Is the rural South different from, say, rural New York?

For years, I’ve been reporting on and writing about the remarkable congruities between rural voters across the U.S.

A small town voter in Alabama has frequently cast his ballot more like his rural counterparts in faraway Tupper Lake than he has like a voter in nearby cities and suburbs.

Similarly, a Malone voter looked more like a rural Idaho voter than a voter in New York City.

The 2008 election may have changed all that.

The New York Times has developed a fascinating graphic that shows much of rural America trending sharply Democratic.

Most rural counties still voted Republican, but the GOP’s share of those small-town voters declined by as much as 20% in many areas.

(View that map here.)

In electoral terms, that’s a huge shift — a kind of earthquake in rural politics.

But in the rural South, many counties actually trended in the opposite direction, voting MORE Republican in 2008 than in 2004.

According to the Times, the distinction appears to be race. The rest of small-town America — in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania — seems to have worked through this issue.

Not the South:

Several Southern states, including Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee, have voted for the winner in presidential elections for decades. No more. And Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats.

Here in Alabama, where Mr. McCain won 60.4 percent of the vote in his best Southern showing, he had the support of nearly 9 in 10 whites, according to exit polls, a figure comparable to other Southern states. Alabama analysts pointed to the persistence of traditional white Southern attitudes on race as the deciding factor in Mr. McCain’s strong margin.

The problem for conservatives, of course, is that rural voters are only a significant coalition when they vote with unity.

If rural Southerners are breaking away from, say, small town New Englanders, then the voting bloc is effectively neutralized.

The Times puts it this way:

What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics.

By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.