Donald Trump often tells rural folks that he loves them. Contrary to myth, not all of them love him back. According to The Rural Voter, a new book by the political scientists Nicholas Jacobs and Dan Shea, only about one in 10 rural people are what they call “rabble-rousers”—the kind of MAGA die-hards who tweet incessantly or raise a stink at school board meetings, often with an intimidating edge.

While more conservative on average than urbanites, rural Americans are far from monolithic—racially, culturally, or politically. Even among rural conservatives, about a third are less fans of Trump than they are people who’ve come to mistrust Biden.

Some of these folks are potential Biden voters. To win in November, the president needs every one of them he can get.

In 2012 and 2018, one of us (Anthony) ran for Congress in Virginia’s Ninth District, a mainly rural area in the southwestern corner of the state. The district previously had a Democratic congressman for 28 years and sent several Democrats to the state Legislature. While the Tea Party victories of 2010 ushered in what appeared to be sudden changes to the region’s politics, the underlying causes of that red wave had been festering for decades.

Southwestern Virginia’s shift from a politically purple region to one that votes more than 70 percent Republican is the story of much of the American countryside. Rural America is working-class country, and the decline of Democratic power there tracks the party’s broader failure to hang on to what was once its working-class base.

As recently as 2008, Barack Obama won 45 percent of rural and 46 percent of white working-class votes nationwide. In 2016, barely three in 10 rural Americans voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. Liberal pundits—most of them urban—often ascribe this shift to deep-seated racism and anger at being “left behind” by the so-called knowledge economy. That analysis misses the mark by a country mile.

Rural America hasn’t been left behind so much as it has been worn down: by timber, coal, gas, copper, and other metals extracted until what’s left is too expensive to reach; by companies pulling out and workers left holding the bag; by hogs, cattle, chickens, and grains produced and shipped out in abundance, with farmers getting only pennies on the dollar that consumers pay; by midsize textile and furniture factories steadily upgrading equipment and worker skills, only to be undermined by trade policies that favor cheaper labor anywhere it can be found.

As rural economies imploded, Democrats and Republicans alike stood idly by. But liberals added insult to injury by looking down on the “dank backwaters” of rural America or glibly insisting that people abandon their communities and go where the jobs are.

Rural Americans are angry because we’ve spent decades at jobs making homes warmer and food cheaper for our suburban and urban neighbors, only to be economically discarded and culturally vilified as racist rubes. As one Iowa Republican put it, “It was a huge insult to say that you support Trump because you’re racist. A lot of them here voted for Obama. Democrats see us as uneducated, simple thinkers who’ve got guns. It’s a huge boon for the Republican Party.”