PEORIA, Ill. – Brad McMillan, executive director for the Institute of Principled Leadership at Bradley University.was recently asked if electric vehicle policies could be the reason rural areas saw a shift to the right in the last election. 

Much of the country shifted right in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and rural America was no exception. Since 1980, no candidate has done better than President-elect Donald J. Trump, who won 64 percent of voters in rural areas last November, according to exit polls. The previous best, 61 percent, was set by Trump in 2016.

The data reflects an approximately 4 percent rightward shift in votes compared to the 2020 presidential election. Contrastingly, candidate Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, trailed President Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers in many rural counties across the nation, especially in swing states.

One factor in the rural vote could have been Biden’s vehicle emissions mandate through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – seemingly adopted and continued by Harris – that forces all U.S. passenger automobiles be made electric by the year 2032. Was Harris’ refusal to eschew the mandate a deal breaker for farmers who produce crops for renewable fuels, or were other policy issues more at the root of the rightward shift? 

“It’s a good question,” McMillian said. “I don’t really know how hard the campaigns focused on that particular issue, especially in the swing states,” said McMillan, a political pundit who served as District Chief of Staff for retired Illinois Congressman Ray LaHood for 10 years. “I do think that you’re going to see in the new Trump administration a very different approach to national energy policy than was under the Biden administration.”

Illinois Corn Growers Association Executive Director Rod Weinzierl said Trump’s energy policy, which includes an “immediate” repeal of Biden’s all-electric vehicle mandate – and Harris’ refusal to distance herself from the mandate – could have played a role in rural voters’ decisions in key battleground states including Michigan and Wisconsin.

“This is due to the auto manufacturing that occurs in these states,” Weinzierl said. “I think this (policy) affects the rural electorate significantly more than the urban electorate because it pushes a product that does not work in rural areas.”

In June 2024, the National Corn Growers Association, American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) and six auto dealers representing 16 brands joined the American Petroleum Institute in filing a lawsuit in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the EPA’s light-duty and medium-duty vehicle emissions standards for model years 2027-2032.

“Farmers answered the call to help America be more sustainable by growing the crops necessary for renewable fuels. Now, the rug is being pulled out from underneath them with unrealistic emissions goals that put years of investment at risk,” AFBF President Zippy Duvall said in a 2024 news release. “Impractical standards for light-duty and medium-duty trucks will drive up the cost of farm vehicles and force farmers to rely on a charging network that does not yet exist in rural areas.”

Another key issue for farmers was the Biden-Harris administration’s record on regulatory issues affecting agriculture. An analysis of the regulatory cost burdens on the economy of the first four years of the last three presidential administrations finds the costs of the Biden-Harris administration were 600 times the Trump administration’s and 3.7 times those of the Obama administration, according to the Institute for Energy Research.

The Biden-Harris administration had imposed an estimated $1.7 trillion in new regulatory costs since entering office, according to a 2024 report from Republican staff on the House Oversight Committee. Trump has promised to review Biden’s regulatory programs and suspend, alter, or abandon those he considers onerous and/or too expensive.

Many rural and urban voters cast their ballots for Trump simply because of his “anti-establishment” approach to government, McMillan noted. “The voting results show that many Americans were part of an anti-establishment coalition. (Trump) didn’t have former President Bush or anyone like at the Republican convention – you had people like Hulk Hogan and others, which was very different,” he said.

“What I mean by that is people that are dissatisfied with what they see in Washington, D.C., saw Trump as the outside candidate that was not ‘establishment.’ The bottom line is that we are still a deeply divided country when you look at how close the popular vote was and the margins in the seven swing states,” McMillan added.

As with most elections the economy was a top concern for voters, with 52 percent indicating they considered it to be the election’s most important issue, according to an October 2024 Gallup poll.