ROCKY FORD, COLORADO - From where Peggy Sheahan stands, deep in rural Colorado, the last eight years were abysmal.
Otero County, where Sheahan lives, is steadily losing population. Middle-class jobs vanished years ago as pickling and packing plants closed. She's had to cut back on her business repairing broken windshields to help nurse her husband after a series of farm accidents, culminating in his breaking his neck falling from a bale of hay. She collects newspaper clippings on stabbings and killings in the area – one woman's body was found in a field near Sheahan's farm – as heroin use rises.
“We are so worse off, it's unbelievable,” said Sheahan, 65, a staunch conservative who plans to vote for Donald Trump.
In Denver, 175 miles to the northwest, things are going better for Andrea Pacheco. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the 36-year-old could finally marry her partner, Jen Winters, in June. After months navigating Denver's hot housing market, they snapped up a bungalow at the edge of town. Pacheco supports Hillary Clinton to build on President Barack Obama's legacy.
“There's a lot of positive things that happened – obviously the upswing in the economy,” said Pacheco, a 36-year-old fundraiser for nonprofits. “We were in a pretty rough place when he started out and I don't know anyone who isn't better off eight years later.”
But then, she doesn't know Peggy Sheahan, and that makes sense: There are few divides in the United States greater than that between rural and urban places. Town and country represent not just the poles of the nation's two political parties, but different economic realities that are transforming the 2016 presidential election.
Cities are trending Democratic and are on an upward economic shift, with growing populations and rising property values. Rural areas are increasingly Republican, steadily shedding population for decades, and as commodity and energy prices drop, increasingly suffering economically.
The political divide goes even deeper than simply between the two parties. In the GOP primary, rural areas voted reliably for Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose angrier style of politics many analysts argued were too harsh and off-putting to play well with a broader electorate. Urban and suburban Republicans were more likely to support candidates widely seen as more electable, like Florida Senator Marco Rubio or Ohio Governor John Kasich.
“The urban-rural split this year is larger than anything we've ever seen,” said Scott Reed, a political strategist for the who has advised previous GOP campaigns.
While plenty of cities still struggle with endemic poverty and joblessness, a report from the Washington-based found that half of new business growth in the past four years has been concentrated in 20 populous counties.
“More and more economic activity is happening in cities as we move to higher-value services playing a bigger role in the economy,” said Ross Devol, chief researcher at the , an independent economic think tank. “As economies advance, economic activity just tends to concentrate in fewer and fewer places.”
That concentration has brought a whole host of new urban problems: rising inequality, traffic and worries that the basics of city life are increasingly out of the reach of the middle class. Those fears inform Democrats' emphasis on income inequality, wages and pay equity in contrast to the general anxiety about economic collapse that comes from Republicans who represent an increasingly desperate rural America.
Meanwhile, rural areas have been especially slow to recover from the Great Recession that began in 2008: The most recent study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that, as of 2014, rural areas still had not regained all the jobs lost in the recession while metropolitan areas had. Three-quarters of what EIG classifies as the nation's economically distressed ZIP codes are in rural areas. An Associated Press analysis of EIG data found that the economies of central cities suffer slightly less now than in 2000, while those of areas that house the majority of the nation's rural population have grown worse.
“A lot of these communities are wondering what are we going to do and to some extent Donald Trump is talking to that,” said the Milken Institute's Devol. “They're not part of the modern global economy. They feel like they've been left behind through no fault of their own.”
These two different economic worlds are writ large in Colorado. It is among the states with the greatest economic gap between urban and rural areas, according to an Associated Press review of EIG data (Virginia, South Carolina and Florida are the others).