Episode 2: Nick Jacobs, author of The Rural Voter, shares his findings and explains how the 'gap effect' leads to simple stories about rural and urban spaces
Oh, ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and funny, but we'll travel along singing a song side by side.
Nick Jacobs:You're just so accustomed to seeing the partisan gap between rural and urban areas. But that really overlooks other types of both commonalities between rural and urban areas. And looping rural America into a single layer monolith really leads us to create simple stories about why rural people in general are voting the way they do or thinking the way they do. Why collectively, they're responding to things when there, in fact, is a lot of diversity among them.
Ellen Wolter:That's Nick Jacobs. He's professor of government at Colby College, describing what folks get wrong about rural and urban communities. Nick describes himself as one of the few rural academics, an academic living in a rural space who studies rural issues and people. Nick joined me for a conversation about his new book, The Rural Voter, and his research, which is among the largest survey samples ever of rural people. This survey looked at rural people's perceptions of social change and their belief in the rural way of life.
Ellen Wolter:Nick has been a vocal critic of the white rural rage argument posed by others and shares the difference between rage and resentment as evidenced by his research. And we talk about what folks get wrong about rural and urban spaces and the ways in which despite dominant narratives that tell a single story about these communities, they are actually facing many of the same challenges.
Music:And when they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started just traveling along singing a song side by side.
Ellen Wolter:I'm Ellen Wolter with the University of Minnesota Extension. Welcome to the Side by Side podcast.
Ellen Wolter:So, Nick, welcome, and thanks so much for joining us. I'm really excited to talk about your book, The Rural Voter. And I just wanna mention too, this was written with, Daniel Hsieh, your co author, so I want to mention him as well. But this is just, I think, a really important contribution to how folks think about rural and talk about rural and particularly the people that live there. There was just so much more nuance, I think, in your book than what we typically hear about in terms of who lives in rural and who makes up rural and what it what it really looks like.
Ellen Wolter:So it was just really a pleasure to read. So just in advance thanks so much for for your contribution. But can you just start by telling me a little bit about how the idea for this book came about and and what you were hoping to accomplish?
Nick Jacobs:1st, thank thank you so much for the kind words, and I'm I'm so thrilled to be here and and and speaking with your listeners and with you. So I I guess the way I'd start in thinking about what the origins of this book are is Dan and I are kind of weird as academics, or at least as political scientists. We live and we work and we recreate in rural America. We identify as rural people. We unfortunately have had to leave our homes and traveled around the country.
Nick Jacobs:That's kind of common as academics. But we embrace our ruralness in higher education. And that's not something you always find. I mean, both just in terms of general population, rural people are a small percent of the American population. There's small colleges throughout rural America, of course, but most of the faculty tend to live in the small towns surrounding it.
Nick Jacobs:And Dan and I love rural Maine. And we wanted to, I think, understand rural Maine a little bit better and a part of rural Maine and understanding that is understanding rural America better. I've been riding on rural politics, I'm pleased to say, before 2016 and when everybody sort of started to really, I think, focus in on this particular segment of the electorate. And one of the things that was a little unfortunate is that all these other great scholars and some of my writing, you know, we we we kept talking to each other, and it didn't seem like a lot of the insights that my colleagues and and friends that we were developing about the nuances of rural politics and the nuances of rural beliefs wherever filtering down or out outside of the ivory tower as it were.
Ellen Wolter:Thanks, Nick. Yeah. And and it is such a, I think, hard message, I think, to get out there. And you talk a little bit about that in the book just because there are so many ways in which real data and real research is is not available right to to people, not even just in the fact that it's not accessible. It just doesn't exist.
Ellen Wolter:And so I think one of the exciting things about your methodology is the sample size you were able to gather and the way in which I think you were thinking about defining rural. So could you talk a little bit about how you approached your methodology and and, you know, maybe even some of the challenges that have existed around rural data and and what you are hoping to kinda get around and achieve with the ways that you approached your research?
