We see a lot of musing about the reason for the urban/rural divide in U.S. politics. Yes, those depopulous rural states have disproportionate political power thanks to the undemocratic constitution; and within states liberals and Democrats are concentrated in urban centers while exurban and rural areas tend to be Republican, which gives Republicans the ability to win majorities in state legislatures and congressional delegations with a minority of the vote. It's true that people vote, and dirt doesn't, but the way our system is structured, having a lot of dirt does give you an advantage.
The challenging question is why rural areas are more conservative. Will Wilkinson attempts to answer that, and he might just have a good point. People have been heading from the countryside to the city for a while now, but the people who make that move tend to be different from the people who stay behind.
[U]rbanization is a relentless, glacial social force that transforms entire societies and, in the process, generates cultural and political polarization by segregating populations along the lines of the traits that make individuals more or less responsive to the incentives that draw people to the city. I explore three such traits — ethnicity, ideology-correlated aspects of personality, and level of educational achievement — and their intricate web of relationships. The upshot is that, over the course of millions of moves over many decades, high density areas have become economically thriving multicultural havens while whiter, lower density places are facing stagnation and decline as their populations have become increasingly uniform in terms of socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, and lower levels of education.
This would also explain the rejection of expertise and the demonization of the university. Education and expertise are markers of a geographically based socio-cultural divide. Rural people think of the metropolis and its cosmopolitan, educated population as a weird, exotic world with outre values (there I go with the French), that looks down on them. I actually don't think the last item is true -- it's partly a myth propagated by conservative politicians, and partly a projection of shame. People who secretly feel inferior because they lack status enhancing credentials presume that others look down on them.
Liberals don't look down on people personally because of their rural culture or limited formal education, but they are offended by elements of rural culture, notably racism, the tendency to deny inconvenient facts that are asserted by experts, oppressive gender norms. That's what Hillary meant when she referred to "deplorables," a most unfortunate choice of words and yes, it does indicate a lack of empathy on her part. What she should have said, what I will say, is that some people are committed to ideas and world views that I think are incorrect, and inimical to their own interests in the long run. Sometimes it's not enough to call them incorrect, it's necessary to condemn them in solidarity with the people who are hurt by them. But we need to find better ways of talking with people.
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