Rural Resentment in Montana's 2018 Election

Abstract

In the 2016 presidential election, we saw stark partisan and rural divides. While Hillary Clinton easily won the Democratic vote in urban communities, the rural vote carried Republican candidate Donald Trump to the presidency. I wanted to learn whether or not these divides affected how Montanans felt about representation. To determine this, my Elections class and I conducted an exit poll on election day of 2018 where voters from Lewis and Clark County were asked how well they felt the government represented their values. These answers were then compared with whether the respondents identified as a Democrat or a Republican, and if they considered their community to be rural or urban. I predicted that there would be noticeable differences in how rural and urban respondents felt they were represented. Respondents as a whole felt less represented by the federal government compared to the state government. There was little difference between how rural and urban people felt, but there were noticeable partisan differences.