IS RURAL America still politically relevant? The question is sincere, and not mere journalistic impertinence. Since the 2012 presidential elections, a cottage industry of comment has sprung up, examining the growing ideological gulf between America's countryside and its urban centres. All sorts of nifty maps have been created to explain just how Mitt Romney managed to lose the election, despite winning a crushing majority of American counties (nearly 80% of them).

A clever 3D image (on the right) from Robert Vanderbei of Princeton University uses columns of differing heights to show the relative populations of each county. The map shows vast tracts of red flatland, solidly Republican rural territory, interrupted by tall blue spikes, the cities and urban areas that between them handed Mr Obama the popular vote as well as his win in the electoral college.

A fine National Journal analysis by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report (not online), argues that just as demographic trends are tilting the presidential playing field towards the Democrats, the power of geography explains the Republicans' continued lock on the House of Representatives. Gerrymandering of district boundaries is usually blamed at this point, and certainly the Republicans did use their current clout in many state legislatures to redraw the electoral map for 2012, shoring up lots of vulnerable House members by adding Republican neighbourhoods to their seats, and corralling Democrats and minority voters into Democratic enclaves. But the lure of life in the big city and hip urban or suburban neighbourhoods also did a lot of the work, Mr Wasserman notes: Mr Obama's winning coalition (ie, the young, college graduates, unmarried women, black and Hispanic voters, gays) tends to pack itself into safe seats unbidden.

Is this a trap for the Republicans? Mr Wasserman thinks it might be, writing:

By purging Democrats and minorities from their own districts and into Democratic quarantine zones, Republicans may have drawn themselves into a durable House majority. But they have also drawn themselves into an alternate universe of voters that little resembles the growing diversity of the country.

A short while ago the agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, tucked a related warning into a surprisingly tough speech to farm groups, suggesting, in terms, that rural America was losing its political relevance. Asking his audience to ponder why Congress had yet to pass a new farm bill of agricultural aid and subsidies, he pleaded with them to start picking the right fights. Too many farmers had wasted time and energy reacting to false scare stories about how the Obama administration was planning to regulate farm dust or ban farmers' children from helping out on the land, he suggested (I paraphrase). Time to focus on economic growth, Mr Vilsack said.

In short, it was time for your blogger to head to the countryside, to see how a (hopefully representative) rural community felt about its place in the American political system. Ideally, Lexington hoped to trace some of the long-term political and economic forces that have buffeted America's rural heartlands. As luck would have it, the excellent rural blog, the Daily Yonder, recently carried an essay alerting readers to the 50th anniversary of a remarkable sociological experiment, in which a journalist-turned-researcher, Joseph Lyford, wrote a book-length study of Vandalia, a city of some 5,000 people in the middle of the Illinois countryside. His book, "The Talk in Vandalia", was a huge deal, prompting a local stink, national headlines and a film on NBC network television (available on YouTube: check out the women's hats, the men's bowties, and the way that everyone is smoking).

After heading to Vandalia last week, for a long string of interviews, I devote this week's print column to the city, drawing comparisons with the Vandalia of Lyford's book.

Much has improved. Half a century ago, Vandalians worried seriously for their community's economic survival, while democracy and accountability took a back seat to paternalistic rule by "the big five", as a clique of rich business leaders was known. Most gravely (and if I had to guess, I would say that this explained much of the town's hostility to Lyford's book), his study exposed Vandalia as a "sundown" town, from which blacks were barred after dark. I write in my column:

A whiff of corporatism rises from Lyford’s pages. A clutch of businessmen essentially ran Vandalia via the Chamber of Commerce. Competition for jobs was not global, but with other American towns and cities. Repeatedly, city fathers, banks and locals wooed employers with free land, buildings and grants. A shoemaker threatening to leave was bribed with $12,000 for a new plant, from workers who docked themselves two hours’ pay a week. Yet bribed firms could and did fail, or leave. The most stable employer, a mechanical seals maker, arrived without subsidy. Paternalism left little room for partisan politics. Vandalians split equally between Republicans and Democrats. Local offices were mostly won by reputation, not party. A Democratic house painter running for county sheriff campaigned on a single issue: a vow to repaint the local jail. Vandalia was quiet—a two-man police patrol kept it safe at night. It was a bit suffocating, too. A bid to stage an amateur “Messiah” ran foul of church elders worrying that singers might damage a new carpet. A group of schoolteachers were reported for “laughing noisily” in a restaurant. Bleak notes intrude. A Presbyterian minister is quoted asking his flock why fewer than ten blacks live in Fayette County, of which Vandalia is the seat. “You know the answer,” he told them: an unwritten law that at sundown blacks had “best be on their way” out of town, or face the consequences. Lyford found family farmers, squeezed between rising land values and falling crop prices, frightened for their futures. Youngsters who made it to college seldom returned. The town’s survival seemed in doubt.

