Quite a few good and thoughtful points in the below post (I'm not being sarcastic for once) but I'll respond to a couple of points.
2. Rural areas are continuing to get worse economically. Since the Great Recession, job growth has been abysmal in this part of America while it has improved significantly in urban and suburban America. If you think your ability to land a decent, secure, and well paying job is difficult in an urbanized area, it’s way, way harder in rural America. Outside of retail and a few other industries (mostly low wage), steady work doesn’t even exist in many rural areas. And it hasn’t always been this way (which is a significant factor).
It's not so clean to separate true economic anxiety (the unironic kind) from racial resentment. Lots of job growth in these areas come from ag. plants which employ mostly Latinos, including a fair number of immigrants. There has been a lot of reporting on how the changes that come with an influx of non-white labor changes the community, and (unsurprisingly) a lot of the sentiment revolves around community change separate from work displacement.
Here is a good, recent piece about changes in Ben Sasse's hometown wrought by the opening of a Costco poultry plant. Lots of interesting stuff in here, including my own personal observation that a lot of the people in town lobbying for the opening of the plant are typical "Chamber of Commerce"-type Republicans rather than the WWC voters we've come to associate with Trumpism. Which brings me to another point...
There's some stuff in here I agree with but I think we have a tendency to dismiss political and economic elites as only existing in urban areas and specifically on the Coasts. I don't think you're explicitly doing it here, but there's a hazy specter of it in this post, so I'll address it. Power operates at several different scales, and one can find several scales of power concentration in these urban areas. Even though commercialization of farming has brought several agriculture into cities (this is a process that's been happening for over a hundred years) some farmers still have considerable economic, social, and political power. This is true also in other land uses like resource extraction - powerful people in these industries still live, work, worship, etc. in these areas. Your point about cultural resentment (I think framing it as indifference is half-correct) is well taken but that's not just directed at the Jeff Bezos's of the world, it's also directed as the local farmer who holds disproportionate sway in the state cattle lobby or the farmer who has the ear of the state agricultural comissioner.
Also I'll agree to disagree on how much a $15 minimum wage would help depressed rural areas.
