As David Shor has argued, the Democrats’ urban-rural polarization problem has likely been compounded by the nationalization of media and politics. In an era when the median voter got her news primarily from local newspapers and network television stations, it was easier for individual Democratic candidates to win votes in culturally conservative areas on the strength of their personal brands. Now that voters increasingly get their news from national cable news stations, and ideologically-oriented websites, they’re more inclined to vote their cultural values up and down the ballot.

In this context, Democrats can only make dramatic gains in rural America by reducing the salience of the urban-rural culture war. One approach to that task would be to increase the political relevance of issues that link the material interests of rural areas to the policy commitments of the center-left. Another approach would be to moderate on cultural issues in a highly visible way.

Neither of these paths look especially promising. As I’ve previously noted, cultural commitments have become so central to Americans’ politics, high-income Democratic areas routinely vote for redistributive fiscal policies in ballot referenda, while low-income Republican ones vote against them. Triangulating on social issues in an attention-grabbing way, meanwhile, would likely entail betraying marginalized groups with morally compelling demands, and strong levels of sympathy among Democratic voters in general and party professionals in particular. To be sure, socially marginal populations have a strong interest in electoral expediency; acquiescing to perpetual GOP domination of the Senate means acquiescing to perpetual conservative domination of the Supreme Court, a state of affairs that will undermine a wide range of minority interests. But the failure of past (and present) compromises with social conservatism to reliably produce large electoral payoffs makes the case for triangulation difficult to make within the Democratic coalition.