Trump supporters are not 'the rest of the country.' They are the guardians and providers for the country.

By Gary Abernathy

Democrats’ power is compacted. The GOP’s is widespread. It matters.

The 2024 county-by-county election map, above. Counties carried by Donald Trump are in red. Counties carried by Kamala Harris are in blue.

Democrats tend to complain about electoral maps like the one above showing county-by-county results. They say such maps unfairly represent the vote and make it appear that Republican candidates such as Donald Trump are supported by more of the country than they really are. In fact, the much wider geographic distribution of Republican voters compared to Democrats matters more than people often admit.

The 2024 presidential election was fairly close when it comes to the total national popular vote, with Donald Trump winning 49.8% of the vote to Kamala Harris’ 48.3% — 77,302,580 votes for Trump versus 75,017,613 votes for Harris. But in presidential elections, the combined popular vote is entirely irrelevant.

All that really matters in our electoral college system are state-by-state outcomes. We are the United States of America, a collection of 50 unique states (or commonwealths in some cases) under one federal umbrella. By that measure, Trump won comfortably, carrying 31 states to only 19 states for Harris. As we all know, Trump won all seven so-called “swing states.”

The far-left (formerly mainstream) media, which has morphed into the Trump Derangement Syndrome Party, frequently reports on Trump’s “low” approval ratings. For Americans who support Trump, polls showing him with approval ratings in the low to mid-40s are difficult to believe, since almost everyone they know in the region in which they live is a Trump supporter to one degree or another.

In fact, it might surprise Trump haters who only watch MSNBC or CNN to know that the president has positive approval ratings in about half the states. And in at least four or five additional states where his approval is slightly in the negative, it’s still within the margin of error — meaning that as many as 29 or 30 states likely approve of Trump’s job as president during any given poll taken over any random stretch of time.

Trump’s national approval rating is artificially weighted down primarily by a handful of our most liberal states — California, Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii and Vermont.

But it’s important to remember that job approval ratings are not synonymous with election results. When you put Trump up against a named candidate, many people obviously have voted for him because they think he’s better than the opponent, even if they give him a negative job approval rating when they’re not comparing him to someone else.

While a huge swath of the U.S. population residing in the majority of our land mass voted for and continues to support Trump, the isolated media and power centers — particularly New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles — distort the reality of Trump’s standing with voters.

The media bias is not just on the news side, which at least features a small degree of counterbalance from Fox News and a handful of other conservative outlets. The bias also comes from the far-left entertainment media, which leads the charge against Trump and his supporters through Trump-hating movies, TV shows and other programming, not to mention the unsolicited political speeches we’re assaulted with on late-night talk shows and awards shows like the Oscars and Emmys.

The left still doesn’t get MAGA

It’s still amusing to read “analysis” of MAGA Americans by those on the left, who write and comment on Trump supporters — who, again, represent half the country and dominate the country’s land mass — as though they were aliens from another planet.

For instance, Alan Sepinwall, a TV critic writing for the New York Times, produced a piece this week headlined, “This HBO Mini-Series Gets Rural America Right.”

He writes, “Ever since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, television executives and creators have been faced with the notion that maybe they don’t understand the rest of the country after all — and left them grappling with how to better tell the stories of rural and red state Americans.”

“The rest of the country?” If they were grounded in reality, the entertainment world would think of themselves, not others, as “the rest of the country.” The fact is, Trump supporters — whether their support is fervent and unwavering or more general and cautious — comprise the backbone of the country. The Trump haters and resisters are “the rest of the country.”

It’s a common approach by far-left media. Ever since Trump’s first election in 2016, “mainstream media” and other far-left organizations that assume the country thinks like them have attempted to dissect those odd (to them) little parts of America that voted for someone like Donald Trump. “What did we miss?” “Who are these people?” “Where did they come from?” “What do they want?” “When will they go away?”

As with most on the left who deign to put Trump supporters under a microscope, Mr. Sepinwall concludes that Trump voters “think that the economy and the country have been passing them by.” When considered by the left, Trump voters are always painted as “disaffected” or “angry” — and that’s when analysts are kind enough not to call them “racists” and “Nazis.”