Nick Jacobs:Well, I think you've picked up on the biggest problem. It's a simple problem, but it's expensive to overcome, which is that if you're doing a survey of the American population, right, and you probably read one this morning in the newspaper, what Americans think about the latest topic or what the latest polls are suggesting about the presidential election, you only need about 1300 Americans to make, actually, some pretty good estimates about what general public opinion is. Now polls have gotten sort of dragged through the mud the last couple of elections, particularly about forecasts. You know, who's gonna win an election? But on public opinion questions, you can just even see over time, they're actually not really that volatile.
Nick Jacobs:1300 people will get you pretty close. Now, in most of those polls, you might only be getting 200 rural people and You can't say anything about the over 60,000,000 people that call rural America home from just 200 of them. People do all the time. Don't get me wrong. People, polling firms, even reputable pollsters will break out and say, oh, this is what the subsample average was for rural, but it's it's not representative and it's not accurate.
Nick Jacobs:And the only way you can overcome that is by getting enough rural people. To be honest, I don't think a lot of mainstream academics have wanted to do that. It's not sort of an interesting problem for them to solve. Notice too that that problem is the same for a lot of conclusions that we might wanna draw about racial and ethnic minorities or any small segment of the population, and we do, overcome those challenges quite often by doing bigger samples of those populations of interest. Dan and I are really the first, that have sort of put our money where our mouth is and gone out and collected thousands upon thousands of survey responses from rural America.
Nick Jacobs:I'll say 2 more quick things about our methodology that might be of interest. The first is you have to meet rural people where they wanna be met. And I think a big issue with survey research recently is so many people are are tuned out of politics. That's actually the bigger problem than being aggressively tuned in. I mean, just think about the last time you yourself answered your cell phone from an unknown number.
Nick Jacobs:You know, you don't wanna be relying only on these people. So you have to use very creative and different ways of getting rural people, especially getting rural folks on their mobile devices, given all the issues we we know about broadband connectivity and and general Internet connections, but mobile devices. So, you know, we we target those pretty aggressively. And then finally, the perhaps even more important than the sample size, we ask rural people about rural issues. Right?
Nick Jacobs:So even if you get a big national sample and you get that critical mass of rural voters, if you're not asking people questions that are relevant to their lived experience, their day to day lives, what's on their mind, what they care about, what might make them different.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. And your other point about national polls is so interesting too because I think about when even there's a poll, like, for the state of Iowa, it's often assumed that that the whole state of Iowa is a rural representation or a representation of rural people, but Iowa's diverse just in what is rural and what is not rural.
Nick Jacobs:Yeah. So you have a presidential candidate, either Barack Obama in 2008 or Donald Trump as recently as 2024 that wins in Iowa. Right? And everybody goes like, oh, well, rural voters flock to that candidate. You know, look how well they're doing among rural voters.
Nick Jacobs:And if you look where support for those candidates actually comes from, you know, 70% of Donald Trump's support in Iowa came from nonrural places. Like, rural is just really small even if it tends to have a a disproportionate pool on how we think about places. Mhmm. You know, there's only 4 states in the entire country in which a majority of people living in those states lives in what the census defines as a a rural community. Right?
Nick Jacobs:That'd be Mississippi, West Virginia, Vermont, and then my adopted home state of Maine. So the whole idea of a rural state in an even though we throw it around all the time, is pretty misleading.
Ellen Wolter:So one of the other things that you talked about in your book is this idea of the gap effect, which I thought was really interesting because I I find, just like what we were talking about, we are often putting people into groups. We're either rural or either urban. And, the work of of this podcast is really thinking about, well, how binary are we really? Are there ways in which we were we are more connected? So I really thought this idea of the gap effect was interesting, and I had not run across that before.
Ellen Wolter:So I was wondering if you could just share a little bit, first of all, about what it is, but then also about how you integrated this idea into your work, into your research.
Nick Jacobs:The gap effect really refers to this idea that when we break people into dichotomies. Right? And we do this all the time. We it it helps clarify the world, men versus women, whites versus non whites. And of course, here we're talking about rural versus non rural.
Nick Jacobs:We overlook the differences within those categories. We fail to see that, for instance, differences between men and women in terms of higher education degree attainment or growth in income over the last 30 years. But if you only look at that dichotomy, right, you overlook the fact that white women have surpassed black men in terms of average earnings. Right? Or that black women have surpassed black men of college degree attainment.
