In the Midwest, the political importance of the Trump-voting counties cannot be overestimated. He won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan by a combined total of 77,744 votes out of more than 13 million votes cast in those states.

While Trump has claimed, and will continue to claim, credit for the improvement, Muro argued in an email that “the uptick in 2017-2018 seems mostly to reflect industry effects, rather than policy,” adding “the tax package may have had some temporary effect.”

In an earlier Brookings report — “In 2017, Rural Places Won a Little More, But Will It last?” — published in March of last year, Muro and Jacob Whiton, a senior research assistant, found that in the nation’s rural areas the economy performed well in 2017.

These communities, they pointed out,

home to 12.4 percent of U.S. jobs — actually had a pretty good year in 2017. Rural areas in fact outperformed their share of the economy to generate some 16.6 percent of the nation’s job growth.

“In short,” Muro and Whiton wrote,

at least one core portion of Trump’s America finally won a little during his first year in office.

The authors warned that it would be very difficult to sustain rural growth:

Many of the industries that added jobs in rural communities in 2017 — such as logging, mining, oil and gas, and construction — remain cyclical given economic and commodity trends larger than any Trump-era deregulation drive or tax cut.

In addition, Muro and Whiton argued,

the types of physical or rote jobs prevalent in rural America remain disproportionately vulnerable to automation and globalization in a digital era that seems to favor the biggest, densest cities with their high education levels and powerful “agglomeration’ economies.”

Rural areas have held their own during the first 26 months of the Trump administration.

Alex Brill, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tracked state-by-state employment patterns in a paper, “What Is Behind That Record-Breaking State Unemployment Rate Data?” He found that 10 states — many of them with large rural populations — broke records in 2019 by hitting their lowest unemployment rates in history: Alabama, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont and Wisconsin. Nine out of ten of these states voted for Trump.

Brill found that an additional 11 states came within a quarter percentage point of record-breaking lows. If you take these 21 states together, 14 of them voted for Trump.

In all of these states — and in virtually every state Trump carried — white men who had not graduated from college (polling shorthand for the white working class) were a crucial constituency driving Trump’s victories.