as an inevitability in our politics, but it is only a few decades old, and our political future and stability might rest on reversing it. Certainly for the Democratic Party, any durable political power rests on reversing it. Reversing it isn’t going to be easy. But it begins with understanding it and taking seriously the resentments that fuel it. Rural Versus Urban, a new book by the political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown, is the best place I’ve found to start."---Ezra Klein, New York Times