Nick Jacobs:Right? So you lose the nuance. I I think the gap instinct or the, you know, at the our instincts to create those types of gaps are understandable, but they purposefully simplify the world and often simplify beyond really the level we want to. We are just so accustomed to seeing the partisan gap between rural and urban areas. But that really overlooks, I think, other types of both commonalities between rural and urban areas.
Nick Jacobs:Many rural communities statistically are very similar to certain neighborhoods in urban America in terms of doctor accessibility, actually, in terms of home affordability. Right? Like, the problems aren't all that different. And as it comes back to the people, people are actually just as anxious. Right?
Nick Jacobs:Like, anxiety is not a thing that's not felt in urban America. The second way you have to correct it is you have to acknowledge that within that big category of ruralness, there's a whole lot of diversity economically. People are often surprised to learn that social mobility in some parts of rural America, right? Like if you're born into a community, what are the likelihood that you'll do better than your parents you know, as an adult, moving your way up the economic and social ladder? There are parts of rural America that have the highest social mobility in the country.
Nick Jacobs:And looping rural America into a single liter monolith really doesn't not only overlook the nuances for the sake of understanding the nuances, but it really it leads us to create simple stories about why rural people in general are voting the way they do or or thinking the way they do. Why why collectively they're responding to things when there in fact is a lot of diversity among them.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. Yeah. I love that that old adage.
Ellen Wolter:You know, if you've seen 1 rural community, you've seen 1 rural community. You know, demonstrating that diversity of rural is such an important message as we think about how we want to work with rural people, how we want to connect, how we want to better connect urban and rural.
Nick Jacobs:No. Yeah. I I I could completely agree, and I'd say that if you were to take your average city dweller today, right, living in a big city, it could be New York City, it could be Portland, Maine, right, and you were to place them in another city at random. They'd get on just fine. Right?
Nick Jacobs:They'd have to learn a new route. That and you but that's what you also see in terms of migration. Right? They move from one city and they you know, they get fine. The amenities are all there.
Nick Jacobs:It's a slightly different system. You go from a rural community in the Midwest and drop you into a rural community in the Northeast or God forbid the South. The rural South, which is like a different country, you know, it's much more different. Right? So I think we can think about diversity in many ways, of course, racial and ethnic diversity, but just diversity of the community type, I'd say rural America has a much broader span of community types than you find in other geographies.
Ellen Wolter:You know, one of the things I think your book does really well is kind of breaking down that myth that rural and urban spaces are so different. It really highlights, I think, the reality of of urban and rural and a lot of the challenges that we are both facing. So I'm just curious what you think contributes to these, you know, misperceptions of rural America despite these data points and despite much of the diversity of place that you even just discussed and brought up. Why is it that people kinda keep getting it wrong or or not thinking about the nuance that really exists in a role?
Nick Jacobs:That's a terrific question, and I I never say that cause it sounds shallow, but it's a good question that's making me, pause for a minute. And I don't think there's a single answer. If I if I was to go to the first thing that comes in my mind, I think there's a supply problem. And I've come to appreciate this a little bit more in talking to people after the book's been published, especially people that are doing the supplying of information about rural communities. And one of the most startling facts, like this is a division, right, is that the decline of local news, the decline of community centered news is the most dramatically visible in rural communities.
Nick Jacobs:It's not been replaced by anything. And so when you do get rural news coverage, you are getting rural news coverage by outlets who are not centered in the community and you are getting covered by journalists who are not deeply embedded in the community. And there's no ill will. Nobody's trying to create false impressions. I I deny that, right, narrative about the press, which is sometimes here.
Nick Jacobs:I think every reporter I've ever met is trying to do their honest day's work and meet that deadline so they can get home to their family and friends. But the fact of the matter is they're coming in to get a story about a rural what rural people think, and and they're trying to give us representation, but they they don't get it right. And I emphasize the ill will. And I guess the only way I can emphasize that more is to just share a story. Right?
Nick Jacobs:So here here NPR, who I actually think has done a whole lot in the last couple of years to increase their coverage of rural issues. Right? NPR sends a reporter out to Sheboygan 2 days before the 22 midterm elections. So we wanna know what rural people think. Let's just assume, okay, Sheboygan's rural.
