Getting ahead in the city is hard. In rural America, it’s even harder.

It has been snowed over by the rallying stock market and the cascade of controversies in the early months of the Trump administration, but the 2016 election revealed a deep economic and geographic divide in America. That divide remains critical — though not sufficient — to understanding both Donald Trump’s victory in that election and the policy debates that have defined his presidency so far.

Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was fueled by a growing Republican dominance in rural areas, as NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben wrote last fall. Those areas have been left behind by big cities in the recovery from the Great Recession. The counties Trump carried in November generate a bit more than one-third of America’s economic output, which appears to be a modern low among winning presidential candidates.

Trump’s victory has raised the hopes of many of rural Americans, but it has not fundamentally shifted the economic forces that have rewarded big metro areas and punished so many — though not all — small towns in recent decades. Those forces have not just political consequences but long-term economic ones, as new research from the Economic Innovation Group, a policy group in Washington that has written extensively on the country’s economic divides, demonstrates.

The research finds that if you’re born poor in the United States, and you’re hoping to climb the economic ladder, you’re better off growing up in an urban area than a rural one.

“There are certain type of cities, if you’re poor, you definitely want to be there,” says John Lettieri, EIG’s senior director for policy and strategy. “But in general, the divide between city and rural opportunity is definitely becoming more stark.”

The group’s report, “Is the American Dream Alive or Dead? It Depends on Where You Look,” mashes up EIG’s previous work on “distressed communities” and groundbreaking economic mobility work by a group of researchers led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. The report looks at mobility levels among counties that ranked in the highest and lowest quartiles on distress — which is to say, the richest and poorest counties — and sorts those counties into four buckets: prosperous ones with high mobility, prosperous ones with low mobility, distressed ones with high mobility, and distressed ones with low mobility.

Not surprisingly, mobility is highest among more prosperous counties. This probably seems intuitive; wealthier places generally have more economic opportunity and more resources, like good schools, to help build the skills that would help you seize those opportunities.

Per the report:

Nationwide, across the 2,869 counties for which we have data, economic prosperity and economic mobility are positively and meaningfully correlated. The correlation is stronger for children from poor backgrounds than it is for children from better-off ones. This means that prosperous locales give poor children a disproportionate boost, on the one hand, but also that growing up in a distressed community disadvantages them relatively more, as well. Kids from wealthier backgrounds, by contrast, appear to have a stronger bulwark against negative effects of place. Poor children are more vulnerable.

Overall, the majority (51 percent) of counties in the United States exert a negative impact on the economic mobility of low-income children, and these 1,660 counties are home to 60 percent of Americans under the age of 18. Three out of five of today’s children are growing up in a county that has historically failed to provide their most disadvantaged youth a leg up.

Here’s something maybe less intuitive: Large urban counties, the report finds, split about evenly between high and low mobility levels. Less populated counties are more likely to have low mobility — particularly rural distressed counties.

The really striking difference the report highlights, says Steve Glickman, EIG’s executive director, is between “rural communities that are doing great — and not just relative to other rural communities, but everywhere — and rural communities where, if you’re there, you’re just lost.” He adds: “If you’re in a rural place that’s doing bad economically, you’re really screwed.”

You’re also very likely a Trump voter.

Of the four buckets that EIG mapped, Trump did far and away the best in high-distress, low-mobility counties. He won nearly 80 percent of those counties, representing nearly three-quarters of the population of high-distress, low-mobility areas. You’ll understand why when you see where those counties are overwhelmingly located: 85 percent of them are in rural areas, mostly concentrated in the Southeast.

Trump’s strength among rural voters was, in part, strength among the people trapped in the most difficult places to get ahead economically — places EIG calls “vacated by the American Dream.”

It’s worth noting that many lower-income residents of those counties — and the states that house them — stand to take a hit from the Trump-backed bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, which is scheduled for a vote on Thursday, as documented in analyses by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Trump appears to have been boosted, both in the primaries and the general election, by mobility-limited voters in those distressed counties, and the bill he supports risks increasing their health costs as it stands. There’s a political risk there for the president.

It’s also worth noting the limits of this explanation for Trump’s appeal, as you’ll see by checking out this map of high-prosperity, high-mobility counties:

You can make a lot of arguments for why Trump won Wisconsin — some strategic, some cultural, even some economic — but “high economic distress and low mobility for poor children” is clearly not one of them.

Boosting economic opportunity — and avoiding economic harm — in downtrodden rural areas probably won’t win either party the White House in 2020 by itself. But it remains a critical policy goal, even when buried by the blizzard of this presidency.