There is a widening gap between urban and rural realities.
I think I've discussed this before, but I live in a small rural town out of state but still work remote for a company in Austin. I go back to Austin to work in the office about 1 week out of every 8-12. My company has remodeled its office space to look like a college campus. Its like the West Mall. 75% of our employees are recent college graduates with excellent engineering academic pedigree in their first or second gig since hitting the work force.
Go to our company's cafeteria in ATX at any time of day, there will be a handful of 26 year olds and under clustered into different groups. They are tech nerds, sipping their lattes. Playing table top games. Talking about the badass band they just saw, or whats going on downtown this weekend. So forth. They are making close to six figures if not over and have their whole career ahead of them.
Go to the local coffee shop here in Bumfuck, CO population 800 and its a bunch of people over 40 except for tourists passing through. They are talking about who got thrown in jail, their divorce, who got busted for meth, the business that just shuttered, how they lost their job. So forth. They are scraping by and are further behind the curve than they were 15 years ago when they were the same age as the previously described group.
The locals that know me know I'm a tech guy working remote, and they can tell I make a decent living. They ask me how they can do what I do, and I have no idea what to tell them. They are so far removed from that population where life is good -- educated, intellectually curious, possessive of in-demand skills and living in a boomtown. I tell them they need to start learning how to sling code, save up an emergency fund, move to a tech hub, be willing to start out in tech support and be prepared to work their asses off. But I don't have a lot of confidence any of these people will be able to pull it off. They are about at their capacity for technical skill already -- turning on a computer, playing with social media and jerking off to pron.
Nixon's southern strategy employed by Trump works with that group of rural have-nots because their lives really are shitty and they did not enjoy any of the prosperity that people like I enjoyed riding the tech wave in a place like ATX during the Obama years. I don't know how you fix that exactly, but I don't think its by labeling everyone living in Vidor, TX that voted for a charlatan superficially empathetic to their plight a racist.