There's a fascinating article in The Atlantic from the week after Donald Trump won.  It notes in both 1992 and 1996, President Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to win roughly half of America's 3100 counties, demonstrating a breadth of appeal across rural, suburban and urban America.  In 2016, his wife would win some 88% of the largest counties in the country—even higher urban support than President Barack Obama—but a rural wave in key battleground states for her opponent would be enough to overcome her massive advantage in the big cities.

We've seen this before, with the United Kingdom's narrow vote to leave the European Union.  The "leave" campaign won across rural England and Wales, winning places where coal mines had closed or in country villages where a way of life felt under siege.  In fact, of all the major cities in the UK, only Birmingham voted to leave, and even then by the narrowest of margins.  Most cities—London, Edinburg, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff, Belfast, Bristol—voted by margins of 60% or more to remain in the EU.

This rural-urban divide exists in Canada, too.

Just look at Ontario. Premier Kathleen Wynne won a majority government of 58 seats in 2014.  Of that total, some 23 seats are in the City of Toronto; add in the five seats in Ottawa and four seats from Mississauga, and 55% of the Liberal caucus is from Ontario's three largest cities alone.

The Liberal majority came from this urban base plus winning most of the 905-belt of suburban ridings around Toronto, along with a sprinkling of other ridings around the province.

(Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, borrowing from Wynne's playbook, did it even better a year later, sweeping Toronto entirely and picking off most of the few suburban seats in the Greater Toronto Area Wynne failed to carry.)

Outside the Big Smoke and the Nation's Capital, the Liberals did well, too.  In university towns across the province such as Guelph and Kingston, and in the emerging tech hub of Kitchener—Waterloo, and in northern cities such as Sudbury, Sault Ste Marie and Thunder Bay, Liberals won—but these are exactly the marginal seats most at risk in 2018.  Indeed, the Liberals were already wiped out in Windsor and but for stalwarts like Deputy Premier Deb Matthews, veteran Jim Bradley and Speaker Dave Lavec, LIberals would have lost in other south-western cities like London, St Catherines and Brant.

Moreover, Wynne's rural seats are few: she has Members elected in rural ridings east of Toronto in Durham, Peterborough, Northumberland—Quinte West and Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, but west of Toronto, the Liberals' only rural seat is Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, a bucolic area just north of Hamilton.

On a more micro-level, I helped run the 2014 Liberal campaign in York—Simcoe, where I grew up.  Bordered by the Greenbelt and Holland Marsh to the south, and Lake Simcoe to the north, this is a riding with three main suburban towns and a lot of fields and forests in between.  I joked the day before Election Day that we'd win all the polling stations based in areas where voters could see their neighbours and lose wherever voters could see cows and corn.  It was prophetic; my candidate, a popular local school trustee, won nearly all suburban polls and lost every rural poll, and the race overall by around 4%, the closest margin in decades, but not enough to change the seat for the first time in nearly a half century.

Clearly, the Liberals have an issue in rural Ontario, built up through a series of policy irritants, from electricity prices to horse racing to wind farms.

But the Conservatives have the same problem in reverse.

As Steve Paikin noted, the Conservative Party "hasn't won a single seat in the [Toronto] in four straight general elections. Can you imagine that? Zero-for-92!" referring to the number of potential seats given up over the four races.  Under former leader Tim Hudak, the Tories won a by-election in Etobicoke by running a long-time city councillor, only to lose it again in the general election fairly convincingly; Patrick Brown, the new leader, likewise had a long-time local city councillor elected in a Scarborough by-election, but as everyone knows, by-elections are rarely reliable portents.  Other than the odd suburban seat such as Thornhill and Whitby in the Toronto region and Nepean—Carleton near Ottawa, the Tories are shut out in Ontario's cities and suburbs.

Are things about to change in this rural-urban divide as Ontario approaches a 2018 election?

Brown and the Tories have to hope it does, as the new constituency boundaries are adding fifteen seats, eleven alone in the Greater Toronto Area.

For Wynne and the Liberals, their reelection hopes start with defending Fortress Toronto and Fortress Ottawa: if they can hold on to what they have—no small feat after fifteen years in government—they could be halfway to a majority government.

We might even see a scenario, essentially the reverse of what happened in the American Electoral College, where Wynne's more efficient vote in cities and suburbs—if it holds—could win her the most seats whilst Brown wins the popular vote, racking up huge margins in the countryside, but just failing to crack the urban centres (it took roughly 30,660 votes to elect a Liberal candidate in 2014 compared to 41,355 to elect a Conservative, due to the efficiency of the Liberal vote in suburban and urban constituencies).

If Brown can break into urban Ontario, along with his rural base, he'll win in a landslide; if Wynne can defend urban and suburban Ontario, she'll hold on to power.  That's the entire ball game, with the election sixteen months away.