Rural US Voters’ Views on Health Policy and COVID-19 Before the 2020 Election

Rural US residents played a key role in the 2016 election. Despite media portrayals as an ideological monolith, 1 rural views on issues-including health policy-are nuanced. Ahead of the upcoming elections, it is important to examine rural US residents' opinions on major health issues and how their strong and divergent political values influence their view of the government's role in addressing these challenges. We reviewed multiple public opinion surveys conducted from 2018 to 2020 by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in partnership with Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and NPR, 2 the Commonwealth Fund and the New York Times, 3 and POLITICO 4 on rural US residents by partisan affiliation (ie, Democrat, independent, or Republican) and found that despite numerous serious problems shared across party lines, rural US residents' views on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) response, health reform, and the role of government are largely shaped by their political values. Even in the midst of a major public health crisis such as COVID-19, rural US residents are deeply divided in their views of how policy makers should respond. Much like their nonrural counterparts, rural Republicans largely favor opening the economy during the COVID-19 outbreak and having less government involvement in health care. Rural Democrats largely favor keeping nonessential businesses closed until COVID-19 spread is contained, and they support greater government involvement in health care. In comparison, rural independent voters are largely split on both issues.