Institutions are largely urban. The federal government is in Washington, D.C.. The financial center is in New York. New York is also the publishing capital and home to cable and broadcast news. Hollywood is in California. Our Ivy League schools are in a handful of Northeastern states. Our most influential cultural institutions — museums, performance companies and spaces, music studios — are in big cities. The same can be said for our most influential newspapers.

Furthermore, there are two complementary and compounding internal migratory patterns that exacerbate the divide: At the same time that young people are moving out of rural areas and into urban ones, a 2009 United States Department of Agriculture report pointed out that “members of the baby boom cohort, now 45-63 years old, are approaching a period in their lives when moves to rural and small-town destinations increase.”

This makes the places these people are leaving and the places they’re going both more homogeneous. Young people tend to be more liberal as well as more educated. Baby boomers are more conservative. In fact, a 2015 Gallup report found that “older generations have twice as many conservatives as liberals.”

Add to this brain drain the diversity factor in cities. As the International Business Times pointed out in 2011:

“Non-Hispanic whites are now minority in 22 of the country’s 100-biggest urban areas, including those surrounding Washington, New York, San Diego, Las Vegas and Memphis. The reversal is being fueled by a growth in Hispanic and Asian populations — they grew by 41 and 43 percent, respectively — and the fact that white populations have grown by less than one percent.”

Furthermore, urban areas, rather than rural ones, are magnets for new immigrants from other countries and, as a 2014 Pew Research report found, this immigrant population is exploding, providing fertile ground for appeals to rural whites experiencing or worried about economic distress and looking for easy scapegoats for their anxieties:

“In 1990, the U.S. had 19.8 million immigrants. That number rose to a record 40.7 million immigrants in 2012, among them 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants.”

So, rural whites are suspicious of big institutions and big government, located in big cities with big populations of people who don’t look like them.

People in big cities, living cosmopolitan lives among diverse populations that resemble a tub of rainbow-colored ice cream, may be weary of institutions for other reasons, but they are less likely to blame diversity and inclusion for their problems, and are therefore less amenable to the destructive message of Donald Trump.