Nick Jacobs:Fair. Small town. And the reporter on air, who I hold in very high regard, the reporter on air confesses, like, nobody I can't get anybody to talk to me on Main Street, Sheboygan. Well, of course not. They don't know you.
Nick Jacobs:And I you know, you're not in the community. Who's gonna talk to a stranger? And so he ends up finding somebody that will talk to him. And it's a guy with 30 yard signs in his front yard. And that guy, I think we all know, is not like your typical Sheboyganer or Sheboyganite.
Nick Jacobs:He's got 30 yard signs in his yard. You know that person. But he gets to be the voice of that rural community. And the viciousness continues because then you hear that as the representation of your community, and you're now less likely to talk to the reporter the next time you see him. Right?
Nick Jacobs:The the trust that rural people have towards news outlets is rock bottom. And I think some of it is partisan. I think some of it is attributing ill will where none is there. But rural people are also the most likely to say that the news coverage of their particular communities is either irrelevant or distorted. And so I think there is an institutional reason that has intersected with people's reactions to news and and media figures that I, honestly, I I have a tough time seeing a way out of the creation and recreation of those false perceptions.
Ellen Wolter:You know, one of the the ways in which I became aware of your book was from a commentary that you wrote that was pushing back against the common narrative that you often hear about rural America, which is, you know, the the rage in rural America. So I'm just curious. What did your re research find about rage in rural America? What does that really look like in rural America based on your findings?
Nick Jacobs:Well, I I'd say rage rage is irrational. Right? Rage is strictly a motive. Like, you you can't talk to somebody that is enraged. And the enraged person, you know, be it rural or whatever, I mean, here the term is being thrown about to describe rural people.
Nick Jacobs:So the idea of rural rage is to say that rural people are voting the way they're voting because of an irrational, sort of unreflective gut response. I mean, you throw whatever headline at it, that's the alleged source of the rage. But I'd emphasize the irrationality. That's very different than what scholars have found in rural populations throughout the country, both quantitatively and qualitatively, which is resentment. Resentment is a rational response to a sense of feeling unfairly treated, right?
Nick Jacobs:There is a source and there is a story to someone's resentment. And there is not a source and there is not a story to somebody's rage. They are just mad. So resentment is the term that we use to describe why many, not all, but many and importantly I think a critical mass of rural individuals increasingly view politics a certain way. You know, when I talk about resentment or when I study resentment, I'm interested in why rural people think that they get less than they deserve from government.
Nick Jacobs:That government is not sending rural communities what they deserve, and instead it's going to other places. When I research resentment, I'm very interested in understanding why rural people feel like their voices aren't listened to, in the state house or by, government officials. And then I'm really interested why rural people think that individuals living in urban America and institutions that are representative of urban America don't value rural ways of living and don't care to value rural ways of living when you're thinking about rural people and the weird stuff that we do in rural places. Because it's wonderful, but for many Americans, they scratch their heads and they wonder why. And that resentment I think all boils down to a sense that you're not welcome in this America of the future.
Nick Jacobs:You know, not only are you materially left behind, but you are culturally and socially as well. And that seems to be okay. That's resentment.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. And it's and it's hard to know how to move forward and bring folks together, but I think it's a starting point. Right? If you are better understanding where folks are coming from, it's a starting point for how to move forward. I think one of the things well, one of the many things I thought was interesting about the findings that you put forth in your book is there's this idea of resentment, which I think many folks in the narrative you often hear about rule tie up with xenophobia or, you know, lack of college attendance or racial attitudes towards people who are racially and ethnically different from them.
Ellen Wolter:But I think one of the things that you found, which I think is really interesting, is that those factors or those characteristics of people do not predict whether or not you are a person that lives in rural. So it just sort of underscores that complexity of of rural and the nuance of rural. So could you talk a little bit about some of those specific findings?
Nick Jacobs:So I I really appreciate the opportunity to just make crystal clear. I don't think it's a clarification of anything I've said, but let me just state unequivocally, right, to to acknowledge that resentment as I've defined it here is present in rural communities is not to deny that there are other attitudes or motivations in rural communities. And it's not to excuse, right? It's to try and think about what, if anything, makes rural Americans different. And I I'm comfortable with the thesis that nothing does.
