This paper revisits the cleavage of rural and urban interest from both theoretical and empirical angles. The success of populist parties in modern politics has re-emphasized the increasing differences of political preferences and electoral behavior among rural and urban areas. Even more than before, the urban centers tend to be dominated by progressive, while the countryside qre thought to be leaning towards authoritarian and populist political forces. This paper picks up some bits and pieces from Lipset and Rokkan's famous concepts of political cleavage structures and adopts these theoretical building blocks to account for diverging electoral maps. We argue that the canonical definitions of four historical cleavages no longer sufficiently account for growing political divergences among urban vs. rural or center vs. periphery. Instead, the new cleavage of city and land is structured by strategic maneuvers of conservative parties and their relation with the populist right at the local and national levels. The empirical part of this paper explores the new divide of urban and rural interests by applying modern methods of geographical data analysis. We utilize aggregate-level electoral returns from Austrian and German electoral districts and, where available, precincts. We also merge aggregate electoral returns with survey evidence by techniques such as multilevel regression and post-stratification so as to better understand the interaction of individual preferences and local context and their joint effect upon the emergence of right-wing populist political actors.