Dumb take. Food and supplies can easily come into ports (or by air) and the largest populations have access. Just like the first Civil War, the rural side might make early gains but the size, money, weapons, and industrial power of urban areas would eventually crush them. Look at the population of Iowa. Then look at the population of one major US city.
A prolonged airlift couldn't hope to support the material needs of a modern economy at modern scales. The Allies did manage to do it in the late 1940s when the Soviets blocked Berlin, but that effort only provided the most basic of needs for a population used to wartime deprivations for 2.8 million.
The NYC metro area now has something like 20 million people. The "Northeast Corridor" from Boston south through NYC and Washington down to Virginia Beach is more like 50 million.
Another direct example is the German attempt to supply Stalingrad by air. It didn't work. The fact they thought it could superseded a German plan to attack into while simultaneously breaking out of the cauldron to either evacuate the trapped 6th Army or resupply it. That would have been a better plan.
You'd need wheels or boats.
Plus, if you are relying on aircraft, then you create obvious targets for the resistance. As the war in Ukraine is showing in force, MPADS are very effective, cheap, and easy to use for even a solo infantry solider. A civilian airliner or freighter would have no way of defending itself against such a system.
Industrial capacity is split between rural/exurban areas and the edges of cities nowadays. Nobody wants to have a factory in a commercial core or residential area like they did before automobiles when most people still had to walk to work. We don't make M-1 tanks in New York or Los Angeles the same way we made rifles in Springfield, MA (one of the larger cities in the country in the 1860s). We make them in small cities with factories in eastern Ohio and Alabama... places that at least lean red if not very red with their votes.
You can bring some supplies in by sea, but you can't put electricity on a boat. Even most major port cities lack the infrastructure to process liquid fuels or LNG from tankers. So New York and Washington are still going to be without power and fuel even if you can bring in food. And water transport does nothing to help you with interior metro areas like Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Denver, St. Louis, and Orlando.
You're talking about the northeast. Maybe they could gain quick control of that region but you still have huge population centers all over the country. No way could the coordinate and have the manpower to take over all of those quickly. Cities on the coast would have ports to provide supplies. I could see most of our allies aligning with the urban side of the conflict as well. It would be a total mess and would be anything but quick.
The Northeast Corridor is about 1/6th of U.S. population and includes its largest and wealthiest city and the national capital. Most of our leadership class lives there. Controlling it (or rather controlling the flow of resources into it that keep it livable) is going to be powerful in any such conflict. I figure a few guys with some improvised explosive can take out the power and fuel supplies to Washington, DC and then you just wait.
I do agree with your second point, though. It would be a mess.
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