You can easily lie by cherry-picking data and stats.

Well, one of two things will happen. Conservatives will win elections (assuming these are "lies by cherry-picking data and stats"), or their numbers will continue to dwindle (Pew Research's demographics data about 70% of Republicans being over age 50, folks 55+ aging out at a rate of 1.8M/year per CDC actuarial data) and rural America continues to wither away. Certainly, we can wait to see what happens to see if the data matches our observations if we believe the thesis put forth doesn't match ground truth, because time will tell us for sure.