Over the past several years, it’s become increasingly convenient to label cities and metro areas as “blue” and prosperous and rural areas as “red” and distressed. This dichotomy pits urban and rural communities on opposite sides of America’s economic, political, and cultural divides.

The fault lines are real, at least in the aggregate. They are evident in the economic gulf between Biden and Trump counties in the 2020 election, and in the widening growth chasm between rural and urban counties revealed in the 2020 census. They have spurred growing calls to save American democracy by way of taming urban America and reinvigorating smaller towns.

However, this zero-sum narrative not only hardens our divisions, it also misses the point. It’s our major metro areas that are at the forefront of global innovation and rapidly evolving social and economic dynamics. City and regional leaders’ ability to navigate these changes—including the common challenges and interdependencies they share with rural leaders—will dictate America’s collective future.

The fall and rise of Washington, D.C. offers a metaphor for the wider resurgence of metro areas, especially the largest ones, in the U.S. and global economy. Over the past quarter-century, those economies have heaped an increasing share of their rewards on highly educated workers and the urban industries in which they predominate. Together with the accelerating demographic and economic mixing between major U.S. cities and their suburbs, this means that America’s future is shaped principally by its largest regions: 56 metropolitan areas with populations exceeding 1 million, from Fresno, Calif. to Greater New York, now account for more than half (57%) of the nation’s population, 60% of its jobs, and an astonishing 66% of its total economic output.

Beyond their current demographic and economic heft, America’s largest city-regions also foreshadow the country’s future makeup. In 2000, residents of these metro areas were already 38% Latino or Hispanic or non-white (compared with 31% of U.S. population overall), presaging their 42% representation across the entire U.S. population in 2020. Today, more than half of very large metro residents are people of color, a little more than 20 years ahead of the U.S. Census Bureau’s projection for when our country will mark that milestone.

Read the full article about supporting urban leadership by Amy Liu and Alan Berube at Brookings.