With roots in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania, years as first lady of Arkansas and a 2000 Senate campaign that featured a "listening tour" of small-town New York, it's not surprising that Hillary Clinton's campaign website has a full page devoted to helping the rural poor, including a jobs and economic development plan.

The son of a wealthy real-estate developer, Donald Trump grew up in New York City, and built his fortune in Manhattan, a world away from hard-luck towns upstate, like Auburn and Jamestown. His website doesn't say much about tackling exurban joblessness and despair; a white paper produced on his record focus mostly on trade issues, tax cuts and ethanol.

Drive an hour or two outside of any major U.S. city, however – Washington, D.C., for example – and campaign signs for Trump dominate the countryside: nestled in soybean fields and thick woods; beside two-lane highways and shotgun houses.

Support for Clinton is hard to find, if it exists at all.

"I guess I want to say it's not terribly surprising," says Lisa Pruitt, a faculty member at the Center for Poverty Research at the University California-Davis. "I would say it's not terribly unusual"

That's because, despite a strong grasp on rural poverty issues and more than a decade in the Ozarks, Clinton is an intellectual Democratic politician – anathema to God-fearing, gun-loving people in places like the Central Plains or down-east Maine. Voters in the American hinterlands don't much like where her party stands on hot-button issues like same-sex marriage, civil rights and abortion, and believe she's among the political elites who constantly look down on them.

Trump, by contrast, is a brash Republican with a Noo Yawk tough-guy accent who loves fast food and hates political correctness. Though he lives in a gilded penthouse apartment and borrowed millions from his dad to start his career, Trump says he's rubbed elbows with construction workers, learned to operate a backhoe as a kid and built a business empire with his own hands.

That common-touch image, coupled with his two-fisted, America First message and bold if vague promise to restore long-gone manufacturing jobs to towns like South Boston, Va., has rural voters flocking to Trump's campaign like birds to a freshly-sown cornfield.

To understand why rural America believes their savior is a Manhattan real-estate mogul and not a Yale-trained policy expert who helped improve schools in a poor state like Arkansas, however, is to understand the American fault lines of class, authenticity and elitism, including how politicians see the rural poor – and how the rural poor see themselves.

At the same time electoral math and the red-blue political divide also means neither party is likely to seriously address the needs of the rural poor in the South and the heartlands – so-called "flyover country," where Democrats haven't been competitive since President Lyndon Johnson came to ramshackle Inez, Kentucky, in 1964, to launch his War on Poverty campaign.

J.D. Vance, author of the best-selling memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy," believes the reason Trump is big in small town America lies with attitudes of "political elites" like Clinton and President Barack Obama, her onetime rival and former boss. Though they have great policies and are well-intentioned, Vance said, they don't seem to respect or empathize with rural poor people.

Vance pointed to Obama's 2008 campaign statement – hard-pressed, small-town voters with little opportunity "get bitter, cling to guns and religion and antipathy towards people who aren't like them," the then-presidential candidate said, behind closed doors – as Exhibit A.

"It reveals an attitude that turns a lot of people away from the Democratic Party and turns them towards someone like Donald Trump" who says he understands them, Vance, an investment banker whose breakout book traces his hardscrabble upbringing in rural Kentucky and Ohio, said in a CNN interview . Despite policies that can help them, he said, "there's this sense that President Obama and, frankly, some folks in the Republican Party, too – they look down on people like me."

By contrast, Trump, photographed eating a bucket of fried chicken on his private jet, seems more authentic, and has a message that resonates, Vance said. Just mentioning he's talked with hard hats at construction sites, he said, goes a long way towards breaking the ice among people who consider themselves hard-working, salt-of-the-earth Americans.

"Nobody else is really talking to construction workers any more" about their lives and needs, Vance said."So it's not surprising that they support him."

Pruitt concurs: "I think the same basically holds true for why they don't like Hillary," she says.

Trump "has this straight-talking way that does speak their language. And they look at an Obama who is very neutral – he has no accent. All this [speaks of] privilege," Pruitt says.

Although Clinton spent more than a decade in Arkansas and worked on children's education issues, a neutral politician "is who she has become," says Pruitt. "And I think it's very very hard for rural voters to relate to that."

When she was running against Obama, the first major-party African-American presidential candidate in 2008, Clinton said she was the candidate of "hard-working Americans, white Americans" and boasted that "whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me." But that constituency isn't there for her this time around, perhaps because of her affiliation with Obama and the federal government they loathe.

Consider: A recent CNN poll of white working-class voters found an overwhelming majority of them believe the government doesn't represent them (93 percent) and think that Washington is the reason for their problems (73 percent). Meanwhile, roughly half believe America's best days are in the past, that multiculturalism is a threat to their way of life and that government is doing too much to help racial and ethnic minorities.

Despite her time in Little Rock, Clinton hasn't tried to reach those voters, perhaps because she knows she'd come off as a city slicker, says Beth Mattingly, director of research on vulnerable families at the University of New Hampshire. Poor rural communities are insular, she says, have pride in their ability to get through hard times and don't trust outsiders, even helpful ones.

"A lot of people are struggling to varying degrees," she says. "Some of the work we've done in rural Maine –'Life is hard up here, the weather is hard, the work is hard the economy is hard.' But there's a sense that, 'We're all in this together.'"

Seth McKee, a Texas Tech political scientist, says that insularity and sense of pride makes it hard for a Democrat like Clinton to break through – particularly since her image, and her party affiliation, is a turn-off poor whites.

"You talk to some poor rural white voter – 'You should be voting Democratic because Hillary has a plan that would be better for you,'" McKee says. "The first response would be, 'Oh, yeah? I can't stand her or what the Democrats stand for.'"

"They look at this group and say, 'I'm not like them, that's not my tribe. I'm not African-American, I'm not Hispanic,'" he continues. "On [economic] and race issues, they see themselves more as Republican. Inserting any policy discussion into that argument doesn't work."

Add in presidential electoral-college math – red states in this column, blue ones in that column, first candidate to 270 wins – and it's probable that neither candidate will focus on rural poverty in this election cycle.

"If you think about strategy and winning the presidency, so many [poor people] are located in states that candidates don't care about," says McKee. "A lot of them are in really red states" that Republicans take for granted and Democrats know they won't win.

"They're sort of captured voters," McKee says. "They're ignored. They vote one party heavily, and they've got nowhere else to go. It's a bad place to be."

Yet Vance says if both parties want to compete for votes among the rural poor – a move that echoes former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's "50-state strategy" – Job One is something Clinton has already done in New York towns like Oneonta, Utica and Schenectady: Talk to them, and listen when they answer.