M

assachusetts certainly has its share of sparsely populated towns, hundreds of them with vaguely familiar names and rich but little known local histories.

And yet, there’s little evidence of a ­rural-urban divide in the state: no small-town ethos standing against the experience of big city residents; few defining differences in economic experience or political orientation.

In a variety of ways, the people who live in Massachusetts’ smallvilles look and act just like the ones who populate our metropolises. Not only do they earn approximately the same incomes, but they work in the same industries, die at the same rates, have the same number of college degrees — they even vote for similar politicians.

That’s not to say that our tightly packed urban areas are somehow identical to the rural regions, which are defined by their sparse populations and are mostly in the western part of the state.

For one thing, there is a gaping demographic divide. Fully 95 percent of the residents of Massachusetts’ most thinly populated towns are non-Hispanic whites. In the most crowded municipalities, that number is just 60 percent. More generally, rural towns face distinct local challenges: transportation rather than charter schools, accommodating aging populations rather than immigrants.

But these kinds of differences are surprisingly superficial; they don’t seem to penetrate deep enough to affect residents’ economic lives, for instance.

As a first measure, consider earnings. The average household in rural Massachusetts makes about $84,000 a year. Urban households average about a remarkably similar $86,000.

Same story on jobs. About 64 percent of adults in our most bucolic towns are gainfully employed, very much in line with the 62 percent employment rate in urban neighborhoods.

And both groups are clocking in for the same kinds of jobs. In rural and urban Massachusetts alike, the most common type of occupation is professional work, what the Census Bureau calls “Management, business, science, and arts occupations.’’ About four in 10 employees fall under this umbrella — whether you’re talking about Boston or Tolland. And that makes sense, given that about four in 10 adults in both spheres have college degrees.

If any of this sounds surprising, or counterintuitive, it helps to remember that no place in Massachusetts is really all that rural. Wherever you roam, you’re never more than two hours from Boston — or three to four hours from New York City.

Even when the houses around you look pretty far apart, it’s nothing like the open distances of rural America. The least densely populated county in Massachusetts — Franklin — has about 102 people per square mile. By contrast, the least-populated county in the continental United States has 0.1 people per square mile (Loving County, Texas). Closer to home, ­Piscataquis County in Maine has 4.4 people per square mile.

The Massachusetts towns we think of as rural aren’t nearly that empty, or that remote. Which is one reason Massachusetts’ rural economy looks so much like its urban economy.

It also helps explain why rural Massachusetts isn’t suffering from the same social and economic ailments as the rest of rural America — or the same political convulsions.

Take the recent, headline-grabbing findings that middle-aged white Americans are dying at ever-increasing rates, particularly those living outside of cities.

This scourge seems to have skipped right over Massachusetts. The overall death rate for 45- to 54-year-olds has actually been going down over time, with no sign of a selective increase across rural counties.

Poverty, too, is an area where rural Massachusetts defies a national norm. Across the country, about 17 percent of rural dwellers live below the poverty line — a higher rate than you find in cities. Not so in Massachusetts, where the poverty rate in our most rural areas is below the statewide average.

But beyond all this, politics is what really undermines the idea of rural Massachusetts, showing that bucolic spots from Alford to Worthington don’t represent a place apart, or harbor a separate and distinct worldview borne of some alternate life experience.

In each presidential election, little-trod polling places in remote parts of the state post results that are remarkably close to what you find in city centers.

True, our most rural towns did vote for Trump in slightly higher numbers than more populated communities, but just slightly. He got 31 percent of the vote in the most pastoral parts of the state, compared with 24 percent in the areas with the least elbow room.

Once you account for the demographics, the difference looks even narrower. Whites as a whole tend to lean further right, so you’d expect white-heavy rural towns to vote more Republican than diverse cities. The fact that this barely happens in Massachusetts suggests that small-town whites in the state are far less attracted to conservative politics than their peers elsewhere.

All of this is totally different from the national pattern in 2016, where the gap between urban and rural voters was enormous, bigger even than the gaps between men and women, old and young, rich and poor, college grads and non-college grads.

Exit polls show that rural Americans broke for Trump 59 to 35; urban voters went almost precisely the other way, giving Clinton 62 percent of their votes. This was a crucial factor in the 2016 election, and it basically didn’t happen in Massachusetts.

What’s the takeaway from all this? When talking about rural Massachusetts, it is important to whisper that first word and accentuate the second. Because ultimately, the small towns of Western Massachusetts resemble greater Boston far more than they resemble the rest of rural America.

Whether you check people’s wallets, their vitals, or their political leanings, what you find is that the defining difference between rural Massachusetts and other communities is simply that fewer people live there.

(Average across 50 least dense)

Average household income

$83,536

Employed

64.2%

Adults with bachelor’s degrees

37.7%

Employed in “management, business, science, arts’’

40.7%

Voted for Reagan in 1980

46.9%

Voted for Trump

31.1%

(Average across 50 most dense)

Average

household income

$86,382

Employed

61.9%

Adults with

bachelor’s degrees

40%

Employed in “management, business, science, arts’’

43.9%

Voted for

Reagan in 1980

37.1%

Voted for Trump

24%

Evan Horowitz digs through data to find information that illuminates the policy issues facing Massachusetts and the US. He can be reached at evan.horowitz@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeHorowitz.