The innovative inclusion of digital economy and rural revitalization into a unified framework, exploratory integration of rooted theory and empirical model, and a complete research framework containing theoretical construction-empirical analysis-optimization path are proposed, and 12 cases and panel data from 30 provinces (regions and cities) from 2012-2019 are used to demonstrate the research process. The study finds that the digital economy and rural revitalization are cross-coupled through key activities in the internal and external environments; the digital economy includes digital infrastructure, agricultural digitization, and agricultural digital industrialization, while rural revitalization includes industrial prosperity, ecological livability, rural civilization, effective governance, and affluent living. The development of the digital economy is generally weaker than rural revitalization, but the former is growing significantly faster than the latter, and the gap is gradually narrowing. The digital economy and rural revitalization are strongly correlated, but they have not yet reached the optimal coupling state, making it difficult to achieve high-quality coordinated and complementary development. The main obstacle factors at the indicator and factor levels vary in different provinces and years, but they all reflect the main obstacles to the coordinated evolution of the coupled system.