The mistake is not in painting rural politics as racist, it’s in inferring that suburban and urban politics are not. This goes all the way back to the founding. Northern and urban whites need the redneck Klansman (and his slaver great-granddad) to feel better about their own stake in maintaining a permanent racial underclass.

From the “Great Migration”, Northern and Western States created a patchwork of policy that officially and informally enforced racial segregation that the Confederate States could only envy. That segregation persists to this day. Notice how integration in blue States required “forced bussing” implying the literal distance between races.

The whole reason suburbs exist was a government largess in cheap loans for houses connected to the city by interstate highways. Minorities and women were excluded from the loans while the interstates plowed great polluted holes in the neighborhoods where they could live. This period of “white flight” cemented the idea that cities were the locus of crime, disorder, and filth. The privileged could maintain connection to urban economies while living (and paying taxes) in “the country”. (it also married us forever to car culture)

In America, geography is race.