FOR Americans who love road trips but despise Democrats, the Obama years have been a golden age. Rural America does not like this president—an antipathy that only deepened between his election in 2008 and his re-election four years later, when he picked up just 37% of rural voters. Add that trend to a decades-long swing of southern states away from the Democratic Party, and the size of conservative America, measured in square miles of majority-Republican territory, has grown and grown. In 2012 the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, won fully 77.9% of the counties of America (though, sadly for him, those counties are home to just 42.7% of the population). With a bit of planning, you can drive across the lower 48 states from east-to-west or top-to-bottom without entering a single county won by Barack Obama in a presidential contest—though you’d need a stomach for barbecued meat, country music and conservative talk-radio.

Small wonder that so many Democratic campaigns focus on cities and college towns, hoping to offset rural losses by running up huge margins of victory among such groups as urban youngsters, non-whites and highly educated liberals. In contrast Republicans need little prodding to don jeans, brag about their love of hunting and denounce gun controls or environmental rules as an imposition by bossy, out-of-touch Washington elitists. Each election sees campaign outfits pop up with names like “Farmers and Ranchers for Romney Coalition”.

But a paper published in the latest issue of Political Geography, an academic journal, suggests that both parties may need to refine their thinking. The paper, by scholars at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), finds that rural America is far from monolithic in its politics. The country boasts roughly 2,000 rural counties. They cover three-quarters of its land area and are home to about 50m of its people, just under one-sixth of the population. Most have mixed economies, containing everything from farms to slaughterhouses or prisons (guarding ne’er-do-wells is a big rural industry). One in five is classified as a “farm county” by the government, meaning that its economy is dominated by agriculture. At the other end of a socio-economic spectrum lie the 289 rural counties deemed “recreational”, meaning that their prosperity rests on enjoyment of the Great Outdoors and other forms of leisure. These counties range from Rocky Mountain ski valleys to New England hamlets teeming with baby-boomers, most planning retirements full of hiking, cycling or organic bee-keeping.

The new paper, “Red rural, blue rural? Presidential voting patterns in a changing rural America”, focuses on farm and recreational counties. Counties dominated by the “old” rural economy of farming are sternly conservative, handing Mr Obama just over a third of their votes in 2012. Digging into a nationwide survey that included 9,000 rural voters, the Co-operative Congressional Election Study, the UNH academics found farm-county residents strongly opposed to gay marriage and legal abortion, and more sceptical than the average American about the menace posed by climate change. By contrast, the mountain-biking, canoe-paddling, golf-playing residents of recreational counties handed almost half their votes to Mr Obama in 2012 and take a liberal line on all manner of social issues (not least because they are significantly less likely than other country-dwellers to call religion “very important” in their lives).

Many farm counties have seen their populations stagnate or shrink for decades, and struggle to hold on to their youngsters once they reach adulthood. In contrast, far-flung counties offering pretty landscapes or such attractions as golf courses, ski slopes or even rural casinos have seen big inflows by what demographers call “amenity migrants”, though arrivals slowed during the recent recession. Such newcomers tend to be richer and better-educated than typical rural residents. The migrants bring different ideas with them and, although many of them are retired, they also create jobs for younger people. As Kenneth Johnson, an author of the paper, notes: “Somebody has to staff the hospitals and build the houses.” Some recreational counties have seen growth rates that rival those of successful cities.

Different strokes for different folks

In a few cases, migration flows have been large enough to help create new presidential swing states, argues another of the authors, Dante Scala. A case in point is New Hampshire, which wields outsize clout as an early-voting state in the Democratic and Republican contests to choose a presidential nominee. The lovely, thickly forested north of the state is the ancestral home of the Yankee Republicans—a flinty, taciturn bunch with little time for either government meddling or fire-and-brimstone social conservatives. But lots of those moderates have moved either to Florida or to meet their Maker, says Mr Scala, a political scientist. In New Hampshire’s four recreational counties, their places have often been taken by folk from such states as New York and New Jersey, who have brought their Democratic-leaning politics along with their walking books. In 2012 Mr Obama averaged more than half of the vote in those recreational counties, helping him to victory in New Hampshire. The president did equally well in the ski towns and hiking centres of Colorado, another battleground state.

Change will take a while. To borrow an elegant cultural measure invented by Justin Farrell, a Yale University sociologist, in lots of rural states drivers with gun racks still outnumber those with bicycle racks. In such electoral battlegrounds as Virginia and North Carolina, the Democrats’ rural bastions remain counties with lots of black residents. But some 70m baby-boomers are due to retire in the next two decades. If only some of them yearn to picnic in pine forests or swim in glacial lakes, local power-brokers such as farmers, ranchers or miners will find their clout challenged. Back-country road trips may never be the same.