In fact, most Trump voters are happy, well-adjusted people who only want to preserve the things that made America great in the first place and keep the world a sane place for their families — especially their children and grandchildren — without the society around them falling prey to the worst tradition-trampling, heretical, convention-defying delusions of the radical left.

To be fair, Mr. Sepinwall’s article has its interesting and informative points, and is not as condescending as some of the stories that have appeared in far-left publications. But it predictably treats “red America” as “the other” rather than “the normal.”

It would be more accurate for such an analysis to begin, “Ever since the rise of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, most Americans have been faced with the notion that maybe they don’t understand the rest of the country after all.”

Grassroots Republicans lead the nation

It makes a difference that Republican voters are more evenly distributed across more regions of the country than Democrats. The GOP presence across wider geographic areas means their economic and social views are likely more diverse and represented at more levels of local and regional government than voters who are clustered in more tightly confined areas with fewer regional influences and economic opportunities.

Rural Republican areas are often accused of lacking diversity. Cities might be made up of more racially and ethnically diverse people, but their political views are restricted by their geographically limited daily lives. People living in open, rural sections of the country — where conducting routine business, shopping and attending events might require traveling for miles each day through multiple communities — are by nature faced with a greater variety of issues and challenges. They experience a more varied life experience than is stereotypically portrayed.

Take another look at the map above. To be sure, Republicans and Democrats alike own and care for property across the U.S. (although state and federal government owns nearly 40% of U.S. land).

But it’s interesting to note that “privately owned land in the U.S. is more likely to be owned by people who identify or lean Republican,” according to an AI analysis of data from Pew Research Center, Farm Policy News+1 and newgeography.com+1. That goes for homes, farms, ranches and timber companies since “these ownership classes and rural owners tend to be politically more Republican on average.”

Backing that up is a recent study showing that Baby Boomers own 41% of all private property (and nearly 52% of the nation’s total wealth) in the U.S. (Gen X is second in property ownership with 29.5%.) Boomers align with the GOP over Democrats by a roughly 52%-45% margin, according to Pew.

The above map shows vast stretches of land where Trump supporters outnumber his haters. To one degree or the other, much of the land is likely owned by Republicans. Property owners are responsible for the well-being of their land, and typically feel a responsibility for neighboring land and people for miles around. They have a stake in the outcome and bear the risks and rewards of their decisions.

Landowners, whether of homes, farms, ranches or other expanses of acreage, pay property taxes that fund schools, infrastructure and local services. Farmers and ranchers, big and small, feed the nation and much of the world. They often open their land for hunting, fishing or agritourism. They employ local community members to work on their farms or for their other agribusinesses. They are environmentalists, rotating crops to protect the soil and engaging in other land management practices that improve water quality or reforest the land.

Yes, there are millions of Democrats in the U.S. who are hardworking jobholders, taxpayers and landowners. But the point is this: If anyone should be thought of as “the rest of the country,” it’s sure not Republicans.

Data shows that Republicans — the vast majority of whom (about 90 percent) support Trump and his agenda — take a backseat to no one in providing for the maintenance, sustenance and nurturing of our nation, and have every right to lead the way in determining the cultural, political and economic direction of our nation. Republicans should feel no compunction about expressing and fighting for their traditional patriotism, often deep-rooted faith and overall worldview.

Republicans are the leaders in keeping America great — or making it great again, to coin a phrase. President Joe Biden took every opportunity to disparage MAGA Republicans, as others do to this day. But MAGA Republicans are nothing new; only the name has been recently invented. They have long been the GOP base, waiting for someone like Trump to come along.

Through their control of the leading news and entertainment platforms, the left paints a picture that minimizes Trump supporters, ridicules their beliefs and undervalues their contributions to society.

But the map at the top is not only a reflection of how votes are cast. It’s also an accurate representation of Republicans’ widespread presence and their cultural, social and economic contributions — contributions that help bolster and preserve “the rest of the country.”