Today, Vandalia is far more democratic and transparent. Mary Truitt, a local historian and retired teacher who well remembers the fuss triggered by Lyford's book, explained to me how open debate led by an energetic mayor, Rick Gottman, had replaced cosy deals by businessmen behind closed doors. Ms Truitt did not shy away from her hometown's troubled past. She had re-read Lyford's book as preparation for our interview, she told me, and "it isn't quite as bad, 50 years later". As a young girl, she used to hear a siren blowing at half past five each afternoon, she volunteered. "I thought it was to tell the stores downtown it was time to close." She knows now that the siren began as a warning to local African-Americans to leave the city limits, or face the consequences.

The county sheriff, Aaron Lay, assured me that race relations had evolved during his 50 years in Vandalia. He had just hired a black officer, purely on merit, he told me (though it is true that the county remains overwhelmingly white, unless you count inmates at the state prison on the edge of town).

More broadly, everyone from the hospital CEO to the local newspaper publisher, the mayor, the high school principal and a trio of his students, described a city in which big issues of the day are debated openly and community solutions sought.

Yet a more overtly political system of government has brought about a partisan realignment that has left the city out of kilter with the state that surrounds it.

Vandalia and Fayette County now routinely send Republicans to the Illinois state legislature as well as to Washington, by margins of two-thirds or more. In common with lots of rural communities, there was a sharp drop-off in Barack Obama's vote in Fayette County between 2008 and 2012, with the Democratic incumbent losing 28% of his support. Most of those disheartened Obama voters stayed at home: Mitt Romney's haul of votes in Fayette County was only 8% larger than John McCain's, four years earlier.

Vandalia's Republican representatives are no centrists, either. Its congressman, John Shimkus, made headlines in 2009 when he quoted the Bible at a congressional hearing as evidence that Americans need not fear rising sea-levels as a result of climate change. Reading from Genesis as well as the New Testament, Mr Shimkus suggested that God had promised Noah that mankind would not perish by floods, and asserted that only God, not humankind, had the power to bring about the end of the world.

In May the local state senator, Kyle McCarter, triggered a fuss in Illinois—a firmly Democratic state, thanks to Chicago and its surrounding suburbs—by blocking legislation on school bullying, on the grounds that it was being used to push a "pro-homosexual agenda". Mr McCarter's concern, reportedly, was that Christian students might be forced to attend sessions urging them to accept gay rights, even if that ran counter to their religious beliefs.

Locals talk of how their values and priorities place them out of line with Illinois, and differ dramatically from Mr Obama's vision for America. Almost everyone that I talked to grumbled that private employers were hard to attract to their city because of the dysfunctional politics and economics of their home state. Longing comparisons were drawn with the conservative neighbouring states of Indiana and Missouri, which have worked to woo incoming businesses with lower taxes and business-friendly regulations (including curbs on union activity).

To be harsh, a touch of muddle does intrude on Vandalian conservatism here. Locals grumble about high taxes and big government. And yet the city's biggest political movement in recent years has been a campaign to keep open their state correctional facility, which is the largest local employer. The second largest employer is the state-funded county hospital. And if local farmers are thriving, the head of the county farm bureau conceded that several would have been ruined by the harsh drought of 2012, were it not for federally-backed crop insurance. The city has received federal cash to renovate its handsome main street (for which Mr Shimkus is thanked), and public money to renovate its main tourist attraction, a 19th-century statehouse in which the young Abraham Lincoln served, during Vandalia's brief stint as capital of Illinois.

The problem is a sense of powerlessness and accountability. Locals do not like being dependent on government money and public works.

In an interview with Mr McCarter, the state senator noted that the most common question from voters, when he first sought office, was "are you going to fight for the prison?" It is "unfortunate" that to survive, Vandalia has to fight for a prison to be its economic driver, he suggested, not least because it left the town at the mercy of successive governors of Illinois, and political favouritism.

Strikingly, the mayor and a 17-year-old high-school student, Rachel Hedrick, offered near-identical answers when asked what Vandalia needed most. "We need more people to take risks, to open businesses and give young people something to do. [But people] are afraid of failing," said Miss Hedrick.

The rural dilemma has changed, I conclude in my column. Vandalia is not about to vanish, thanks to crop insurance and other state safety nets. It does risk becoming a quaint dormitory: some locals already commute to jobs an hour or more away. But that is not what Vandalia wants. It wishes to remain a living, risk-taking community, with a voice in big political fights of the day. Yet in its fierce conservatism and piety (the city boasts 18 churches, or one for every 300 permanent residents), Vandalia feels the rest of America drifting away. Fifty years on the fight is not for survival, but for relevance.