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Notes -
One party in the US two-party system was based on an (admittedly corrupt) alliance between the northern urban political machines and the rural south from about 1910 to about 1980, which is a third of America's history. For much of the other two thirds politics was sectional (New England and friends vs the South and friends) with cities and their hinterlands voting together. AFAIK the only period "urban vs rural" has been the best simple model of national politics in the US was the last twenty years, and it has been a 50-50 split with suburbs as swing territory. [I think you can make an argument for rural Jacksonians vs urban Whigs as a model for the 1820-1840 period, but it isn't the standard one]
In the rest of the democratic world, big-tent centre-right parties which consistently win the countryside and are competitive in the cities are dominant in most countries most of the time. In the UK specifically, the Tories are competitive in the big industrial cities until Thatcher, and in London until Brexit - in both cases until they stopped trying. (Labour's heartland was the coal-mining areas, not the cities) For example, the last time Manchester elected a Tory-majority council was 1967-1971, and 1982-1984 for Birmingham.
Running against urbanism and cities is a choice made by some right-wing parties for their own internal reasons. If right-wing parties choose to do that, they don't get to say that urbanites hating them back is an unfairness that needs to be remedied with malapportionment.
Coastal cities are built around ports, usually at river mouths (which gives you access to fresh water). Rich cities relying on food and raw materials imported by sea because they didn't control a large enough rural hinterland to feed themselves goes at least as far back as ancient Athens - Rome was fed from the Nile Delta. And higher value raw materials come from even further afield. The archaeology is ambiguous, but it is likely that Athenian hoplites were going into battle wearing bronze armour where the tin in the alloy came from Cornwall.
New York City doesn't need Idaho because they have Elizabeth, and Elizabeth plus cash gives them the world. If you look at the blue/red state map, every blue state has blue-or-Canadian-controlled access to the sea. (I agree that there are blue cities in red states which don't). Technically all red states have red-controlled access to the sea via the Gulf coast, but in practice using that access would overwhelm the capacity of the Gulf coast ports, and also require the use of railway junctions in blue states. So in the case of a peaceful-but-hostile split, the reds would run out of raw materials first.
There have been times and places where the economy of the city is based on a threat to shoot up the country - see Rome passim. (Urbanites make much better soldiers than yokels, it's just that they have sufficiently good alternative employment opportunities that they don't volunteer for peacetime garrison duty). The modern US is not one of them - rural America is subsidy-dependent, and the largest paypig in the system is Big Tech.
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