Nick Jacobs:Like, we're all just the same, and we're making a big to do about. No. No. That's not what I find. And so when you think about the relationship between something like rural resentment and racial resentment, you know, when I'm interested in explaining rural resentment, I'm not saying that racial resentment isn't present.
Nick Jacobs:What we find with racial resentment is the tragic fact that it is so present throughout American society, urban, suburban, and rural, that knowing whether or not somebody holds negative stereotypes about black Americans or immigrants or any other group in society, knowing that sort of prejudice actually doesn't allow you to to predict with any degree of certitude where they live. And that's another way of saying that even though, racial resentment is very present in rural communities, because rural America is so small that there are millions of more Americans who hold racially resentful attitudes outside of rural America than within. You know, we've been talking about race, but let me put it in in conversation with another issue that I think is of of critical importance looking forward a few months, political violence. Right? So you can look at a a question on a survey.
Nick Jacobs:You know, should Donald Trump be returned to office through force? And a slightly higher percentage than you would should expect of rural Americans agree with that. Right? But the vast majority of people that believe that, almost 2 and a half times more, live outside of rural areas than within. And if you talk to scholars who study insurgency and political violence, they'll tell you that, okay, even if it's slightly elevated in rural communities, and the difference is like 3 percentage points, by the way, Like, the real danger is in your neighborhood, not the countryside.
Nick Jacobs:So I think I don't think that's the gap instinct, but I think it relates to what we were talking about earlier. Like, our our almost insatiable desire to say, like, that's what the other thinks and that's what we think, overlooks the fact that the other over there in rural communities is very, very small. So coming full circle, what we do find though is that rural resentment, those attitudes I discussed earlier about geographic inequity, feeling looked down upon by certain institutions that are centered in urban America, that actually does help you predict whether or not somebody lives in rural America because only rural Americans think that.
Ellen Wolter:You know, one of the things you said in your book is racism is present in rural America, similar to political violence as you just mentioned, but it is not just a rural phenomenon. And I think that's hard oftentimes for some people in urban places to to understand that it is really it's an American phenomenon.
Nick Jacobs:And I sometimes wonder if rural people don't get stuck with it because I think it is one of the, if not the most important issue that we have been trying to figure out in this country for 100 of years. We can't. We keep banging our heads up against the wall. And perhaps just by throwing it on a few couple of millions of Americans as being the source or the the problem, maybe that makes us feel better about our future when, again, the fact is, tragically, it's everywhere. And I and I think by emphasizing the the gap, you don't do anything to actually overcome the problem.
Nick Jacobs:And I'm certainly not the first to say that. And I think people that are really doing the work of of healing those types of divisions will be the first to acknowledge that you don't make any progress just othering each other.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. And and you need we all need to play a role in solving or navigating how we support all communities and how we eradicate racism, and that includes rural people. You know? So if we're writing off a whole swath of communities as if they are racist and don't want to play a role, then it's going to be much more difficult, I think, to solve that that challenge.
Nick Jacobs:And that's exactly what calling them enraged does.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. Exactly.
Nick Jacobs:Because you don't, again, you don't negotiate with the enraged. You don't try to persuade the enraged. You just throw them to the side.
Ellen Wolter:So one of the other things that you mentioned in your book was this idea of a shared sense of fate in rural places. And you talked about the inequality that exists in rural and urban spaces and how that is actually one of the things that really differs across rural and urban spaces. And I will say that when I moved from Minneapolis to Central Minnesota, that's one of the things that struck me immediately was how much more economically integrated my community was in the way in which we live amongst each other. We are not as economically segregated. So talk to me a little bit about what you mean by that shared sense of fate and and how that idea of economic segregation plays a role in that.
Nick Jacobs:Nationwide, if you wanna know how somebody votes, you need, like, to know 3 things about them. And one of the things is how much money they made last year. But in rural America, knowing how much money somebody made last year doesn't tell you anything really about how they're gonna vote. Nationwide, I 100% it does on average. But in rural communities, rich people, because there are rich people in rural communities, poor people, middle income, right, it doesn't help you.
Nick Jacobs:And that's very perplexing because it absolutely does in urban America, especially if you then know their race and you know their level of education. The possibility that I present stems from the fact that as you've said, rural communities are vastly more economically and socially integrated than non rural communities. And what that looks like is I consider the 3 mile stretch of road that I live on. The nicest house on that road, which ain't mine, the nicest house on that road is across the street from the not nicest house on that road. I think they're still struggling to get the roof replaced.
Nick Jacobs:They're talking every day I drive by them. They're chatting away. Their kids go to the same school. They have to use the same transfer station. They're part of the same social network.
Nick Jacobs:They're neighbors. And you see poverty in a different way. Urban people see poverty. I know they do. They don't see it with their neighbors.
Nick Jacobs:They live in an apartment building where everybody makes above a certain income. They surely send their kids to different schools. That is the politics of suburban education. You don't have school district lines in my town, my community, because there are only one school. So we all go to the same school.
Nick Jacobs:And that does something. It does something cognitively in how we think about politics. And it's amazing that it works out this way. It almost works out like too good. Knowing how well somebody did last year economically, you know, we ask this question all the time, like, are you better off now than you were last year than you were 5 years ago?
Nick Jacobs:If we know the answer to that question outside of rural America and suburbia and urban America, we know that, you know, if you're doing worse off, you're more likely to punish the current office holder. That question is meaningless in rural communities because it doesn't matter how you personally are doing. The question that seems to matter, we know it matters, is how your community or how your neighbors are doing. So there's this sense of social solidarity that is reinforced by the ways in which we live and like the physical space that we live. But that's also representative of the social networks that we construct in rural communities, which are very different and are much more integrated in certain respects.
Nick Jacobs:There's certainly deep divisions. I think about sort of banal divisions in my community. The Quakers are not that deeply integrated nor are the Amish, and the same as, you know, racial divisions socially in the South, are are profound. But there's a interconnectivity enough that it leads to these peculiar political, habits of mind.
Ellen Wolter:I just love that, theory and it really made me think about a shared sense of fate across rural and urban spaces. And that's really what our work is really thinking about is how can we build that interconnectivity across rural and urban. And so I'm just curious about any thoughts you might have on why rural and urban Americans don't have a shared sense of fate. And I mean, I think we all have some ideas. Right?
Ellen Wolter:We don't live very closely. We don't see our neighbors. Right? So we can't kind of debunk the perceptions we might have about each other. But what do you think are some of the barriers to establishing this shared sense of fate across rural and urban spaces?
Ellen Wolter:What are some ways in which you've seen kind of effective things folks have done?
Nick Jacobs:Well, it's, not a happy story, but it's the, you know, going back to the motivations of the book and certainly the conclusion of the book, I think our politics is broken. I think our political system thrives off of creating this sort of division.
Ellen Wolter:Sort of like perpetuating those narratives about rule, exploiting some of the is that what you mean?
Nick Jacobs:Yes. That we're different peoples, and that we don't have anything in common, and that they're the enemy, and both sides do it. And that's why I think we talk a lot about polarization in this country, polarization between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, and that's hard enough to overcome, right? We're in our own echo chambers. We listen to the people that we're most likely to agree with.
Nick Jacobs:We identify with a certain party because of our professions and our class, who we're married to, what our parents did, right? When the polarization, which is already hard enough to overcome, becomes geographic and you don't even see the other side, right? The hopeful thing I will say is that talking to dozens of people sort of about the book, which I I I'm so thankful to have the opportunity to to talk to smart, hardworking people that are doing the work you're doing. Like, I know people are trying, and I I have actually learned that a lot more people are trying, even in politics, to push against the grain, to remind people to not write off this part of the country because they happen to be hard or that it's not as easy as just drumming up or mobilizing your base, that there's something I talk to them and they almost seem to recognize like there's something beautiful about a politics of persuasion. Like, that's the good fight.
Ellen Wolter:This is just like what we were talking about before. We all have a role to play in this. Right? And I think your work really contributes to helping to understand a more complex picture of rural and contributes to then lessening that divide. So I really appreciate, your time today.
Nick Jacobs:Thank you so much. I really appreciate the work you're doing and the the opportunity to share.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Walter. Nancy Rosenbaum is our senior producer. Special thanks to Jan Jekyllah, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
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Ellen Wolter:You can find episodes of Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Walter, and this is Side by Side.
